Giving presentations requires the performance skills to stand before an audience and keep them engaged no matter the topic. This comes with the same nervous energy as delivering any theatrical monologue or performance. Whether you thrive or fear the spotlight, it’s a practiced skill to balance the development of clear visuals and your own delivery. Like any good performance, presentations seek to tell a story, they just tend to be more information and data driven.
Blast helps clients produce better communications through an understanding of presentation design, audience analysis, and visual language. This means first and foremost understanding who your audience is and what they’re seeking to get out of your time with them. A meandering and overstuffed presentation will not only produce a muddled message, but as Thomas Jefferson observed “Speeches measured by the hour die with the hour.” Keeping an audience engaged means being economical with your time, because there is no getting it back.
Some major business figures like Jeff Bezos have pushed back against the use of presentations in Amazon’s meetings, along with the rise of AI tools automating how we communicate, are effective presentation skills becoming irrelevant? I sat down with Mike to discuss why he places such a focus on effective presentations, his tips for understanding your audience, and to learn what key factors will make or break your next presentation.
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Craig: Ever since I started working with you on Blast projects, presentations skills and their importance has been a pretty consistent theme. What is it about presentations for you that makes them so important to get right?
Mike: When I think of a presentation it’s like a stage in the sense that success or failure always comes down to how the person performs the presentation. If we don’t get the story right, then it’s a failure. As early as I can imagine, human communication has always been about telling a story, which is why we consume information and data in a much more profound way than just looking at charts and graphs. We don’t just listen to the words and numbers and mathematics of it all, we really need to appreciate it as a living breathing thing. Beyond the word of the meeting, that’s what a presentation offers, an entirely different level at which we can experience the story that the presenter is telling us.
Craig: Presentations have a notoriety for being aggressively dull or dragging on for longer than they’re welcome. Are there any strategies that you employ to keep presentations engaging for audiences, be those visual elements or other ways to break up the pacing?
Mike: The general experience people have with the form of presentations is that there’s always too much information. By contrast, there’s rarely a case where people have too much time. We almost invariably condition and prepare ourselves to fill every second of time we have with an audience. But I think something that helps with structuring your presentation is what I call ‘The Diamond Principal’. It starts with declaring upfront what that singular focus is. This is really important to do before branching out into subtopics and finally narrowing back down to the closing ‘action’ we want to happen after the presentation is finished. You help our audience by closing with a focused set of ‘next steps' which lets them apply the information you’ve just conveyed.
The question is then, what do you put in the middle? The struggle with the middle is figuring out ‘How do I get it down to the most important content?’ I always suggest you should go ‘deeper’ rather than ‘wider’. If we walk away from a presentation after spending an hour with a presenter who stays on one topic, unpacking it around three key fundamentals, then you’re always better off. Part of it is memory and pattern recognition. People just don’t have the capacity, especially today, to remember ten different things rapidly touched on.
Craig: You’ve mentioned before how at Amazon specifically there’s a rule about “no presentations in meetings.” I hear this comes down directly from Bezos. What do you think would make someone so hostile to presentations?
Mike: I think for Jeff Bezos, a key decision maker who owns the company, one must look at how he absorbs information. What are his preferences? Few of us have ever met him in person but I’d have to classify him as an ‘Inductive’ audience that wants to get to the point, be very thorough, and is very logical in how a case is made. His preference is to have it in the memo form. Everyone reads it in the first half of the meeting and then talks in the second half. That’s how he designed it, that's the standard he set, that’s right for him. But what I worry about with that kind of prescription is that it misses so many of the things that make for good communication. Good communication being meaning, and resonance, and memorability.
In the presentation design methodology that we use we start by working out our audience’s values which involves identifying what's important to them. What’s the core of their work, what are they hoping to achieve, and where do they find the most pain? We spend time looking at how they communicate and receive information. The reason we do that is to leave ourselves in a state where we’re anchoring everything we’re trying to accomplish to the audience.
Bezos’ remedy is to have everyone sit in silence and read this story. That’s not a visual presentation problem; that’s a management discipline problem. I work with lots of companies that solve that by saying presentations must go out two days before a meeting, and at the start the CEO asks, “Did everybody read it, yes or no?” You get into trouble if you say you did but it becomes clear that you didn’t even open the document.
Craig: Is there ever a risk in trying to strip a presentation down to the point it becomes too minimalistic or begins to rely heavily on having one specifically effective presenter tie all the content together?
