Sticky story lines

It is difficult to communicate a complicated message to a large audience, and once something sticks, it is hard to change it. Like trying to change the direction of a fully loaded oil tanker at speed. The COVID pandemic gives some good examples:

• From no human to human transmission, to, yes there is

• From just wash your hands, to the disease is airborne

• From natural immunity works to only zero COVID works to only vaccine immunity works

• From where masks everywhere, to masks are only useful in places without ventilation

• From we are flattening the curve, to we are protecting you, to we are protecting the elderly

• From masks protect you to masks protect others

• From kids don’t get very sick to kids are the driver of infections in the overall population (including vulnerable people)

• From the new variant is really dangerous, let’s ban all flights, to it is actually less dangerous

• From boosters are not needed to boosters are essential

• From we need green passes to stop infection, to vaccinations don’t really stop infection, no green passes needed

Personally, I love to dive into statistics and read the most recent research and am perfectly fine with changing my mental model about the disease instantly. But the vast majority of people are not.

The public is confused and frustrated:

• Governments are incredibly slow to pick up new information and don’t spread their net wide enough, by ingesting information of countries that are further along the curve. Well-informed citizens see that the government is “wrong”. Once you lose credibility it is very hard to regain it.

• Policy ‘borders’ (national, state, city) are useless in pandemics. People move frequently in and out of different areas, and are confronted by different policies everywhere. (EU countries, US states).

The result is that people follow the rules (or try to avoid them) because they have to, not because they believe in their objectives. (Ooh, there are sharks in the water, luckily the swimming ban goes into effect only tomorrow, time for a final dip).

And the current polarised political environment tends to make stereotypes of people. If you agree with a political view of an opinion leader, then you are probably also taking her view on masks as the right one. And once you have identified yourself with one of the stereotypes, it is very hard to change your view on specific aspect, without losing your sense of identity.

I have no clear solution here. The only thing governments can do I think is admit being wrong and have a consistent message that is up to date.

Follow the chart

For the analysts who are in the trenches crunching the numbers behind slides (often after 18:00).

Presentations of financial data often evolve. You start with a relatively naive model, create some slides and iterate the numbers. Slowly, your team starts understanding what actually matters and discovers with drivers to focus on.

Instead of the exact numbers in your spreadsheet, your manager asks you to group this, that, and that into one number, quickly offline. Then another scenario, put that number in, quickly off line. Then another one.

In each round, you re-run your model, take out a calculator, scribble the summarized numbers, and update your slides. This takes a lot of time and is prone to errors.

Instead, build a quick layer on top of your ‘old’ model that spits out the required numbers quickly. In fact, make it a habit that every number in your presentation is pulled directly out of a cell in a spreadsheet.

My financial models would usually have these layers:

1. Data dump: straight copy-paste of raw input data, or data entered straight from a financial report without thinking, make sure the total is correct at the bottom. You get a new set of data: simply overwrite the entire worksheet, or add a column.

2. Model engine, this one does the hard lifting and runs your analysis

3. Bridge: this worksheet pulls numbers out of the engine and produces the required numbers for the charts (relevant to the scenario I described above)

4. (Optional) Slides. A small box that matches exactly every page in your presentation, with the exact numbers that appear in each slide. Useful if you need to run periodical updates of your presentation (weekly, monthly, quarterly results for example).

'Ponder' charts in the age of Zoom

Most presentation experts (me included) describe the ideal slide layout as something similar to what Steve Jobs used to use in his big product announcements. Super minimal.

This type of slide works in auditorium or conference room settings. People sit relatively far from the screen, and the slide is competing for attention with the physical speaker (gestures, eye contact). Glance at chart, understand it in 5 seconds, focus back on speaker. The speaker and the slide are probably about the same size for someone sitting in the back of a conference room.

In a video call , the setting is a bit different. The slide is “in your face” on the screen, and the presenter is usually a small “talking head” in the corner of the screen (if present at all). Maybe the slide can carry a bit more information than the words “1.5 billion installs”.

