3 Reasons to Ditch your Powerpoint Presentation
PowerPoint and Keynote slides are often so terrible that ditching them completely would go a long way in helping presenters connect with audiences. I was taking a lazy Sunday nap and read an article on NPR called “Physicists, Generals, and CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint.” The article makes three fascinating points on why we should get rid of those slides completely:
PowerPoint gets in the way of discussion
A team of physicists banned PowerPoint and forced presenters to use a whiteboard instead. In their experience, people who used PowerPoint slides were tethered to those slides, and when it came time for group discussion, presenters couldn’t move beyond their slides. After watching thousands of presentations, I’ve come to the realization that unless presenters learn how to properly use Keynote or PowerPoint, they should ditch the slideshow completely.
PowerPoint is boring
Molecular biologist John Medina has released a series of Brain Rules books. Medina tells us that the brain can’t pay attention to boring things. According to his website, “What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Whether in school or in business, these differences can greatly affect how an audience perceives a given presentation”.
John Paul Chou, a physics professor at Rutgers, believes that “the main advantage of forgoing PowerPoint is that it forces both the speaker and the listener to pay attention. With PowerPoint, he says, it’s ‘easier to let your mind go on autopilot and you start to lose focus more easily’.
I’ve personally been in dozens of meetings, leadership training and board retreats where as soon as the presenter flipped on the PowerPoint, everyone in the audience tuned out. Since we’ve seen so many bad presentations with slides, our brains are comfortable shutting down as soon as we see the slideshow. In many cases, the material was important and could have been interesting.
You can tell if your slideshow presentation went over well, and this leads us back to the first point of the NPR article. If you give your presentation and no one has any questions, you sucked. If you present your slides and no one has a single thing to offer, to contribute, to discuss, to ask, or to say when you’re finished, your presentation was bad.
PowerPoint is lazy
John Paul Chou of Rutgers “says the problem is simply that ‘we’re so used to giving PowerPoint [presentations] that we forget there are other means of communicating’. Consider this: BusinessWeek estimates “350 PowerPoint presentations are given each second across the globe”. That’s an estimated 30 million PowerPoints every day. How many of those 30 million presentations actually needed slides? PowerPoint is the lazy way out, and its purpose is hazy. Why did those presenters even use slides in the first place? Could he or she have gone without the slide medium completely? Could the presenter have done something differently?
We also see people use PowerPoint as their speaking notes. Instead of using the medium properly, a presenter will type all of his/her main points on the slide. This is lazy. World-renowned presentation experts Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds tell us that speaking notes belong to the presenter only, and PowerPoint slides should visually reinforce the content.
Vision trumps all other senses. We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%. Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.