Mike: One of the things in the workshop we do is get people's views on what makes a great presentation, or where they’ve seen a great presentation, and every time people talk about Steve Jobs and his keynote speeches. His presentations had a single image of a product or piece of technology with no other information on the screen. Jobs was an exceptional storyteller and there’s a lot of information he conveyed, but by virtue of being the uber-creator of all things Apple he’s very captivating in his knowledge and he has all of the answers.
Most presentations are live collaborative engagements where multiple people are being led through a story. What audiences usually complain about is “I can’t understand this slide”. I’ve gone into meetings to build powerful presentations, and they can be immensely data-rich but if it's structured well and tells a powerful visual story then it becomes clear. If the question then becomes ‘what is the right amount of information?’ then it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you have a singular goal you want people to focus on, like an opening ‘why are we here’ message, it’s probably best to have a single thing or visual on the slide about what the goal is, to reinforce the spoken word.
Craig: When people put time into crafting a presentation that ‘does that legwork for them’, would you say a presentation fails if it can’t be understood without the presenter in the room?
Mike: I think the right way is to always design the presentation for that specific event or experience. You should formulate it for that purpose. If it's being built to survive on its own and become a record, then it begins taking on multiple purposes. A presentation should give a platform for the audience and presenter to engage across. If we try to build something that lasts beyond that purpose, then it starts to get confused and difficult. You stop building it just for the audience and what they need to know.
Looking at AI enabled presentation services, I’ve found they always come across as very generic, cold, and impersonal. Communication is a fundamentally human thing, and it’s one thing we should focus on preserving as something we care about. If we let go of that control and start becoming ok with having technology do something that’s inherently human and designed to create a human-to-human connection for us, then we’re kind of lost.
Craig: What are some of the dangers of going down that path further? Do you see a similar issue there with the “A.I.-ing” of corporate messaging and presentations?
Mike: I think it's understandable human behavior, but I see us always choosing to take the path of least resistance. I really worry about this ‘laziness factor’, and that AI has an inherent passiveness built into it. You would assume that you can work with AI in a protege or assistant role, but even with some guidance, it often drifts away from an agreed upon direction and outcome that you’re asking for. That happens when you give it too much to do all at once, or you don’t calibrate tightly enough on what its job is. The reason for that is that AI is all about figuring out within a body of knowledge something that ‘fits’ your request. So, if its orders are too wide it’s lazy in the sense that it knows to just grab something between these specified endpoints. You get answers that are maybe correlated but not the cause you’re searching for. When it comes to communication I worry because we humans have a desire to get easy answers and AI seems very ‘easy’.
Craig: Thinking back to your earlier days of presentations, was there any point you got really interested in presentations? Was there a specific one that made you think “Wow these have a lot of power to them”?
Mike: The first year of my career I was doing benchmarking where we try to figure out how to improve a company's performance. At that time there was usually one computer in the office so I was the go-to person to manually draw and edit the slides on graph paper as the basis for these meetings. I liked the subject matter then, but when it really shifted was when an executive I was working with came and said, “My god all of you have to see this presentation!” She flipped through the hardcopy and explained the incredible singular story so as you journeyed through it. Though it was very complex, nothing was disconnected or left floating on its own. They were incredibly detailed slides but because they were well designed with the use of visual elements and care of language each slide could tell its story as part of the whole.
Later in my career, the best presentation I felt that I’d ever worked on was when we had an hour with the senior officer of a global company. We went into that meeting for one hour with a single double-sided piece of paper. On one side was the problem, and on the backside was the solution we were bringing. We spent almost exactly half the time on each and at the end they had said “That’s the best meeting I've ever had in my life”. In my view, the longer a slide can hold the conversation and enable it, the more valuable it is. To do those two slides we probably spent two weeks on them, deriving and refining information from other slides and trying to get the details just right. In the end the presentation was a prop, a platform for conversation.
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To our readers, we hope you’ve gained a deeper understanding of the role of presentations as a stage and setting for communication. Presentations are created for specific contexts and audiences which requires you to consider their information processing style. While two great presentations might look completely different from structure to information density, in the hands of a skilled presenter they are equally as effective in communicating their information story. As auto-generated presentations enter the market it will be tempting to throw all of your key messaging into a system that promises to figure out the structuring for you.
Resist this urge.
Great presentations come from intimately considering the relationship between the presenter, audience, and information, something that for now still requires your complex understanding of human communications.
