How to Wash a Chicken

by Tim Calkins

  In a good presentation, the pages should flow naturally; it should all feel logical. It is just like you are telling a story. If you say, “I had a great weekend,” you should probably then say, “I went to the movies,” and then “I saw Wonder Woman.” This is obvious when thinking about a conversation.

  The dynamic is also important when it comes to presentations. If you say, “Sales were up 18 percent last year,” the next page should probably explain why. If you have a page describing the new product development effort you implemented over the last year, you might then have a page reviewing the results.

  One way to test the flow is to ask yourself what your audience might be thinking about after a page. If you say, “We are worried about rising interest rates,” a logical person might wonder why, or how likely an increase really is.

  DO I MOVE TO THE CONCLUSION?

  Ultimately, you need to get to and support your recommendation. A series of interesting points might engage the audience, but it won’t be a successful meeting if you don’t get to the point.

  So, as you look at the flow of a presentation, you should check that it is moving you in the right direction. Does this presentation naturally take me to the recommendation?

  Best case, a presentation will arrive at the recommendation in a completely natural manner. The proposed solution will seem like an obvious solution. Your audience will think, “Of course! Doing anything else would make little sense.”

  ARE THE PAGES MECE?

  When constructing a presentation, the points should be MECE. This phrase, used frequently by consulting firms when developing recommendations, means “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.” Both parts of this are important.

  “Mutually exclusive (ME)” means that each point should be different. You shouldn’t just repeat the same thing; this is redundant and tiresome. For example, don’t say, “Our key target is suburban soccer moms,” and then “Suburban soccer moms are an important target.” This is just repeating yourself; it makes your presentation longer and more complex than necessary.

  The phrase “collectively exhaustive (CE)” is also important; it means that your presentation should be complete. It should touch on all the key points. If there is a critical issue, the presentation should address it.

  Spend the Time

  This phase of the process can be frustrating. It takes a long time and progress will seem limited. You aren’t creating pages and polishing charts. You may think, “I’ve spent five hours on this and I don’t even have a single page done yet. All I have is a pile of Post-it notes.”

  Don’t be discouraged! It takes time to create a strong story, but it is an investment that will pay back many times over. If the presentation flow works, then the presentation is set up for success.

  8

  CREATE SIMPLE PAGES

  * * *

  Once you have the overall structure of a presentation set, you can turn to creating the actual pages. This is when you put words to paper: you write headlines and add tables and charts.

  Wait

  People love this part of the process because they feel like they are making real progress on the task. They can see the pages take shape. There is tangible output.

  It is tempting to jump directly to this stage. Creating pages feels significant. If you have fifteen PowerPoint pages complete, it seems that you are well underway. You’ve made real progress!

  Don’t do it.

  You can’t start the task of creating pages until you know the overall flow of the presentation. One page has to connect to the next page; each slide is like a piece of a puzzle. This means that you can only create an effective page if you know how it fits into the flow; you have to know the previous page and the following page.

  Create a Strong Headline

  The most important element on a page is the headline. This is where you state the main point. The headline should be crisp and clear. If the headline works, the page will likely work.

  When you developed the overall story, you probably had the first draft of a headline. If you created a storyboard, you presumably wrote in a first version. As you now construct the page, you should go back to revisit this. Is the phrasing correct? Does the language work? Very often you captured just an idea in the previous phase. Now you have to make sure the idea comes across as an effective headline.

  Remember that one headline should flow to the next. One way to check your presentation is to go through it, reading only the headlines. Ideally, these should form a natural story; someone should be able to understand the presentation by looking at just the headlines.

  MAKE IT A SENTENCE

  A good headline states the conclusion, or the main point. It doesn’t just say what is on the page. It should be a sentence, complete with a subject and a verb. There should be a main point to the headline. Remember, you are telling a story, not just communicating data.

  The following headlines add very little value:

  Sales by Region

  Customer Segmentation

  Margin Trends

  Net Promoter Score

  Stage-Gate Process Update

  Results by Quarter

  These are all fine things, but they are not effective headlines. When you read “sales by region,” you don’t learn anything. You can assume that the information is accurate, but why does it matter? What is the point of the page? What does “sales by region” tell us?

  A title like “sales by region” shows that you are just presenting data. This is probably a waste of time. Why bother to create a presentation at all? Just print out the charts and send them over, or just send the spreadsheet.

  Presenting data adds little value. Worse, people might interpret the information in different ways. This can be a problem. Your goal is to sell a recommendation; you want to shape how people view a situation and guide them to a conclusion.

