Slides -> Text -> Slides

Most project presentations consist of slides ripped from the project working documents. Pages you used to learn and discover things to analyze and make conclusions. They are not the best visuals to communicate the project outcomes to outsiders.

• Their layout is likely to be messy and detailed, designed to be read at close distance

• The structure of your project document is likely to be methodological, like a workplan that makes sure you cover all the bits of work required.

Here is an alternative approach to make your final presentation:

1. Leave your project working papers for what they are

2. Write a long-hand text (1 page) that explains what the conclusions and next steps are, supported only by facts that are critical in supporting the recommendations. (Not a “this is what we did” paper)

3. Now, make a completely new slide deck based on just that text document

Sounding like ChatGPT

Here is a headline from last night’s GOP candidate debate: Christie accusing Ramaswamy of “sounding like ChatGPT”

We might hear this more often in the future when it comes to debates and presentations. Things that make you sound like ChatGPT:

• Highly structured stories: intro, your supporting points, the wrap up

• Very polite language

• Zero human emotion, humor, anger, cynicism, fatigue

• No spontaneous tangents

• Arcs of a few paragraphs each

You get the point. It is similar to “sounding like a marketing content writer”, a style that has been around a bit longer.

The case against recycling...

… of slides.

It takes time and effort to create a good presentation. So when a next meeting comes up, it is tempting to borrow from a previous presentation that was already created. And typical presentations that are readily available are:

• Investor presentations of the last fund raising round

• Board presentations

• Product / sales presentations

We recently needed to pitch a tailored, one-off, joint service offering with a strategic partner. The first draft of our presentation:

• About company A (lots of slides, with an investor presentation flavor)

  • The market need for what company A does

  • The generic solution of company A to solve this market need

  • The team of company A

• About company B (lots of slides with a product presentation flavor)

  • The technology of company B

  • The results and achievements of company B

• What company A and B can do for you (1 - 2 slides)

Basically 2 generic company introductions, with a few minutes left to talk about the joint solution we were pitching to the client. We changed things around to focus almost everything about the specific problem of the client, and the company introductions were reduced to appendix background reading.

If AI gives poor results...

…when you prompt it to generate your presentation, maybe you are on to something new! AI generators predict what to write based on information it ingested before.

Now what if your AI generator comes up with a brilliantly written pitch?

Things ChatGPT is good at (and not)

ChatGPT can be a useful productivity tool for presentations:

• Get a basic story line / section outline for. a presentation

• Improve the language of a text

• Etc.

When using it, it is important to understand what underlying technology it uses, so you can see understand where it is strong, and where it is not.

• ChatGPT predicts words based on your prompt and the previous words it has already generated. Therefore, it is really good at “completing” texts that are very common on the Internet. High school essays, business plans, corporate annual reports, product documentations, product reviews, computer code. If your presentation fits one of these, it will work great, if it does not, results are not very reliable.

• ChatGPT cannot yet do live web searches to enrich its answers. Everything it “knows” is based on its training data set that was cut off in September 2021. Any information that became available after that, is not incorporated in the results.

• The majority of text available online is in English, so results in other languages will not be as strong.

Back in the early 2000s, Yahoo! was trying to categorize the Internet. Google beat it with a simple approach of tracking to which site other sites point for a certain subject. ChatGPT is a sort of super template: instead of looking for / categorizing text in templates, it simply reads all the templates and predicts what sentence is most likely to come next given the previous ones.

So “generic” presentations are most likely to benefit from ChatGPT. Quarterly budgets, CVs and bios, results from a science project, product launches. But even startup presentations can be pretty generic. Think about a pitch deck of SAAS (software as a service company) that has revenues and can fill pages with data about the typical financial ratios that investors are looking for.

Let others do the selling for you

During our very short (see yesterday’s post) speaking slot to launch a new partnership for 9xchange, we used the slide below. Deal making in healthcare is inefficient because everyone needs to kiss too many frogs in order to uncover their prince.

It got stuck in people’s head, and during the following presentations, presenters kept on referring back to frogs in their own talks. Free publicity.

Introduction emails

People are speed-reading emails. If you got someone willing to introduce you to someone else, and she says “send me an email that I can forward”, she is very likely to do just that, hit forward.

• Don’t expect much text editing, explaining, or pitching from your contact. Yes, she know your company. Yes, she knows what you want from the introduction. The person to whom it gets forwarded has little idea. Do the hard work for her.

• Writing the intro line for her (“I had a coffee yesterday with my good friend, and it struck me that the customer segment targeting positioning of their value proposition exactly matches or long-term vision for the business unit”), is likely going to have the line “See below, interested?” above it.

