Please don’t read this book

I enjoy attending conferences, whether I am making a presentation or not. You get to meet interesting people, hear interesting talks, and see how other people give their presentations. From the point of view of watching and learning from other people, the TCUK09 Conference was enlightening. I was grateful for some positive feedback from my own session, but I was aware that I was doing my presentation in a pretty conventional way. Mainly text, with bullet lists, numbers and percentages, some graphs – you get the idea. I took great care not to put too many words on each slide, and not to read the slides but to use them for the main points or for key quotes and to talk around them. But still, I reckon it was a pretty routine presentation, and quite a few of the other presenters I saw were not much different. Good content, well presented, but lacking in … something.

Some of the presentations I saw at TCUK09 were in a completely different league, and really blew me away. They were memorable in a way that my own presentation was not. They used very few words, and instead lots of images which complemented rather than duplicated what the speaker was saying. I was determined to find out more about this way of presenting, and a little bit of research amongst my friends and on the web brought me to Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds’ web site, and his book of the same name. In a written style as elegant as the example slides he includes, Reynolds comprehensively demolishes the everyday slide presentations we all can recognise. He coins the word “slideument” for the sort of presentation that has too many words, and that should have been a document. He criticises conference organisers who, he says, have created the expectation that a presentation slide deck can be printed out and read later as a substitute for attending the session. This is quite wrong. In a presentation, says Reynolds,

Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support your points quickly, efficiently, and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion come mostly from your spoken word.

What you, the speaker, say, and what appears on your slides are two different things. If you want to create a handout with your main points for your audience to take away, by all means do so – but your handout is a completely separate document from your slide presentation.

As an aside, I have recently viewed – I have recently been subjected to, would perhaps be more accurate – a number of slide presentations that would make the “bad” examples in Reynolds’ book look excellent by comparison. Packed full of text, and identical with the speaker’s script, these have been some of the least memorable presentations I have ever endured. Worst of all, I have had to view some of these presentations on line, as a result of the mistaken belief that if you take a bad presentation and capture it electronically you have created an e-learning module. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Reynolds doesn’t just attack conventional practice by knocking things down, he gives plenty of practical advice about what you should be doing instead as well. Having lived in Japan for many years, Reynolds takes much of his inspiration from Zen philosophy and urges presenters to be as completely devoted to the presentation they are giving as a legendary Zen swordsman is devoted to his swordfight – “lost in the moment” – and totally identified with what he is doing with no distractions or reservations. That sort of dedication and devotion isn’t easy to achieve, of course, and Reynolds urges presenters to practice and rehearse ahead of their presentations as if they were giving a performance – which in fact they are. He cites Steve Jobs as an exemplary presenter, and stresses that Steve doesn’t stint on preparation or rehearsal.

Reading Garr Reynolds’ book has made me determined to make the next presentation I deliver more memorable by replacing text-based slides with stimulating images, and developing (and rehearsing) a presentation script in which I deliver my message, rather than read it from the screen. I think it will be worth the effort, not just for me but for my audience as well. Everyone has something to learn from this book, even people who consider themselves experienced speakers. Author and speaker Seth Godin is quoted on the back cover of Presentation Zen as saying,

Please don’t buy this book! Once people start making better presentations, mine won’t look so good.

I’d like to echo that sentiment. Please don’t read this book, unless, of course, you want to be inspired to become a better speaker.