How to have ‘making effective decks’ and ‘not losing your mind’ go hand in hand.
Starting off as an Analyst in a service oriented Data Analytics firm and then as a Management Consultant and a Product Manager, my relationship with presentations (deck-making) has been fairly long.
Sometimes rosy, many a times rocky, deck-making is probably the one professional exercise which evokes strongest of the emotions within me whenever I am at it.
Some of my most rewarding and fulfilling moments have come while articulating an impactful deck for a client while at the same time some of the most blood-sucking drudgery that I have had to endure has involved deck making at the very centre of it.
Over a period of time I realized that these emotions were exhibited by a lot of my peers & colleagues as well. And probably at a frequency more alarming than mine.
Since I have been at the activity for a fair bit of time now, there are a few things that I have realized about the process of deck-making:
Realization 1: Decks are less about them & more about storytelling. Below is a bit of arithmetic that I personally believe in:
- Bad deck + Bad Story = Pathetic
- Good deck + Bad Story = Bad
- Bad deck + Good Story = Nice
- Good Deck + Good Story = Great
Realization 2: Fiascos of deck-making have less to do with your incompetency but more to do with the lack of alignment between you & your team members
Realization 3: And lastly, Microsoft PowerPoint is not going anywhere. And if it makes it any better, it is definitely not the reason that cripples your deckmaking skills.
The Long List of Problems
- Approach: Most of the folks whom I have worked with and discussed this at length and who have had less than pleasant experiences, all had one thing in common. All of them, treated deck-making as a ‘CHORE’. This does not mean that they didn’t work hard towards making the deck. But instead, that they treated the deck as a templatized and ‘one-size-fits-all’ sort of an activity where a bunch of slides need to be thrown in together with fancy images and designs to go along with it. This is THE ROOT of all problems. To begin with, people need to start acknowledging the activity of deckmaking as less of a ‘CHORE’ and more of a ‘PRODUCT’. When you treat the deck as a PRODUCT you question the objective, existence and genesis of the entire document rather than just going through the motions of making a deck
- Mindset: Most of the people, treat the deck in isolation rather than thinking of the role that it plays in the broader scheme of communication. As I have mentioned above as well, actually making the deck is only 25–30% of the effort that goes into a]the communication in totality. The rest is about doing the pre-work of thinking about the messaging AND the actual delivery of the messaging, supported by the deck, in front of the audience/client
- Design: Most of the people resign themselves to their fate thinking that they can never be good since they are poor at ‘drawing’ or are not good artists in general. While that may appear to be a reasonable argument, considering the nature of the activity, it is superficial at best. Deck-making is less about art and more about communicating your thought clearly. You need not be a Van Gogh to make good & effective presentations. If this sounds too farfetched to you, try and remember the last time you sat through a good presentation or a TED Talk. Do you remember the deck that the speaker may have used at that presentation?
- Coordination & Teamwork: My easiest experiences while making a deck have been when I have ‘owned’ the deck with little help from other folks. While some of my most torturous ones have been when people around me have refused to give me the liberty to ‘own’ the deck but still expected me to create the entire deck. In conclusion, resulting in incomprehensive and unclear messaging, long nights and scampering the next morning to save face.
Humans while working in teams & in a position of authority, have this compelling urge to make their contribution/opinion heard/felt without evaluating the marginal utility of that input. While everyone loves a democracy and having their opinions heard, deck-making is one of those scenarios where it is absolutely essential to have a single owner. He/She can choose to hear anyone out but at the end of the day they should have the freedom to do what they think is best. - Microsoft PowerPoint: A lot of people mistakenly believe, that there troubles with deckmaking stem from the abhorrent Microsoft PowerPoint and they would be much better off if the firm were to move to a different tool like a Prezi or something along similar lines. MSFT PPT is a market leader & more importantly here to stay for a bunch of reasons: network effects, predictable user behaviour and all the reasons why Slack could not upstage MSFT Teams.
Okay. Just tell me what to do.
Picking up from points 1 and 2 of the previous section, I have found the following approach to be the most appropriate for me:
Thinking about the ‘deck’
This is the part where you get an idea of the ‘lay of the land’. It is here where you define the broad contours of what you are going to cover. This is the phase that helps you in deciding that ‘WHAT’ is the ‘PRODUCT’ that you want to send out and in order to develop a crystal clear understanding of that, there is some introspection that you ought to do:
Who?