• You are pitching for the next interaction with the person you get introduced to, not the closing of the deal itself. On the one hand, this will make writing this email a lot simpler, on the other hand, it means that you have make it super personal and relevant, a standard pitch won’t do it.

Write for your audience

Every communications books and marketing strategists says it. Who is your audience? And many presenters would answer I know: the “C-level executive who is eager to get efficiency and transparency benefits for a better price than the current offerings in the market segment in between premium and super premium”.

That does not sound like a real person to me. Maybe it is someone new on the job who wants to impress her boss. Maybe it is someone buried under so many projects that she does not see how she has time to take on another one. Maybe it is someone who does not like that you get back to emails only after 5 days. Maybe it is someone who ia upset that you still keep talking about things she said she was not interested in. Maybe it is someone who needs to convince a colleague to use your product.

If you cannot visualize your target audience as a person, you might not have found it yet.

The song is always too long

Advice from a music teacher to amateur musicians: “You think the song is too short, the audience (almost always) will perceive the song as too long”. When you are an amateur musician, who sticks her out by performing on stage, you get instant sympathy, even without having heard a single note. If you play decently, people will enjoy your performance as well. But, because you are not (playing like a) famous rock star, patience / novelty might run out after a while. “Ah, she is going for another verse”.

Have the courage to keep it short.

Selective highlighting

This chart in the WSJ shows how you can focus on data points that matter to your story, while literally ignoring other data points that are less relevant.

This slide is obviously super complex, but you can also apply this style with more mondaine, everyday slides.

Instead of complex animations, it is easer to copy a version of your chart in consecutive slides, and adjust the coloring and messaging to highlight the points.

This approach also makes sure that your story is visible in environments without animations (PDF, mobile devices)

Replying to comments of trolls and hecklers

The current crisis in Israel (this Economist article sums things up pretty accurately) is waking up a whole group of the population that until now was not really involved in politics. People start posting politically charged messages on LinkedIn and other social media platforms that they used only for work or family updates. As a result, things can get out of control quickly, with heated debates turning up in the comments. Some thoughts.

• The people you are most likely to convince are the ones in the center. A die hard believer in an extreme position will never change her mind. So write for the people who might be sitting on the fence.

• Aggressive images, rude language, calling people stupid, is unlikely to work. It confirms stereotypes of you being unreasonable. “Hmm, that person just called me an idiot, maybe she is right, and I should change my mind / upgrade my intellectual capabilities” Nope.

• Write your post with a real person in mind, a friend who might disagree with you, but is not unreasonable. What would you tell her? What are her beliefs?

• When you get flaming comments back, count to 10, and either ignore, or post a polite reply. “Everyone has the right to their own opinion”. Maybe correct a fact that was wrong. As a result, the aggressive heckler will look bad, not you. And remember, you are not replying to the heckler to convince her that she is wrong, you are writing to other people who could be more reasonable and are glancing over the comments.

Speaking at mass rallies

Israel is going through a major political crisis now that has little to do with the traditional conflict here that usually makes headlines around the world. As a result, I have been attending a number of large rallies pretty much for the first time in my life, to try to prevent the current government from making the Supreme Court and legal system subordinate to the parliament with a simple 51% majority vote, effectively ending the separation of power that is crucial for a democracy to function properly.

Some lessons here when it comes to public speaking at these events with 100,000 attending:

• Your script is basically a list of sound bites, paragraphs of tension / release. Build up tension one way with a problem, then provide release with a punch line. There is very little room for sophisticated story lines.

• Don’t be afraid to put really, really long pauses in between, to get the crowd to calm down.

• Make sure your punch line is short and does not get washed out by the noise of the crowd.

• Balance your voice volume. If you are at the top of your voice all the time, you can no longer add extra drama to the punch line. (Yes, some people have a microphone voice with lots of lower frequencies, giving them an unfair advantage).

• Use the crowd creatively. “Raise your hand if you…” “Turn on the flashlight of your mobile phone if you…”

Most of the people in these rallies follow the speaker on giant screens. In between speakers, video clips are shown with a mix of regular footage and “slides”, usually big text messages that come in and out with animations.

There is an opportunity here for a carefully crafted, synchronized slide show and speaker performance. But I guess it will be pretty difficult to get all the technology to work: managing slide transitions, and switching between speaker and slide on the giant monitors. It should be possible though for events that are planned long in advance. The ones in Israel now are created at the very last minute, as things are moving very fast.

Rehearsing the whiteboard

Adhoc brainstorm meetings are very hard to manage. If you have to discuss a complex issue, it might be worth to prepare and rehearse your white board sketch before entering the room.

On its own, a white board (or a black board at school) is not very meaningful. A bunch of words and drawings out of context. For the person who sat through the meeting, the board is very meaningful. Every scribble on a specific location on the board is a visual anchor for the entire rich discussion that was held about it.

