Psychology of young people pondering the COVID vaccine

I am intrigued by the dynamics surrounding how people make the decision whether to take the COVID vaccine or not. Unlike most other countries, people have the luxury to ponder this decision here in Israel. The government has a real communication challenge here.

We spoke about segments before. If you are a fundamental anti-vaxxer, or have severe doubts about the vaccine safety, you are unlikely to be convinced.

There is a segment of young people though that “can not be bothered”. The personal risk of getting severe COVID is very low. They consider it the same as joining public roads every day. You consciously take this calculated risk, knowing that the probability of getting stuck in a severe accident is very small, especially when you drive safely.

What people forget, is the indirect impact. Big number of people x tiny percentage is still a big number of people at country level. And filled up intensive care units, trigger more lockdowns, more closed restaurants, bars, parties, zoom schools, etc.

I compared the two scenarios in the chart below (search “COVID” in the SlideMagic app to use something like this logic flow in your own presentations for other topics, also put it in the web template bank, download it here).

"Why are 2x2 so popular in consulting firms?"

I answered a question on Quora:

Read Jan Schultink's answer to Why are 2 x 2 matrices so popular at McKinsey Consulting? on Quora

I can think of a number of reasons:

1. A 2x2 is a nicer way to present options than a slide with 4 bullet points, a 5 dimensional space can get very complicated

2. It forces you to think things through thoroughly for holes and overlaps, maybe you start with 2 options, add a third, take a step back and think what actually defines these 3 options, come up with the 2 axis, and then realise you overlooked option number 4 to be complete

3. A 2 dimensional framework allows you to think about what happens if you move things around, and makes it easy to visualise.

4. In most cases there are more than 2 dimensions to a problem, but it is hard to visualise (see point 1), and think about. The 2x2 forces you to choose the 2 most important dimensions.

5. Cultural habit, if you are in a place that uses a lot of 2x2s, you will use it more often, it is a language that people understand easily.

SlideMagic has lots and lots of 2x2, 3x3 and other matrices as slide templates for your to get started. Download the app and get started.

Chart make-over: UK vaccine priorities

I took on the challenge from this tweet:

Admittedly a tricky challenge to visualise 9 bullet points when they're all very similar but is there a better #design?https://t.co/3romtz5hSJ pic.twitter.com/ElK7J3ajfO

— Jamie Garroch (@JamieGarroch) January 2, 2021

The embedded tweet is obscuring the image, here is the original taken from the BBC:

I think these icons are very cute, but are very hard to understand. I quickly put the following together in SlideMagic.

In the philosophy of SlideMagic, not the design of a pro, but very clear and very quick to put together. Notice how I kept things simple, by including the theoretical 0-16 years in nursing home residents, there won’t by any but the big horizontal bar shows the message “everyone” and maintains the visual harmony.

I have added this vaccin priority slide to the SlideMagic template database. You can access this slide for free by simply searching for “vaccine” from within the SlideMagic desktop app.

Example: COVID chain of infection

A slide came flying by on Twitter:

I might a quick remake of this slide in SlideMagic, in line with the SlideMagic philosophy: quick, clear, nothing too fancy (= time consuming) and added it to the SlideMagic template database since it could be a useful basis for any slide that needs to show some sort of chain of events.

What did I change?

• Removed the low-contrast red on black colours

• Took out the simplistic icons and replaced it with no-nonsense clear numbers

• Rounded up numbers so to avoid cut up people (audience is not hard core scientists)

• Put in a proper bar chart to show the magnitude of 416 vs 3, instead of an icon count

• Flipped the design left to right to make the flow in time more clear

This slide demonstrates how easy it is to line up bars of a data chart, arrows, and text cells of a table in the overall slide layout (an absolute pain on other presentation design software).

Hexagons

The new line drawing feature in SlideMagic was put in to support the connection of boxes in organisation charts and flow diagrams, but you can use it more creatively as well. The attached examples of the use of hexagon shapes shows how you can bypass SlideMagic’s strict limitations on shape types (basically boxes). But do you need to?

Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

An OKR slide template (Objectives and Key Results)

Not enough SlideMagic users have discovered that I try to respond to requests for new or missing templates. Today I added a template for an OKR sheet, Google’s approach to managing Objectives and Key Results.

