THE HEADLINES you wrote for Act I will prepare the working memory of your audience for the crucial first few minutes of a presentation by orienting, interesting, engaging, motivating, and focusing them. Although you might have made quick work of planning these first five slides, things get much more challenging as you plan the rest of the slides in the body of your presentation.
And Now Presenting…Act II
Although you face difficult challenges and have hard choices to make when you create the body of your presentation, Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is up to the job of helping you complete Act II of your story template. As in Act I, completing the story template for Act II creates a solid foundation that will help you choose exactly what you will show and say as you present the working memory of your audience with new information. With this foundation in place, you’ll have endless creative options to make the crisp and clear underlying story even more powerful.
To begin, go to Act II of the BBP Story Template you’ve started to write, locate the Zoom toolbar in the lower right of the screen, and click and drag the Zoom toolbar so that Act II fills the screen, as shown in Figure 5-1.
FIGURE 5-1 The cells where you will write the remaining headlines in Act II of the story template.
The specific words you write in these cells in Act II of the story template become the headlines of the rest of the slides of your PowerPoint presentation. But whereas the Act I headlines help you plan only five slides, your Act II headlines will help you plan most of the rest of the slides in the body of your presentation.
A special type of outline
Act II in the story template contains three columns, labeled Key Point, Explanation, and Detail, as shown in Figure 5-2. In the Key Point column, you give the top three reasons your audience should accept your Call to Action headline. The Explanation column contains an additional level of information about the Key Point column headlines, and the Detail column contains the next level of information about the Explanation column headlines.
FIGURE 5-2 The three column headings: Key Point, Explanation, and Detail.
One way to understand how Act II works is to see it as a sentence outline you might use to write a paper. In a sentence outline, beginning from a single thesis statement, you write out your topic sentences, explanations, and details and organize them by using numbers and letters along with indentation. For example, you write out your first topic sentence and then number it 1. You then indent and number as 1.a. the first explanation that follows the topic sentence, and then indent and number as l.a.i., l.a.ii., and l.a.iii. the details that follow the explanation, as shown here:
1. Topic sentence (Key Point)
a. Explanation
i. Detail
ii. Detail
iii. Detail
b. Explanation
You continue numbering and indenting your sentences in this fashion as you write the rest of the outline.
When you write your presentation outline using your story template, instead of indenting and numbering your headlines, you write them in the corresponding columns of Act II, which are colored according to the levels of indentation. For example, when you view Act II as a sentence outline, as shown in Figure 5-3, your thesis statement corresponds to the dark gray Call To Action cell in Act I (top). Your topic sentences in the first numbered level of your outline correspond to the medium gray Key Point column in Act II (left). The next level of indentation corresponds to the light gray Explanation column (middle), and the next level of indentation corresponds to the white Detail column (right).
Other Act II Options
Write Act II in a blank Microsoft Word document using a traditional sentence outline if that works better for you.Some BBP practitioners use tools other than Word to write their story templates, including Microsoft Excel, mind-mapping software, and even Post-it notes—visit www.beyondbulletpoints.com to learn more.
FIGURE 5-3 The relationship between the three columns of Act II is similar to the indented levels of headings in a sentence outline.
Built-in scalability
You’ll notice that the column headings in this story template also include time estimates: the Key Point column heading includes the phrase 5 minutes, the Explanation column heading includes the phrase 15 minutes, and the Detail column heading includes the phrase 45 minutes. These time estimates indicate that for any presentation, you choose to complete the columns that correspond to the level of information and length of presentation you want.
The entire story template, including Act I and all three columns in Act II, contains 44 cells, each of which contains a single headline. If you spend an average of one minute per headline, you have enough material for a 45-minute presentation. If you skip the Detail column, you end up with a total of 17 headlines in your story template; if you spend an average of 50 seconds on each, you have enough material for a 15-minute presentation. If you skip the Explanation and Detail columns, you have 8 headlines; if you spend an average of 40 seconds on each, you have a 5-minute presentation.
In this topic, every cell in the example will eventually contain a headline so that you see how the entire process works.
The headings in Act II of the story template describe the most common division of levels of information in a presentation. If you want to adapt the headings to align more closely with your profession, see "Tip 3: Tailor Your Act II Column Headings to Your Profession" later in this topic—it might be worth taking a quick look at these now to keep them in mind as you learn how to use Act II of the story template.
Threading the Eye of the Needle Using a Hierarchy
Act II might look bland and unassuming with its various rows and cells in a Word document, and the idea that it is a form of a traditional sentence outline does not make it seem exceptional. But appearances are deceiving—it is, in fact, a powerful critical-thinking tool that has helped many people in a range of professions to break through intellectual clutter and find a compelling story structure beneath mountains of data, charts, and bullet points. Built into the arrangement of these simple cells is a process that wields tremendous intellectual power to help you get right to the point.
When you use indentations in a sentence outline as described earlier, you are applying a hierarchy to your ideas by consciously specifying some ideas (your topic sentences) as more important than other ideas (your explanation), which are in turn more important than other ideas (your details). The relationships between levels of ideas in a hierarchy become clear in a logic tree, also called a tree diagram—a concept that dates back at least 1700 years. The basic look of the logic tree diagram is recognizable today in the form of an organizational chart. When the logic tree that is built in to Act II of the story template is placed on its side, a triangle drawn around the logic tree shows its shape, as in Figure 5-4. This triangle shape is the powerful tool you will use to distill your ideas to their essence, prioritize them, and arrange them in the sequence in which you will present them in the form of slides to the working memory of your audience.
The concept of a hierarchy illustrated by the triangle in Act II might not be popular these days, with trends moving more toward free-flowing, organic, free-association relationships among people and ideas. But you absolutely need an idea hierarchy to help you decide which of your slides are more important than others. You cannot present the working memory of your audience with an unprioritized and unstructured sequence of slides, because you will quickly overwhelm it. A hierarchy breaks up a complex body of information into smaller pieces that are easier for working memory to handle and then prioritizes those pieces and places them in a particular sequence.
FIGURE 5-4 Act II of the story template is built on the powerful foundation of a hierarchy.
A hierarchy is the natural way people routinely go through a reasoning process—if you are completely new to a topic, you might start with a large amount of unstructured information (bottom of a hierarchy) when you first assemble the many details of the information you want to present. You then apply your reasoning process to sort the information into smaller groups to explain what it means (middle of the hierarchy). Last you develop the key points or conclusion about what you analyzed (top of the hierarchy). You sometimes approach a reasoning process the other way around, as you’ll do when you complete Act II in this topic—if you’ve already completed the reasoning process by the time you’re ready to prepare a presentation, you begin with the key points you want to make, follow those with your explanation, and then follow your explanation with the details. Either approach to Act II is perfectly valid.
Tip
An easy way to remember the essence of Act II is to imagine the audience saying to you as you decide what to keep in your presentation, "1-2-3, show me only what I need to see."
With the hierarchy concept firmly established as the foundation of Act II, it’s time to make things practical and apply the hierarchy to the specific slides in the example presentation.
The Power of a Pyramid
The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, and Problem Solving (Minto International, 1996). The topic is a sophisticated, thorough, and comprehensive application of a logic tree technique that Minto developed more than 30 years ago to teach management consultants to write business documents more effectively, and she now teaches her approach as an independent consultant to senior executives around the world.
Prioritizing Your Slides
To recap your story so far: Your Act I headlines define the Setting, Role, Point A, Point B, and Call to Action slides. You make your audience’s problem clear with the gap between the challenge they face in the Point A headline and where they want to be in the Point B headline. The gap between these headlines forms the dramatic tension for the entire presentation, causing your audience to now pay close attention to find out how they can solve this problem. With this gap wide open, you focus the entire presentation with the Call to Action headline. This makes the headline of the Call to Action slide the top of the triangle, as shown in Figure 5-5, and Act II is the rest of the triangle that will pull your slides through the eye of the needle of your audience’s working memory based on a sensible sequence and priority.
FIGURE 5-5 The tip of the hierarchy is the headline of the Call to Action slide from Act I.
In the example presentation, your proposed Call to Action headline is to "Change your way of thinking to get breakthrough results," as shown in Figure 5-6.
FIGURE 5-6 The Call to Action cell from Act I with the headline completed.
Now that your audience knows your recommended Call to Action headline, they’re eager to hear why and how it is a good idea, which is what you’ll justify next. Focusing exclusively on explaining your Call to Action headline in Act II gives you the criteria you need to reduce the amount of information in your presentation. You’ll include only information that supports your reasons for recommending the Call to Action headline and exclude everything else.
As you work on Act II, refer to the completed story templates available at www.beyondbulletpoints.com. These templates include a range of Act II examples from different types of presentations.
