Designing a presentation from scratch

I can’t begin to think of the number of times I’ve worked with would-be presenters and they’ve told me how they ‘design’ their presentations – and it goes like this: I sit down and think about what I’m going to say for a moment and then open PowerPoint to write it.

Oddly enough, I’m rarely impressed by the results of that kind of thinking.  The thing is, once you fire up Powerpoint (or Keynote, for that matter), your brian starts to work in a particular way – linearly and logically. It has to, to be able to work the software.  The less competent you are at using the software, the more significant that problem becomes.  I’m an expert in Keynote, using it pretty much every week, and even I don’t fire it up until well, well down the design process.

Long term readers will know that we often use a simple set of three questions to get ourselves thinking the right sort of things when we design a presentation (and note here, I’m deliberately using the term ‘design’, not ‘write’!) but the next step is a tricky one.  The questions tell you what to say in your presentation but not how… which is where things like the diagram I’ve posted here comes in.   This is a snapshot of the start of some work on a presentation called “Wrestling the Octopus” – it’s going to be about ’emotional robustness’… in other words how to keep your head up when things around you are going downhill faster than you can say ‘Bobsleigh’.

As you can see, I’ve started to build up ideas, issues and things to mention into groups – and some kind of structure is starting to emerge organically.  The thin arrows are places where I might want to mention back to something I’ve said before to provide context and the groups of things are, probably, going to be slides (or perhaps short sequences of slides).  The key point, however, is that I can now put things together in a simple, visual way and mess about with it to my heart’s content before starting to worry about how to communicate the information.

By the say, for those of you who are interested in this kind of thing, the software I used to do this is the excellent (and free!) Xmind.  Typically, I do this on a whiteboard (a big one!) using post-it notes and things, but on this one occasion I ignored my own advice about not using technology so that I could easily show the process on this blog.

The next step of course, is to figure out how to communicate the information once I’ve got the structure… …but that’s a post for another day.  Today it’s sufficient to just think about what facts and figures go with what other facts and figures… and what order they should be in.