SlideMagic is particularly useful for slides like this, it is easy to add rows, adjust the layout, and now those boring percentages can be visualised easy with a bar chart that always lines up with your table.

Search for “OKR” in the SlideMagic desktop app and it will pop up and ready to work on for free, alternatively, pro subscribers can download the template (in .magic or .pptx format) from the online template bank.

Let me know if you need more/different types of OKR templates.

Using heat maps in your presentation

This is a neat visualisation of the COVID outbreak in Florida:

Why does it work?

1. It uses colour intensity to introduce another dimension of data in a column diagram: time, number of cases, and age range.

2. The colours are nicely chosen so the chart gives the impression of some sort of fire being lit (which is unfortunately the case).

These charts cannot easily be created in PowerPoint, this one is generated by some code. But you could give it a go in PowerPoint.

• Take a standard column chart in PowerPoint

• Make all the data series have the same value, the age brackets you want to use

• Set the gap between the columns to zero

• And now comes the hard part: manually add different colours to each data point. To select a data point click it twice in quick succession (one click will give you the entire data series wiping out your detailed painting effort in one go)

Here is a quick search for heat maps in SlideMagic, I added one design that sort of resembles the COVID chart. You can see how the new slide layout with the side title I introduced a few days ago comes in handy to create more vertical space for data.

Slide template for a RACI matrix

On request of a user, I have added templates with a RACI matrix to the SlideMagic database. (It does not happen often, but this is the first time I actually heard about this consulting framework, the responsibility assignment matrix). In SlideMagic it is super easy to manage all the columns and rows of the table. If your colleagues are not ready for SlideMagic yet, use the app to create the chart, then export to PowerPoint.

Organisation charts

Organisation cultures are changing. Traditional hierarchies becomes less important, and project teams often become the engine of doing things. Also outsiders such as freelancers do not fit in nicely in big structures. At my time in McKinsey in the 1990s, we could have full meetings about whether a line should be dotted or not, and who would have to be drawn slightly higher than someone else on a page. Mistakes here were especially painful in a presentation to the management team.

Organisation chars in presentation are tricky for two reasons: it is hard to get all the boxes right on the page from a technical point of view, and it is hard to make everyone happy that the hierarchy and lines of the boxes reflect reality.

At the request of a user I have added a few more organisation charts to the SlideMagic slide template database. Complex organisation diagrams are not SlideMagic territory (if they are. hard to draw, the audience must also find them hard to understand). Instead, I created a few simple templates that can lay out the structure of an organisation in simple way, cutting the amount of lines, and increasing the size of text boxes.

If you present your chart as a a rough summary of the organisation rather than an exact reflection of hierarchy, you might just get away with it. If you pretend to be precise, people will nitpick..

The “connector” element in SlideMagic is still the weakest drawing tool and I am thinking about a new diagramming user interface now that my front end HTML design skills have improved significantly over the past year. As usual, the problem is not technical. Also in PowerPoint with its more sophisticated diagramming interface, it is hard to get connecting. lines to do what you want. They always angle and bend in a different way than you want them to.

The SlideMagic grid structure comes in really handy when changing screen aspect ratios, or adding/deleting columns in your organisation chart. Everyone lines up instantly. In PowerPoint rebalancing an org chart is major surgery.

In the mean time, feel free to reach out and/or email sketches of organisation diagrams you think cannot be generated from the current template database, and I will do my best to add them to the collection.

Pretty template, ugly slide

Most corporate presentation templates are designed starting from an empty slide. The designer feels the urge to spice things up a bit with logos and other graphical elements. Now when you actually use that template (designed for a blank page) with everyday presentation content, things start to clash.

The same things must have happened to the designers at BMW, who forgot the license plate that would be plastered over the front of their new car design….

The next time you brief a designer for a new PowerPoint template, give her a full slide deck including content, let her create a design you like, then strip out all the elements and see what you are left with.

<!— Sponsored content: with SlideMagic, there is no need to worry about a presentation template that fits your corporate branding —!>

All the way back to 2008

Now and then I dive back into the 12 year archive of my blog and see some or the early slide layouts I made. This Google image search pops up many of them.