I am not arguing to bring back the dense bullet points. The audience can read them faster than you can present both in a live setting and in a video call. But a Zoom call does open the way for slides that carry more information. Breakdowns of financial data, matrices with competitors plot in them, pros and cons tables.

Consider building them up in multiple slides to slowly add detail to support your story.

Image credit

Vintage presentation software

At McKinsey in the 1990s, we used ‘Solo’ presentation software to make slides. It was far ahead of its time (before PowerPoint became the standard). It had a very advanced template engine that enabled you to recreate charts in the McKinsey style. The software required some skill, and charts were usually created by professional graphics designers who took hand-drawn charts as an input. Back then, Solo would run on Macs only. Which was the reason that McKinsey issued Macbooks to their staff at the end of the 1990s, so that consultants could edit (and create) their own slides if they had to.

Ultimately PowerPoint was the end of Solo. Not because of its capabilities, but because McKinsey’s clients would have this installed on their machines, and these clients wanted to edit slides themselves. And with the advent of PowerPoint, the slide format became less consistent in McKinsey. (Both the result of a less sophisticated template library, and the reduced influence of professional graphics designers to create the slides).

I checked this morning, and Solo is still around, here is the web site: https://www.axoninc.com/. Support has ended in 2020 though. I tried installing the demo on Mac, but failed. The PowerPC engine no longer works. It does work on Windows 10 though, but I had to click a button 587 times because the license of the trial version expired 587 days ago (on 7 February 2022). Those clicks were rewarded with some good memories though, I have added some screen shots.

Vintage ad

This vintage ad explaining the benefits of aerodynamics is making the rounds online. It is promoting cars by Czech manufacturer Tatra, which at that time, looked dramatically different than other vehicles.

Tatra could have been a very different car manufacturer today if the communist government did not force it to switch to building trucks…

A great resource for vintage advertising is the Vintage Ad Browser, careful with copyright though.

The anchorman in the days of Zoom

Up until the early 2000s, TV programs in The Netherlands would be announced by an ‘anchorman’, often a woman (Dutch people can refresh their memory here).

I was reminded of them by watching a number of high schools pitching themselves to my son via Zoom. Some schools had a fully prepared introduction video, linked by a pre-recorded ‘anchorman’. Others had a live anchorman that connected the various videos together.

The latter approach worked much better in my opinion, creating a stronger bond with the audience. But you got to rehearse that switching between anchorman, slide show, and video stream though. In the 1980s, this was the job of the TV control room…

De-cluttering axes

In scientific documents, there are chart making conventions that make sense, clearly labelled axes, titles, etc. etc. Use these charts in your article that you submit for publication in a prestigious paper. For an on-screen slide show however, you could deviate from this standard. Your objective is to communicate the findings as best as possible, referring to the paper for the details.

See the example below (source), lots of duplication in axis labels.

You can make the page a lot calmer be omitting some of these labels. I quickly cut and paste the elements in the image below. (This is not a makeover, just a super rough reshuffle to show you what I meant).

What, how, why?

I saw these headings of a well-known story line structure being put up literally on a website in a big font size. What? Paragraph of text, how?, paragraph of text, why?, paragraph of text.

I like to use these frameworks in a more indirect way. Use them as guidelines to set up your story. Use them as a checklist to see that you covered everything, use them as a starting point if you are stuck in writer’s block, and most importantly, if they don’t work for your specific situation, pick another one or use your own.

The same applies to visual frameworks (SWOT, etc. etc.). They are designed to help you get started with grouping ideas, but if you find yourself forcing things in boxes that do not really fit, pick another one.

Statistics: vaccine effectiveness might seem higher than it is

I love digging into COVID-related statistics. Recently, this paper was published that shows how vaccine effectiveness in local communities can be a lot lower than at the national level. Seems counter intuitive, but this chart explains the math.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, so you could use it in your own presentations as well.

