Advanced Presentations by Design

Creating Communication that Drives Action

Andrew Abela

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118416761
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Based on extensive research studies from the fields of communication, marketing, psychology, multimedia, and law, Advanced Presentations by Design, Second Edition, provides fact-based answers to the most-often-asked questions about presentation design. The book shows how to adapt your presentation to different audience personality preferences, what role your data should play and how much of it you need, how to turn your data into a story, and how to design persuasive yet comprehensible visual layouts.

The book's accessible 10-step Extreme PresentationTM method has been field-tested in organizations such as Microsoft, ExxonMobil, HJ Heinz, PayPal, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Written from the perspective of a marketer and business manager, this new edition offers practical, evidence-based advice for bringing focus to problems and overcoming challenges. The book offers practical guidelines for:

• Structuring Stories: The book presents the SCORE method for sequencing data (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Example) into a powerful story that grabs the audience's attention at the beginning and holds it through to the end.
  
  

• Using Graphics: The author provides numerous examples of charts and other graphics, explaining which can help you best present your data.
  
  

• Setting Goals for Presentations: The book reveals why it's important to set measurable objectives for what you want your audience to think and do differently after your presentation.
  
  

This comprehensive resource offers a proven process for creating a presentation that gets noticed and compels your audience to take action.

Praise for Advanced Presentations by Design

"Shocking but true: You don't have to be Steve Jobs to create presentations that your audience will enjoy and that will also get you results. Even for everyday presentations, I've found that Dr. Abela's unique approach helps you replace crushingly dull and overlong presentations with fresh work your audience really cares about and that you actually enjoy creating!"

—Sanjay Acharya, Vice President, Akamai Technologies

" Advanced Presentations by Design is the best researched book on presentation design that I've ever had the privilege of reading. I recommend it for those of you who want the confidence of knowing how best to plan and design successful presentations."

—Gene Zelazny, author, Say It with Charts and Say It with Presentations

"This book is essential for any executive who doesn't have time to wade through sixty-page PowerPoint decks. You will want to make this book required reading for all your staff."

—Stew McHie, Global Brand Manager, ExxonMobil

PART I

Who?

IN THIS FIRST PART OF THE BOOK, we begin by focusing on who you are presenting to, and what implications this should have for your presentation. In this introductory section I will discuss why you should spend the time to consider the different personality types in your audience, and then in Chapter 1 I will explain how to do so. (I will continue throughout the whole book to separate the “reasons why” from the “how to,” putting the former, which tend to be more theoretical, into the introduction to each part, and the latter, which are more practical, into the chapters themselves.)

Different people have different learning styles and preferences for receiving information. If you can adapt your communication to these different styles, then your presentations will be more successful.¹ There are a number of helpful taxonomies to help you understand your audience members. Two of the most popular taxonomies of learning styles are the Perceptual Learning Styles and the Index of Learning Styles. There are seven Perceptual Learning Styles: print (people who prefer to learn by reading), aural (listening), interactive (talking and discussing ideas), visual (viewing pictures, charts, and demonstrations), haptic (touching), kinesthetic (moving around), and olfactory (tasting and smelling—see James & Galbraith, 1985).

The Index of Learning Styles contains four dimensions: active (learn by doing) versus reflective (learn by thinking about the subject); sensing (absorb facts) versus intuitive (discover relationships and possibilities); visual (pictures) versus verbal (words); and sequential (follow logical steps) versus global (leap to insight).²

A third taxonomy that can be helpful is the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI). The MBTI describes personality preferences in terms of four dimensions. These are “favorite world”: Introversion (focus on inner world) and Extraversion (focus on outer world); information: Sensing (focus on the basic information) and Intuition (focus on interpreting and adding meaning); decisions: Thinking (logic and consistency) and Feeling (people and circumstances); and structure: Judging (get things decided) and Perceiving (stay open to new information and options). One’s personality type is written in terms of four letters, representing the person’s preference in each dimension (e.g., ENTJ, ISTP, ISFJ, etc.—where Intuition is written as “N” so as not to confuse it with “I” for Introvert).³

In this book we will use the MBTI because of its widespread popularity. The MBTI is a sophisticated assessment tool that should be administered by a qualified practitioner. However, its categories are also very useful for making a quick assessment of the personality types likely to be present in your audience, which you can then use to ensure that you are communicating in ways that appeal to everyone in your audience.⁴

Most presentations are given to an audience of more than one person, so you are likely to have a group of mixed personalities in your audience. How do you adapt your communication to different personalities in the same group? Should you even try? Even though people have different personality types and learning styles, it is possible to design your presentation so that it appeals to all types, and Chapter 1 will explain how to do this in some detail.