While many of these layouts are now still available as templates in SlideMagic, some of them, especially the early ones are a bit different:

• “Slides that stick” orange and brown

• Lots of hand written fonts

• Unusual visual analogies

• Most of them are definitely not for the layman designer…

Yes, I made have been a bit more “daring” back then (and remember, most of these designs actually were taken from actual client work), but I still think that I am on the right track with my current sober, simple, easy-to-make layouts. Less artistic, but far less time wasted by smart people that can use their energy to do more useful things that creating presentation slides.

COVID-19 exit strategy in slides

Uri Alon and other researchers at the Weizman Institute just south of Tel Aviv here in Israel have been working on an innovative idea for a COVID-19 exit strategy: intermittent working: let people work 4 days, and go into isolation for 10 days. Even if someone gets infected on day 1 of the work shift, the person will only become infectious during the isolation time, after which symptoms will appear. In that way, the economy can get going, while the infection rate of the virus will come down.

I think the idea is great, but I cannot see it adopted at a country level by politicians. For a specific sector (education?), or a specific company (a retailer with lots of client-facing staff), it could get adopted. Another (maybe even likely) application is to combat a likely second wave of the virus towards the winter. Rather than slamming the full brakes on the economy, go for the intermittent approach.

Communication of this idea is hard though. The researchers started with their scientific paper. Lots of graphs and analysis that shows the statistical impact of their research, including all kind of variables such as the percentage of people that actually stick to the rules. Next up is a video that explains the concept in a much more intuitive way.

I am constantly looking for new charts to the SlideMagic template database, and made a few simple charts that communicate this idea. All of this is done in the spirit of SlideMagic: very simple charts that are really quick to put together. Nothing fancy, but looking decent and doing the job of getting your message across.

Subscribers can download the slides here in .magic and .pptx format. For a limited period of time, every user of the desktop app can access the full slide library there. When adding new slides, search for “COVID-19” in the app, and they will pop up for you to use.

Presenting sensitivities

I added a few more slides to the database today, one of them was this one: a template to present a sensitivity analysis.

Why this particular layout?

• It is nicely spaced out, a calm composition for so much data

• Numbers are disconnected from the spreadsheet: rounded up, entered by hand

• Colours, bold, are used to direct the eye to what is important, and what is secondary

Some thoughts about how and when to present this type of analysis:

• Presenting sensitivities and not the same as analysing them. The latter is the homework that you should have been doing before the presentation. Figure to what factors your model is sensitive, decided whether that is how it should be, then gather more information where needed to increase your confidence in variables that can make a big difference. What is left to discuss are sensitivities after you did everything to minimise and/or understand them.

• The ranges of the variables you show should be realistic. This is not an exercise in mathematics, but an attempt to really understand what drives the future.

• Pick dimensions that are not correlated, if the risks on the x and y axes are the same, you are not adding much insight.

• Try flipping the analysis upside down, instead of showing deviations from the base case, show “what you would have to believe” in order to get to a certain number.

• Be careful when sharing this type of data if you are in some negotiation about valuation. If the other side understand your model, they can basically salami slice the valuation using your own excel. You need to understand the sensitivities, but sharing them directly might not be smart.

The slide layout is available inside the SlideMagic app, or here on the web site.

I got the vanishing point wrong all the time...

They key concept in drawing in perspective is the vanishing point: every line in your slide should disappear in it (see an earlier blog post). It turns out I got the concept slightly wrong all the time. Because of the curve in the Earth’s surface, the real vanishing point for someone standing at sea level is actually below the horizon. A vanishing point that sits on the horizon, would require the radius of the Earth to be 64x as large. (For comparison, the Sun as a radius about 109x that of Earth.

Vanishing point at a planet with a radius 64x that of Earth

The accurate vanishing point

With this new knowledge, will I change my approach to slide design? Not sure.

Based on an article in NRC Handelsblad. Simulation images by Siebren van der Werf.

Picking the 2x2 axes

Two by two matrices are a popular tool rank options. Watch out when to use them though:

1. Do you actually have 4 distinct options that can be grouped according to 2 axes? Many situations have only 3 options, where the 4th option that is suggested by your framework is actually not meaningful in reality.

2. If you pass the first test, make sure you set the axes right: the most favourable scenario in the top right, the least attractive options in the bottom left, the other two the “can’t have the best of both world” scenarios.