So rather than prepare a big slide deck, maybe you should prepare your white board. Where do you put what. How do you connect elements. The whiteboard gives you the perfect excuse not to make perfect drawings. Try 3, 4, 5, or even more versions until you are left with one you like.

How to use ChatGPT creatively

Most people visit ChatGPT, create an account, type in something, are amazed by the results, and then move on. But how could you actually use it for real?

One obvious use case is “homework cheating”: copy-paste entire pieces of text to save time and effort. But the results will still be a bit impersonal. (I suspect that in future versions of the program, you could feed it your own writing style so that the bot adjusts to you personally, the back archive of my blog since 2008 would be great for that :-))

But there are a few others:

• The bot answer might be a great way to get a basic structure/setup for your text. You copy they layout of the argument to start, but then fill in the paragraphs with your own language.

• The algorithm can create a check list to see whether you covered everything that should be covered

• ChatGPT can be better than Google to get tutorials or “how to” articles. At the moment the pages that are best optimized for search engines float to the top. This might not always be the best articles. ChatGPT has read them all and will summarize them for you.

• The software can be a great source of examples or analogies that you would not have thought of.

“Google it” is now an essential part of writing pretty much anything. “ChatGPT it” will have to be added to the list.

CONFESSION: Yesterday’s post about the use of humor in presentations was a complete homework cheat…

Nudging the center

The people you are most likely to convince to change their mind, are the ones who are in the center. It is virtually impossible to argue successfully with people who sit at the far end of the spectrum, basically telling them that everything they believe in is wrong.

Hardcore Democrats or Republicans never vote for the other side, so independent voters are the ones who actually decide who’s in charge!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022

So this Tweet is a smart communication strategy. Whether he is right and/or you agree with him, I leave up to you.

Brain variables

In computer programming (and math), things are stored in variables. A variable has a name and can point to pretty much anything. A numerical value, a user, another piece of code, a device, a map, an image library.

The variable is a little memory shortcut to access information. In the world of presentations, our brain works with variables as well. Visual symbols that are a shortcut to a fragment of a story.

Used in a bad way. After you have given a presentation dozens of times, the slides in your deck become ‘variables’. The page becomes a trigger for you to deliver a piece of the story. It does not really matter what the slide actually says. The audience who sees this for the first time however, misses this context.

Used in a good way. When brainstorming a story line, I often write down pieces of my store on stickers. Each sticker contains a fairly cryptic description. “The lazy point”. “Flipping is not possible”. Meaningless to anyone but me. For me however, it is a very condensed way of putting a label on a section of my story, and enables me to move things around to try out different story lines quickly.

I tried the above brainstorm a few times in a group: writing very simple text bullets in an email and move things around. The other members of the group missed the context, started editing the bullets into full sentences, discuss these, and before you know it, you have a 5 page document that is worse than the original you wanted to improve.

Dismissing the competition

If you are pitching someone who is making a choice between you and your competitors, chances are high that that person in the end will have a better understanding of the competition than you, so be careful when describing them.

I am evaluating some SAAS vendors and over the past week I asked two companies to give their perspective on each other:

• Company A about B: ‘People who want something cheap, pick them” [In a second call I found out they are not cheaper]

• Company B about A: A pretty accurate description of pros and cons of each, a good prediction of how company A would pitch, and why in my situation, company B is the better choice.

Guess which company scored higher on credibility.

"Our industry speaks like that"

Each industry has its own jargon, the way people like us say things. If you are sitting in a meeting and trying to pitch your services as a senior management consultant or lawyer, lowering your voice and using the jargon will show that you are one of them.

But being one of them is only one part of the pitch. Being understood is the other one. And for this purpose, it is probably better to keep things human. Especially if you do not have a lot of time: the cover email of a pitch deck, the description paragraph of a conference panel.

Be understood first, then worry about blending in.

Executive summary degradation

Hundred pages is a bit long, let’s add an executive summary

Hmm, this chart should go in here as well, and this, and this, and this one (that analysis took a long time)

The summary needs some structure, let’s add tracker pages

Wait, is this thing we are actually saying, let’s change the recommendations in the summary

Shouldn’t we change the full document as well?

Maybe the summary has become the document, but it is a bit long…

Let’s add a summary

Writing it down

Summary presentations of strategy projects are usually a ‘greatest hits’ of slides that were produced during the project. Copy, paste, shuffle, done.

Project working document slides are not the same as final results communication slides.

It can be good practice to write out the story behind your conclusions on 1 page. Don’t summarize the analytical work, but explain why the action your recommend is the smart one. Now go back to your slide pile. You might find that not all subjects need to be covered, not every subject needs a slide, and that the order in which you tell your story might be different from the contents page of the project working document.