Who am I having this dialogue with
What?
What do they want to understand/hear from me
Why?
Why do they want to know that
Where?
Where will this dialogue be taking place
When?
When will this dialogue be taking place
How?
How would they go about acting on my message
This may come across as blasphemous to some considering that generally marketers apply this concept to physical goods. But the truth is, that this holds equally well in this context.
Actually making the ‘deck’
This is the part where the making of the deck commences. If you have invested enough thought while answering the questions in the previous step, different steps in this stage would seem a lot less arduous:
Storyline: If you’ve done justice to the first step of the process, the activity that you ought to be doing here is to break down your story into byte sized pieces and have each byte sized story be the title of each and every slide. Please note, titles are not:
Introduction, or
About the client, or
The Problem
Instead, they are:
ABC is a $100M conglomerate with business concerns in EMEA and APAC, OR
With the incumbent markets saturating, ABC ought to look into new territories for expansion, OR
Key challenges that hinder ABC from doing that are regulatory and limited experience.
It is worth noting that the leading management consulting firms follow a general ‘Rule of 3’ which translates to a maximum of 3 takeaways, messages or insights from each page. Which if given more thought, seems to strike the balance in terms of having enough substance in one slide without overwhelming the audience.
Strawman: Once you have the messaging frozen, you go about working on the slides by creating a strawman. As the name suggests, a ‘strawman’ is where you do not create the actual slide but only put in ‘stick figures’ OR the ‘skeleton’ of the slide in place. This would mean that what will go into the slide in terms of content, data, tables, graphs, designs, infographic etc. AND where/how they would be positioned.
Please note, the strawman is not meant to look pretty. It is a quick & dirty preliminary version of the slide so that people in your team can understand what to expect rather than getting surprised at the 11th hour.
Content: This is the part where the actual grunt work of making the deck begins. Once the strawman has been frozen and accepted upon, you go about adding the actual content, data, tables, graphs etc. to support the sub-story being carried by that particular slide.
Formatting: This is the part which I like to refer to as which will make your deck stink less. Once you have everything in place, you start working towards correcting the fonts and making them consistent, checking for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, aligning the color scheme as per the company guidelines, ensure that different pieces on a slide are within a structure and not flying in random directions. While in my opinion the effort in this activity is just 5–10% of the overall, but doing this part well ensures that whether your deck would be classified amateurish or professional.
I have often noticed people getting annoyed and borderline angry when I point this out to them. They think that I am nit-picking. After all, the content is already there how does a few text boxes not being aligned or text being of different color/sizes add any value to the overall deck.
In such cases I usually ask them to think of a book which has page numbers labelled incorrectly and has text flowing out of the borders.
On a scale of 1 to 5 how acceptable would this book be to you?
A few much needed clarifications
A lot of people express their dismay over the fact that this was meant to make things easy for them, instead I have made the process all the more lengthy and time consuming for them. To which I have 3 counters:
- What I’ve described here is a process, for which once you inculcate a muscle memory you would not be required to follow it step by step every single time you go about creating a deck. Instead it would become second nature to you
- Would you rather struggle making a deck with a random process OR lend some degree of predictability to its success by putting in some extra effort? There is no right answer here, but whatever your answer is speaks about who you are as a person when dealt with such situations
In closing, the curious case of Amazon
Before I conclude, a lot of people argue that Amazon has done away with presentations and our firm should also do something similar. Like every other piece of content floating on the internet, this correct but without any nuance:
- It does not talk about the Amazon instead uses Word documents as its preferred mode of organizational communication
Word for Amazon == PPTs for Other firms - The effort that goes into making this document is fairly significant with the only exception being that you are not required to have any fancy designs to go along with it
- As a culture, Amazon believes that it would rather optimize time instead of asking its employees to invest that time & effort in beautifying the document. The sole purpose of the spartan and austere document is to deliver content and information. Bottomline being, Amazon believes that the marginal utility of having anything other than the relevant content on the document is very low.
Ask yourself the question, when was the last time you not just read, but absorbed & assimilated, the contents of a Word Document shared by your firm. - Instead, they spend the same effort in refining and sharpening the content of their document to such clarity that only by reading the document people understand what is the objective and expected actions from them.
Which brings us to the same point we discussed earlier i.e. decks are less about themselves and more about communication.