Public corona data dashboards

BI (“Business Intelligence”) dashboards with data used to be a corporate thing. Firms such as my previous employer McKinsey would advice clients what metrics to put on them, and how to display them. This is tricky, there is an infinite amount of data to choose from, and even more options to slide and dice the figures.

The COVID outbreak has created many country-wide public dashboard with data. In Israel where I am based, a large tribe of “amateur” statisticians has emerged that runs and discusses analyses on Twitter. The other dashboard I had a look at is the Dutch one (part of my family still lives there).

• Dutch board

• Israeli board (use the translate option that is offered by the Google Chrome browser)

The approaches are different, and I prefer the Israeli one.

• The Dutch board looks very pretty, has lots of explanations in text, and has useful maps of regions with color coding. The problem is that it stretches out over many, many, pages, and priotises static data over time series.

• The Israeli one is just one page, with lots of time series graphs, so you can see things develop over time. And not for basic statistics such as overall cases, benchmarks can get very specific. Benchmarks are normalised so you compare apples with apples (i.e., cases / 100,000 by vaccination status). Also, government policy and benchmarks are tightly integrated. The government wants to encourage parents to vaccinate children, so there are statistics specifically aimed at that target segment. Another example: after discussions whether to close the airport or not, stats about airport tests were published (split by country, so citizens can make the call to travel somewhere or not based on their personal risk appetite).

The biggest advantage of the all-on-one-page approach is that people start to understand it, and come back to it very often to get the latest data, even venting anger when it is not updated on a day.

Data visualisation to involve the public in decision making and/or influence day to day behavior.

——-

PS. Israel does a PCR test for every single arrival at its airport, so the arrival statistics on the Israeli dashboard are probably one of the best global indicators of what is going on in a particular country.

Back into AI and machine learning

I looked briefly at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for SlideMagic a couple of years ago, but never really pursued specific ideas. Recently, I revisited things and was surprised by the amount of progress that has been made. Not so much the actual technology itself, but more how accessible it is for anyone to use.

“AI” and “ML” are big buzz words at the moment and many of you are probably be wondering what it could mean for the industry you are working in. You read some blogs, books, watch some videos, but don’t really get it.

I would recommend to actively dive in and follow an online video course. The actual coding knowledge required is now very minimal, it is all about learning how to select and apply models. Sometimes, all the “AI” you need is basic statistics and regression. Sometimes, highly advanced image recognition software has already been cracked and can be used and accessed with a few lines of code.

Such a course is great fun, helps you understand what these technologies could really mean for your business, cuts through the buzzwords and makes you a better manager in case you are hiring people or service providers to build things for you.

To stack or not to stack?

Two charts about a new sub-Omikron (BA.2) variant in Denmark. This line graph shows 3 variants as a % of all sequenced samples in Denmark.

Source: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1485456877723045891

The chart below shows the total number of variants found in the samples. The stack approach does a much better job to give the full picture of what is actually going on,.

Source: https://www.covid19genomics.dk/statistics

With just one data series, showing a share of the total as a stack or line (column) is the same chart. As soon as you have more than one, pick a stack chart so the audience can see the data in context.

Opportunity for freelance presentation designers?

Many of you readers are independent presentation designers. Having done a large number of online courses now, I think these udemy, coursera, etc. instructors could be great potential clients for you. Most of them talk through a set of poorly designed bullet point slides with a picture in picture video super imposed on them.

• These slides can obviously be improved, by a lot

• The narration and creative brief is there for you: the instructor gives verbal instructions as audio and often in a transcript

• These presentations can have a huge audience, and the overall visual quality can make a big difference in their marketing strategy: if the free sample lessons look really good, students will convert and buy the course

• As a presentation designer, you can specialize in a certain field: you start a self reinforcing loop: you understand the subject area better, you do better work, you can attract more work in that same speciality area as a result.