Since it is possible to design your presentations to appeal to all types, do you even need to think about the personality differences in our audience? The answer is yes, because if you do not think explicitly about what kind of personality types or learning styles are going to be in your audience, and how best to communicate with them, then the danger is not that you will design your presentation in a generic way. The real and more likely danger is that you will default to designing your presentation to match your own preferences—which will work for the members of your audience who have a similar personality type to yours, but not for those who are different from you.

Even if you have one of the two most common personality types in management (ENTJ or ESTJ in Myers-Briggs terms: that is, extraverted, judgment-oriented thinkers) and you are presenting to other managers, the odds are that you will still only be appealing to a minority of your audience. You will be routinely turning off all introverts, perceivers, and feelers, because these represent almost three-quarters of all managerial level employees.⁵

If there is a particular person in your life with whom you always seem to have trouble communicating—who never seems to “get” what you are trying to say—then this could be the explanation: that individual has a very different personality type from yours. You do not want to risk having the same type of misunderstanding with your audience, and therefore it is worth thinking consciously about the different personality types that are likely to be in the room each time you develop a presentation.

And sometimes you will face a situation in which you are presenting to only one person, or presenting to a group with only one decision-maker. In that case, you can emphasize the communication elements of your presentation that will most appeal to that person’s type—allowing him or her to understand you better and more quickly, and be more easily persuaded. Therefore, in every case, it is worthwhile to begin your presentation by considering your audience’s personality types.

Notes

¹McFarland, Challagalla, and Shervani (2006), in researching salesperson interactions with buyers, found that the most successful ones adapt their influence tactics to suit their different customers.

²Felder and Spurlin’s (2005) review of the research on the Index of Learning Styles concluded that it is both valid and reliable.

³See Myers, McCaulley, Quenk, and Hammer, 1998. For more information on the MBTI, see the website of the Myers-Briggs Foundation, www.myersbriggs.org/.

⁴Both the reliability and the validity of the MBTI instrument have been challenged by Pittenger (2005). However, we use it here primarily to help recognize the variety of communication preferences audience members can have, and therefore this challenge is not directly relevant.

⁵ENTJ and ESTJ types represent 27 percent of managers, administrators, and supervisors (Macdaid, 1997). All other types, including all I’s, F’s, and P’s, make up the other 73 percent.

1

Audience

Understanding What Types of Communication Will Be Most Effective for Your Audience

Step 1: Identify the Communication Preferences of the Different Personality Types in Your Audience

It is important to understand which personality types are likely to be in your audience, and what their communication preferences are, to help you to break out of the (unconscious) habit, which almost all of us have, of designing a presentation to appeal only to those who share your own personality type. Even if you start out by deliberately designing your presentations to appeal to all types, if you routinely skip the step of thinking about the different personalities in the room, then there is a real risk that over time you will revert to accommodating only your own personality type preferences.

There are several considerations to keep in mind to avoid defaulting to a presentation design that appeals only to those who share your personality type.

If you like details, for example, keep in mind those who prefer the “big pic­ture.” If you like people to get to the point quickly, don’t assume that everyone else is this way; speak also to those who want to know what other factors you have considered and rejected to get to this point. If you make your decisions based strictly on facts, expect that there will also be people in your audience for whom emotional considerations and people issues are of central importance.

For this first step of the Extreme Presentation process, you need to list the most important people in your audience (where “important” is defined as people whose minds or actions you need to change), estimate the personality type of each, and then work out the implications of each type for your presentation design. You can photocopy worksheets A.1a and A.1b in Appendix A and use them to list your most important audience members and their personality types and indicate the presentation implications of each (or you can download copies at www.ExtremePresentation.com).

This chapter will explain:

• How to estimate your audience’s personality types
• How to match your presentation design to different personality types, especially when you expect to have multiple different personality types present in your audience (which is usually the case)
• What other information you could gather about your audience

How to Estimate Your Audience’s Personality Types

You need to make a list of the most important people you are expecting to see in your audience, and try to estimate the personality type of each. The “most important” people in your audience are those whom you expect to have the most influence on whatever decision or action you are trying to encourage with your presentation. If you will be giving the same presentation to different audiences, then focus on whichever is the most important to you, or else design your presentation so that it will appeal to all audiences (more on this below).

In a perfect world, you would have each of your audience members fill out a formal MBTI assessment, but for most real-world conditions this is unrealistic. In firms that have made a significant investment in MBTI, different executives’ types are known in the organization, and so you may already have the information you need if any of these particular executives happen to be your audience. For every other situation, though, you will need to make an informal assessment. I find the following questions helpful:

• Does the person seem to become energized from being alone (Introvert) or from being with people (Extravert)?
• Does the person respond better to concepts (Intuition) or facts (Sensing)?
• Does the person seem more concerned with principles and things (Thinking) or with people (Feeling)?
• Does the person seem driven to closure (Judgin...