Why do organizations keep making these presentations mistakes?
“Oh my god! Not again! … my boss asked that I limit my presentation to only 3 slides. Last week I was told to include more information on my slides which already were cluttered with quite a lot of information.”
These are common challenges faced by many individuals working in organisations, even big ones.
How can you overcome these constraints and start presenting higher-quality information?
Presenting in weekly or monthly meetings, where bosses dictate how you should design your presentation slides, can sometimes pose challenges to the individual presenting at the meeting.
I hear of these constraints being imposed all the time from individuals at my presentation training workshops that the requirements (or should we call it constraints) imposed by the bosses (and sometimes they are the organisation’s policy or practices) are quite impossible to comply with. And yet, these individuals must somehow comply with these impossible requirements.
Two of the most common constraints that I often hear is that, 1; the presentation can only have at most two slides. And 2; you need to include more details in slides that are already packed with information.
Wow! I would really be uncomfortable if those were to be imposed on my presentations.
I felt that if we squeeze too much information into a single slide, the audience will not be able to see anything because it’s going to be messy, and everything will be very small. The same goes in situations where only two slides are allowed for the presentation. The presenter has no choice but to squeeze everything into that 2 slides.
I asked participants in my workshops how they overcome these challenges, as they have to face these constraints every time they present. One participant answered,
“Oh! I just use animation on PowerPoint to show those information. Everything happens on that one slide. When I click my mouse, it will show a new set of information in a rectangle box that is about the size of the slide. In this way, I can add as many layers as I want on just one slide.”
That is an interesting way to counter the constraint of only being allowed one or two slides for the presentation.
Maybe we should be asking why organizations impose these constraints?
Something that I observed is that in the organization, weekly or monthly meetings are meetings where department managers take turns to present performance updates of their individual departments. And these meetings can run for hours.
To control the duration of the entire meeting, managers were given an allocated time for their presentations, maybe 5 minutes or 10 minutes each. But as usual, many will take more time when they present, and quite often, the entire meeting will exceed the allocated time. As a measure to force managers to keep to their allocated time, the limited slides allowable constrain is imposed.
Did this help?
Depending on how you look at it. The answer can be YES or NO. To me, I would say is NO. The method of constraining slides did not help because all managers want to do their best to share details and brag about their performance.
And, of course, managers will squeeze as much information into the allowable slides. Imposing a slides limit might not always help the situation.
Organizations tend to believe that if managers are permitted to use more slides, they will take more time to present. The idea that the more slides you have, the more time is needed to present.
What should we all do then?
Both the organization and the manager have a role to play to improve and not forever make those same presentation mistakes. Of course, there must be a limit if we want to keep the whole timing under control.
Limit the time based on information required to be presented instead of limiting the number of slides allowed.
Organizations should evaluate the amount of time needed to present information of each department. And also, be more objective as to which area of information is required. In this case, the resulting presentation will be more focused and specific. This will lead to higher-quality information.
Better quality and useful information are better than higher quantity and overload of information.
For example, 5 minutes is allocated for the sales department to present sales performance, and 10 minutes for R&D to share a new research finding. The 5 minutes allocation to the sales department is not a lot of time, and therefore the quality information expected will be very focused. Likely at the overall performance level instead of individual product performance level.
Organisations should also stop limiting the number of slides allowable in presentations. Leave that to the person presenting to allow maximum creativity on how best to communicate quality information.
Instead of being too strict on the allowable number of slides, be strict on the allocated time.
The individual or in the case of the Manager presenting at the meeting, needs to spend time analysing the raw data and decide what is relevant for the 5 minutes presentation at the weekly meeting.
Again, we can’t be presenting every detail in 5 minutes. So as a manager presenting at the meeting, we need to be very focused and specific on what we are presenting and what we will show on the slides.
We should use as many slides as required to effectively communicate the required quality information in the allocated time.
Still taking the earlier example of 5 minutes allocated to the sales department, the role of the sales manager is to present high-level overall product performance and then briefly talk about the top 3 high performing products. This will be very relevant and good use of the allocated 5 minutes. The takeaway quality message is clear, specific, and relevant.
Managers need to always respect the allotted time given and present within the given time.
There are many challenges in presentations, and it is important that we recognize them and try our best to overcome those challenges, so we can be most effective when presenting. These challenges are faced by individuals and also organizations. They might be different challenges depending on which side you are on.
What is important is that we all want quality information in the presentation. We want to please the audience. We want the audience to have a great time and experience attending the presentation. And to get there, we need to always make improvements in the way we present and in the way we think about presentations.
For one, limiting the number of slides in presentations is not a good idea, as it undermines the individual’s creativity and effectiveness.
For the organization, think about how you would redesign meetings to encourage creativity in your managers.
As for the individual, play your role and take presentations seriously. Analyze the information required, be focused and specific about what you will present, and show on your presentation slides.
Finally, think about quality information instead of quantity, and be awesome in your next presentation.
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