I myself don’t have the time to all this design work, therefore I leave it up to you :-)

A smart online instructor can do 2 things:

1. Outsource design work to a great freelance presentation designer

2. Do the slides herself, but in SlideMagic

Template: binary confusion matrix

I am dusting off my knowledge about machine learning and data science, and stumbled upon this handy definition of false positives, false negatives, and a bunch of definitions (I always find it hard to keep them apart). I turned them into a slide template that is not part of the SlideMagic library for you to use in your own presentations.

(I use this course if you are interested)

Backgrounds

Some of the best images you can use in a presentation are those with lots and lots of white space. Photographers tend to crop images to make their subject stand out. Great for the image, but often less ideal for the layout of your slide.

Instead of searching for functional or descriptive words such as “car” or “bucket”, search for “background” or “wallpaper” in SlideMagic and something unexpectedly useful might show up.

These examples are pretty straightforward to recreate in SlideMagic, with your own background images and text. Still, I added them to the library so you can use the min your slide designs

Extreme wide angle effects

Online, I currently get bombarded with “ads” that contain city landscapes for some reason. What they have in common are unusual perspectives: the pictures draw your attention. (At least mine).

What is going on? You are seeing familiar compositions and/or places you recognize, but the camera angle seems different. Most shots use an extreme wide lens effect, might have been taken by a drone rather than from a standing position on a building, add a very strong zoom, only using a very small crop of the center of the original image and put an object in the front (either photoshopped or real).

All interesting techniques to learn from, I think soon we will see these types of images more on open source image collection sites, so you can use them in your presentations as well.

I discussed this effect earlier in this post about the “Corona crop”, with extreme zooming, you can make almost any public space looked packed with people.

The... ...prof... ...writes... ...the... ....point...

Academics and other teachers like to write out their points in full sentences on black boards, so that students can copy them in their notebooks. This could actually be useful, the slowly spoken sentence, combined with the hand writing, gets burnt in memory easier. Also, that sentence becomes a sort of mental placeholder on the big collection of black boards. To refer back to it, you can simply circle the sentence, and the text itself reminds the audience what is meant, but more importantly, it is that “geographic location” of memories around that sentence that creates the right context.

As I ‘sat' through’ a 1.5 hour video on encryption technology of an academic lecture last week, the teacher took it to the extreme though: not making his big point before starting to write it down…. “That… makes… it….”, what will it be “possible” or “impossible”?

I would pop the suspense, before writing things down…

Bar versus column chart

The chart below could have been made a lot better using a bar chart. You can avoid the many legend labels, which have a 1-to-1 relationship to the columns

Image source

John Mayer's marketing video

Guitarist John Mayer starred in the launch video for a more affordable version of his signature guitar for PRS Guitars. Some interesting presentation lessons in here.

• It worked, the video gets even linked to on a presentation blog

• A naked and vulnerable pitch. A bare bone background, just him and the instrument, putting his entire reputation at stake by recommending this guitar. “Skin in the game”. Different from celebrities wearing a watch, driving a car, or holding an espresso cup.

• A very nice use of the “best of both worlds” storyline. Up until now you had to choose between A or B, but as of today, you can have both.

• Very clever addressing of target audiences. Hard core guitar players that admire John for his skill, and die hard fans that admire John for his songs are included implicitly. But parents buying guitars for their kids (and maybe secretly for themselves) are addressed directly with a clear excuse to go and get one.

A great sales pitch

Understanding something tricky...

For another project, I had to get a better understanding of the blockchain and various encryption algorithms. This summary helped me a lot, how it is possible that a total “stranger” can verify the validity of a digital signature without sharing confidential information.

Still this explanation suffered from an issue with almost all explainers and technical presentations: certain critical steps that are blatantly obvious to the expert, but very hard to get for the novice get skipped over. The big online YouTube stars in education are masters in getting it right: anticipating what an audience is likely to struggle with.

Anyway, in the process, I added a chart to the SlideMagic library with the very basics of encryption:

Search for “encryption” in SlideMagic and it will show up as a slide template.