Tell better stories with slides
Slides help you tell a story. A great story is engaging, simple, informative and influential.
Most people don’t know the simple tricks to make a powerful story with slides
5 rules for making a great slide story.
1. Do not start by making slides!
2. Let your titles tell the whole story.
3. 1 slide, 1 message.
4. Use the power of 3.
5. Less is more.
1. Do not start by making slides.
Slides are great for telling stories and terrible for outlining them. If you jump in and start developing slides you will waste time. I used to find myself endlessly editing slides, only to discard them later.
Start with Excel or Sheets. The goal is to write down a single sentence for each intended slide – what is the message that slide must convey. For example
Slide 1: Executive Summary
Slide 2: Growth Challenge.
Slide 3: Repeat business is declining
Slide 4: Competition is the problem
Once I have got the messages down then I will shape them into strong action statement titles.
Slide 1: Executive Summary
Slide 2: Our growth is slowing.
Slide 3: New sales are strong, repeat business is declining
Slide 4: 2 new competitors have won 5 key accounts etc….
In some plans I will then go and add a second column of what facts or images I plan to use. This helps ensure that when I write the slide, I have the information to back it up. For example, on slide 4 I would probably write something like – Show Competitor 1 is winning on price model, Competitor 2 on new technology benefit).
2. Let your titles tell the whole story.
In the related blog Make better slides, faster I explained the power of action statements. Using the example of slide two above – “Our growth is slowing” is more powerful, and clear, than “Growth Challenge”.
The goal for your story is that if you read the titles only then it tells a clear story. Taking those 3 story slides we get “Our growth is slowing, new sales are strong, repeat business is declining, 2 new competitors have won 5 key accounts”. From the titles alone anyone can understand the story. This makes the slide content purely additive.
Writing the titles in a simple format like excel makes this test of continuity of the story easy to do. With coworkers I have sometimes asked them to extract their titles back into excel. It makes a very compelling case!
3. 1 slide, 1 message.
This is a mainstay of management consultants, who are highly trained PowerPoint® writers. Each slide should communicate a single idea, and everything in it should support that idea.
It is very easy to conflate 2 messages into a single slide. For example:
· competitors are winning our business, our response is new campaigns.
Having one message (or idea) per slide makes the story easier for the audience and yourself. It ensures that all the added info in the slide ladders up to make a single point. So, in this example, dedicate one slide to competitors are winning our business, and one to the campaign response
4. Use the power of 3.
There are two ways you can apply this.
First, use the adage “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.” For a management review I will have the same executive summary slide at the start and end of the deck. A blog post on how to write an executive summary is coming next week.
Second, audiences like things in 3s. Three is easy to remember, especially if you can connect them in a pithy manner. As examples at Clorox, we had “Bigger, better, faster” and “desire, decide, delight”. I’ll never forget them! If you need more than 3 then skip 4 and go to 5.
So, if I am presenting declining growth, I might make 3 bullet points aside a graph.
· Year on Year revenue decline is 28%
· Prior 3 years 15-20% growth.
· Pricing stable throughout.
5. Less is more.
As Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one”.
A well written management story can generally be told in 10 or less slides. Ensuring that each slide has a different message gives you the opportunity to make ten well-considered points. I have seen leadership teams with mandates of 5 slides and 10 slides. So be sure to know the expectations.
When I speak at conferences, I target 20-30 slides – these audiences are expecting more depth.
However, I frequently see presentations of 30-70 slides. Often you can see that as they move into presentation mode which means that before the presentation starts, I have already gained 3 negative impressions of the presenter. They are (a) unable to distil their thoughts, (b) not sensitive to my needs (attention) and (c) expecting me to figure out the essence of the story for them. It is not going to go well……
If you do an excellent job on points one and two and author your story titles before you embark on your journey it’s generally relatively easy to reduce your number of slides. And there are simple tricks e.g., summarize results and provide a reference to the full data sets.