  A good presentation involves synthesis and analysis. You aren’t just showing someone information; you are making sense of it, working with it, forming it into a compelling argument. There is too much information in the world; nobody needs a presentation that simply gives them more of it.

  With a headline, you want the point to come across. Why do we care? The headlines above would add much more value if rephrased:

  Don’t write: “Sales by Region”

  Write: “The West Region is critical for our business.”

  Don’t write: “Customer Segmentation”

  Write: “The ‘Eager Shoppers’ segment is our key target.”

  Don’t write: “Margin Trends”

  Write: “We grew our margins significantly last year.”

  Don’t write: “Net Promoter Score”

  Write: “Our net promoter score has been increasing.”

  Turning a headline into a sentence with a subject and an action will help ensure that each page has a point.

  LIMIT THE HEADLINE TO TWO LINES

  A headline shouldn’t be long. The best headlines are one or two lines; these are easy to read and understand.

  Longer headlines don’t work well. A three-line headline, for example, is simply too much. In part this is because a three-line headline is visually difficult to read. More important, a three-line headline means you haven’t really summarized the key point; you still have distilling to do.

  If your headline is too long, you should rewrite it and simplify it. Shrinking the type size or changing the type font is not a solution; these should be consistent on every page. You have to tighten the idea.

  Long headlines sometimes indicate that you have too much information on the page. Splitting the material into two pages may address the problem. A headline like “Sales are declining in three of four regions. The East Region is increasing due to better distribution and sales coverage” would easily split into two pages, with one headline being “Sales are declining in three of four regions. Only the East Region is growing” and the other being “The East Region is growing due to better distribution and sales cover
age.”

  MAINTAIN PARALLEL STRUCTURE

  Every headline in a presentation should be similar in structure. Best case, all of the headlines are short sentences.

  Parallel structure ensures that the presentation will work well in its entirety. It feels polished and professional. The following collection of statements works; each one is a complete sentence. There is parallel construction:

  Sales have declined sharply over the past year.

  The decline in sales is due to a drop in buying rate.

  The penetration rate has remained stable even as the buying rate has declined.

  We can connect the drop in buying rate to fewer purchases per occasion.

  Changing structure creates a sense of discontinuity in the presentation. A presentation that lacks parallel structure isn’t polished. For example, this next mix of sentences and phrases is a jumble; there is no consistent structure or format:

  Sales by year

  Sales are down due to a fall in buying rate.

  Growing customer penetration

  Regional revenues

  We can connect the drop in buying rate to fewer purchases per occasion.

  The result is that the presentation does not seem polished.

  INCLUDE TRANSITIONS

  It is good to use transition words and phrases to connect pages in the presentation. Using “as a result” and “on the other hand” and “in addition” strengthens the flow. Remember, headlines taken together should form a story.

  A flow of headlines like this works well:

  Our sales grew by 8 percent last year.

  However, profits fell by 9 percent.

  This key challenge was a decline in variable margin.

  The margin decline was due to an increase in product cost...

  . . . and a jump in variable labor rates.

  As a result, reducing costs is a key priority.

  In this sequence, each headline has a role. There are transitions along the way to connect one point to the next. As Natalie Canavor, author of Business Writing in the Digital Age, notes, “Good transitions create the binding that holds your piece together and reinforces the logic of your argument.”1

  AVOID THE PASSIVE VOICE

  Don’t write in the passive voice! This is true throughout your presentation, but it is particularly important when it comes to writing headlines.

  The passive voice occurs when you turn the object of an action into the subject. It looks like this:

  Active Voice: “We launched a new brand of shaving cream.”

  Passive Voice: “A new brand of shaving cream was launched.”

  Active Voice: “We increased profits by 22 percent.”

  Passive Voice: “Profits were increased by 22 percent.”

  Active Voice: “Our key competitor launched a new ad campaign.”

  Passive Voice: “A new ad campaign was launched.”

  It is always better to write in the active voice and avoid the passive voice. There are three problems with passive writing. First, it lacks energy. It feels flat and it doesn’t communicate excitement. When you write, “A pricing strategy change was made,” you don’t generate real interest. It is far better to write “We changed our pricing strategy.”

  Second, passive writing isn’t clear. There is no obvious actor. Who launched the new ad campaign, anyway? Who changed the pricing? Did it just happen on its own? It is much better to include the actor.

  Third, passive writing avoids ownership. When you say “A new brand of shaving cream was launched,” you are distancing yourself from the action. You are not taking responsibility.