Below is an example of a 2x2 used in an article about software lock-in I stumbled across. Flipping the axes makes the diagram a lot clearer.

The original diagram

I quickly created reworked the axes in a SlideMagic 2.0 diagram below:

Adjusting frameworks

The world of management theory is full of frameworks designed by MBA professors and/or management consulting firms. Many view in the same of was the laws of physics: this is how you go about solving a particular problem.

That is giving them too much credit. Dogmatically forcing a certain problem/solution into a framework will not work: if it does not fit, it does not fit. Every situation, every problem is different. Here is an example of someone adjusting the famous SWOT framework. Here is my own attempt at modifying a SWOT 2x2.

While frameworks can be helpful start thinking about a problem and planning the work that lays ahead of you, they are often not that good as layouts in presentations that communicate your final recommendations. Frameworks are complicated diagrams, and try to be exhaustive and list everything that is relevant for a problem on the page. For your final slide, that might not be what is needed to explain your findings. Frameworks can be useful to solve a problem, but might not be ideal for communicating the findings.

Visualising quantum mechanics

That is an ambitious title to start my first blog post after my return from a summer holiday in Asia!

Through a series of coincidences I ended up reading through a number of popular science books about quantum mechanics. I remember getting all carried away in the briefing session of a presentation design project for a startup in the field of quantum computing. My academic knowledge of this field was basically high school chemistry, so I added this topic to the list of things that needed a refresh. A holiday was the perfect occasion. I am sure I was the only one at the side of the pool dusting of theoretical physics knowledge.

From a presentation perspective, the fascinating problem that quantum mechanics struggles with a the lack of either a visual or verbal language to describe concepts. The mathematics is water tight and has proven to be really useful (lasers, semiconductors, LEDs, etc. etc.). But when you try to take a step back and want to understand what it actually all means in the context of your daily routines, things get confusing.

It is all the result of some form of Anamorphosis, projections of phenomena that get scrambled when angles or dimensions no longer line up. Every scientist is looking for that ultimate simple underlying concept that can explain/visualise/link quantum on a small scale to the more traditional physics that we see everywhere around us at a human scale.

In case you are interested, here are 2 books on the subject: Beyond Weird, and What is Real?.

Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash

Heat maps in presentations

Harvard Business Review is bombarding (spamming?) my Instagram feed with this ad almost every day (Google shows that the chart was first created somewhere in 2016):

It is a very busy chart, so not to be used in your next TED Talk, but for close-up reading these heat maps are actually pretty good. This is a pretty decent summary of what much have been a huge scoring spreadsheet.

• Only a few colours (suspiciously similar to the SlideMagic look…)

• Careful attention is paid to sorting and grouping rows and columns

Some more improvements are possible:

• There is too much text in the descriptions of the boxes: we know that we are talking about sectors, no need to remind us, and there is too much lingo in there (“digitally engaging”).

• Column headings can be shortened, especially that long word “digital” can be lost here and there

• I would move the “assets, usage, and labor” headings (nice short ones) to the top to make the link with the column headings clearer.

This boxy chart will be a good challenge for my code of SlideMagic 2.0, I am going to try it.

Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash

Flying through

With a bit of Photoshop editing you can create an effect of a PowerPoint shape flying through some loop. I uploaded a new slide to the template store that uses this effect. Over the arrow, I positioned a second layer of the image, but just with a piece of rope with its background isolated. The arrow expanding outside the frame of the image (yes, I look those), adds to the motion feel in the slide.

View fullsize

Click the image to find the slide on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

---

Cover image by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

Sensitivity analysis in PowerPoint

Today, I am adding a simple table to the store to show the sensitivity of an analysis. Each cell in the table shows an outcome of an analysis with a slight variation on 2 critical input variables. I used this type of a slide a lot in discounted cash flow valuation models, where assumptions about discount rates and assumed perpetual growth could make a significant impact on the outcome of your analysis.

The base case scenario is put very prominently in the centre of the table, it is the anchor for the viewer from which to start studying the other scenarios. I prefer making these type of charts manually, and not via a blanket copy-paste out of an Excel sheet. In that way, you have to think about whether each cell in the table is meaningful, and you can make sure that the data is formatted and rounded in the best way.

You can download this sensitivity analysis from the store, subscribers can do so free of charge.

---

Cover image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash