Planning the Rest of Your Slides (Using Microsoft PowerPoint) Part 4

An Intellectual Machete

Just as much as you need to identify what you want to include in a presentation, the hierarchy in Act II is equally important for the potential slides it leaves out of a presentation. The built-in hierarchy of Act II guides you through a sometimes difficult but disciplined critical-thinking process that forces you to decide what to include in a presentation and what to leave out. The process of completing Act II acts like an intellectual machete that chops away unneeded data so that clarity shines through.

You will find that there is a great deal of information that did not make it into your presentation. If you’re missing something important, go back and include it in your headlines. What does not make it into the hierarchy, such as detailed quantitative analysis, can be captured and documented and can then be handed out before, during, or after the presentation.

When you have written the rest of your Act II headlines, you have made sure that you have fleshed out the rest of the slides of your presentation. Now every slide in your presentation will be prioritized in your slide hierarchy, as shown in Figure 5-23.

You determine the rest of your slide hierarchy when you flesh out the rest of your slides in Act II, and in the process you have prioritized every slide.


FIGURE 5-23 You determine the rest of your slide hierarchy when you flesh out the rest of your slides in Act II, and in the process you have prioritized every slide.

Don’t worry about Act III of your story template at this point.

BBP CHECKLIST: PLANNING THE REST OF YOUR SLIDES

Do the rest of your headlines in Act II accomplish the following:

■    Justify your Call to Action headline with your key points?

■    Clarify your Key Point headlines with further explanation?

■    Back up your Explanation headlines with the appropriate detail?

■    Put your ideas in a logical sequence and priority?

■    Integrate your motif verbally through your headlines?

Pulling Through What’s Most Important First

Now that you’ve completed the story template, you have accomplished what you set out to do at the start of the topic—that is, prioritizing your ideas and finding the right sequence in which to present them. The three columns of Act II established the priority of your ideas from Key Point headlines at the top of the informational hierarchy, to Explanation headlines in the middle, to Detail headlines at the bottom. The process of creating Act II helps you write out information in complete thoughts, rather than lists and fragments that the audience has to sort through. Now there is a clear flow that connects each idea to the next in a logical way.

In your storyboard, you will cue the audience to the levels of the hierarchy with the slide layouts and backgrounds as you present each idea in the sequence you wrote them. This is an important innovation of the BBP approach that has both prioritized your ideas with a hierarchy and prepared them for a logical sequence in your storyboard.

The hierarchy provides both a priority for your slides and a proper sequence in which to show them.

FIGURE 5-24 The hierarchy provides both a priority for your slides and a proper sequence in which to show them.

As described earlier, writing your slide headlines using the Act II columns has now given your presentation an important scalability that will play out when you work in PowerPoint. When you create a presentation with three columns, you are prioritizing your ideas in order of importance, from left to right. If you have a 45-minute presentation, you’ll present all your slides in Act II. If your time is unexpectedly cut to 15 minutes, you’ll skip the Detail slides, and if your time is cut to 5 minutes, you’ll also skip the Explanation slides. Because you have applied the power of a hierarchy to prioritize your ideas, you scale up or down to the level of information appropriate to the time you have, without sacrificing the integrity or the clarity of your thinking at any level.

But perhaps most important, what you’ve done in Act II reduces cognitive load by easing working memory into new information by presenting what is most significant first. Typical PowerPoint presentations show the details first, then the explanation of the details, and finally the key points—the recommendations or conclusions—at the end. Other presentations simply display lists of detail without any explanation or key points at all to provide context or a framework for understanding the detail. Either way, this approach tries to jam the wide bottom of the hierarchy through the eye of the needle, as shown in Figure 5-25. If you present all the details first, the working memory of your audience has to struggle to retain that information until it knows where your presentation is going.

When you present the details first, you quickly overwhelm working memory.

FIGURE 5-25 When you present the details first, you quickly overwhelm working memory.

With BBP, you always pull through the eye of the needle what’s most important first, as shown in Figure 5-26. That’s because Act II of your story template flips the typical outline around, presenting the most important information first and the supporting information after. By presenting the tip, and the top, of the hierarchy first, you reduce the cognitive load on your audience by focusing first on what’s essential and leaving out extraneous information that could overwhelm the eye of the needle.

Now, instead of the details and data driving the presentation, the proper management of the working memory of your audience is driving the presentation.

When you present the most important information first, you properly manage working memory and provide a framework for the rest of the explanation and details to come.

FIGURE 5-26 When you present the most important information first, you properly manage working memory and provide a framework for the rest of the explanation and details to come.

Lowering the Curtain on Your story Template

One benefit of your story template is that you now see all your ideas in one place and quickly grasp how each idea relates to the others. A printout of your story template at this point will guide you through an initial reading of your story to make sure that everything sounds right.

Review your story template before you print it. If it extends over multiple pages, you might need to split Act II into separate scenes that each fit on a page. To do this, position the cursor in any cell in a Key Point column, and on the Table Tools tab, click Layout; and then in the Merge group, click Split Table to split that row from the row above. If you change your mind, click the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar.

As this topic describes, the story template is the hard-working intellectual and structural engine that makes everything in your PowerPoint presentation work, or not. It is the battleground that determines whether your presentation is a success or failure. If you have an elegant infrastructure, the more time you spend on the presentation, the simpler it will get. If you don’t have a solid structure, the more time you spend on it, the more confusing it will get.

If you get the headlines right, they will clarify and expand understanding; but if you get them wrong, you will lead your audience in the wrong direction, in a fruitless, frustrating waste of time. That’s why it’s important to spend as much time as possible editing, tightening, and clarifying your words.

Just as you use your story template to see and manage all your headlines at a glance, other people can use it to review your story too. If you’re working with only a few people, display the story template on your computer screen and make edits together. If you’re working with a larger group and want to call a meeting to review your headlines, send a copy of the story template Word document through e-mail to all the members of the team in advance.

■ IMPORTANT Don’t move forward from this stage of the process until you finalize your story template and get agreement from everyone who has a stake in your presentation.

Get agreement on the story template from anyone who has a stake in the presentation. This includes the members of your team, people in other departments of your organization, and anyone who needs to give clearance and approval for what you’ll say.

Using your story template as a review document, make quick adjustments to your wording or structure and invite others to contribute their expertise and take ownership in the success of your presentation. Getting approval for your story template allows everyone to focus on your ideas instead of on design issues, which would prove distracting right now. When you get final approval of the structure and sequence of your story up front, you’ll reduce the likelihood that you’ll need to spend unnecessary time and effort later, after you’ve invested time in the design process.

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