  Senior executives want people to take ownership. Writing in the passive voice suggests you aren’t having an impact. Things are just happening. James Humes, the Ryals Professor of Language and Leadership at the University of Southern Colorado and the author of several books on language, writes, “The passive is for the ‘cover-your-ass’ types. The passive is not the voice of a leader. The passive is the voice of the bureaucrat who wants to duck responsibility.”2

  Writing in the passive voice is very common among my MBA students. Apparently, the phrasing somehow feels serious and important. So pay particular attention to this, and stomp out the passive voice whenever you can. As Humes notes, “Some corporate executives like the passive because it uses convoluted phrasing that they think seems more authoritative because it sounds complex. They’re wrong.”3

  Personal pronouns are fine. As Sam Leith from the Financial Times notes, “You do not sound grander or more important by sounding impersonal. You benefit from sounding direct and personal, by speaking as ‘I’ or ‘we’ to a ‘you.’”4

  Add Support Points

  Once the headline is set, you can move on to adding the support points. This is the information that backs up the headline and makes the page credible and powerful. TED’s Chris Anderson explains the process: “Flesh out each point you make with real examples, stories, facts.”5

  Support points include charts, graphs, illustrations, bullet points and pictures. There is a range of material that might back up the headline in a presentation.

  In most cases, you will already know what is going on the page. When storyboarding, you might have drawn a rough chart or graph, or written out a few supporting points.

  Be careful to provide strong rationale. You need to provide information that justifies your point. If your headline says, “We can reduce marketing expenses by 8 percent,” you should have some rather compelling data points supporting the case.

  Unsupported statements are a danger spot in a presentation; it is an area where your audience will challenge you, perhaps successfully. You need analysis to support your case.

  If you can’t fully support a headline, you may need to rephrase it. Generally speaking, descriptive statements are less controversial than conclusion statements and require less support. Saying “The West Region makes up most of our sales” is easy to support. You can simply show a chart with this information. Saying “We should focus on the West” is a more difficult statement because you are making a recommendation.

  Sometimes you will find that a particular headline requires significant justification. You might need several charts and a long list of support points. This is a problem; you can only put a certain amount of information on each page. You need to provide the rationale, and you need clear, uncluttered pages. The solution may be that you need to rework the flow of the presentation entirely, perhaps splitting one page into two or three.

  For example, the headline “Our advertising focus needs to be on urban professionals in the southern cities” may be a difficult one to support, because you are making two fairly different points, targeting urban professionals and focusing on southern cities. You would be well served to split the headline into two different pages; on the first page, you discuss the target of urban professionals, fully supporting this point, and on the second page, you discuss the importance of southern cities.

  Another way to address a weak page is to soften the headline. Instead of saying “Our sales are down due to the recent warm weather,” you could say, “Our sales may be suffering due to the recent warm weather.” A slight wording shift puts you in a different position. You aren’t stating certainty; you are just suggesting there may be a link.

  Remember that your audience is not your friend and not your mother. Your audience is likely a colleague who is facing all sorts of issues and challenges, just like you are. In many cases, your audience will be your boss, or your boss’s boss. They will be looking for you to deliver a strong piece of work, and will be quick to notice lapses. There is no guarantee they will support your recommendation. Sometimes they will challenge your conclusions and try to pick apart your argument. You won’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt.

  Strong support is critical. Each page should have data supporting your headline. You have to answer the question: Why do you really think this headline is correct?

  Some things to remember wh
en inserting support points include the following:

  DON’T HAVE MORE THAN FOUR BULLET POINTS

  Nothing will kill a presentation faster than a long list of bullet points. Putting twelve or fifteen points on a page is always a problem. Nobody wants to walk through a long list of bullets. Don’t do this!

  There are three problems with a long list of support points. First, if you have ten or twelve points, the presentation will lose momentum. It takes a long time to review that many points. People will tend to tune out. Any forward progress that you’ve built in your presentation will dissipate as you wade through this long list of items.

  Second, with a long list, the important points may get lost. If you have twelve support points for a specific conclusion, some are naturally going to be more significant than others. If you list them all together, the important ones may blend in; they fail to stand out and get lost.

  Third, people can’t remember the information. The more you tell people, the less people remember. This fact was brought to life vividly in a study done by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly on side effects in drug advertisements. The company showed people three versions of the same ad, and they evaluated retention. One version included four side effects, the next version listed eight side effects, and the final version showed twelve side effects. The results were striking: the more side effects in an ad, the fewer people remembered. With four side effects, people remembered an average of 1.04. With twelve side effects, retention fell to an average of only 0.85, a notable decline. As the list expanded, more and more people forgot everything on the list.6