Presentation Design: A Management Philosophy

It’s hard to stop Nancy Duarte once she gets started talking about design. And that’s exactly what happened when she met Jimmy Guterman, executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, at the most recent TED conference. It’s no surprise that Nancy views the world through a design lens, a skill which she has used to help world-renowned executives, politicians and thought leaders develop presentations, but it may surprise some to know that it is also her personal management philosophy. She sat down with Jimmy and shared her thoughts about how design thinking can be the one of the most powerful tools for effective management.

“Design is used to convey many ideas… but design is also crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way. This type of  ‘design thinking’–the adoption of a design methodology into an organization’s communications platform–can motivate employees to pull together in times of difficulty, turn supporters of a cause into evangelists or influence consumers to remain loyal to a brand even if there is a less costly option.”

“Creating clarity through context and meaning is at the heart of it,” says Nancy. Managers can spend a lot of time clarifying. Managers are often the bridge between stakeholders and their teams. This makes communication an essential tool for moving goals forward. “Often managers…rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning…leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.” Getting to the point quickly and aligning resources is more valuable and critical to the success of a company than ever before. Read more about Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds’ thoughts on How to Become A Better Manager By Thinking Like A Designer. (Note: sign up is required.)

Topic: Book Reviews, Business, Design, Event, Interview, Strategy
Tags: garr reynolds, management, MIT sloan, TED

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How Decker Made Me Different

Spending the day at Decker was delightful. Shortly after arriving, the transformation of my delivery techniques was well underway.

The meeting started at 9 a.m. in their San Francisco office. Their office is in a first-class building that is inspirational and professional. The path to their front door walks you through a zen-like garden with a large tiled circle. When you stand in the center of concentric tiles and talk, your voice is amplified (no idea how that worked).

Kelly greeted me right on time and we started off reviewing my goals for the day.

Even though I’m an “okay” presenter, it was easy to see right away some areas of development and the power that great delivery has in connecting with the audience and conveying ideas well. I’d never had an objective view of how I communicate and as Kelly recorded my delivery, she had great insights for me.

Great communication is more important than ever right now. It feeds the impression we leave about our transparency and authenticity (or worse, can do the opposite). She had a great quote by Bernard Baruch “The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself.”

Even though I might have been considered “good enough” by many, having someone walk through the weak spots in my delivery was extremely valuable. We worked on three key areas:

1. Eye contact
2. Posture
3. Gestures

Here’s the “before” video. I removed the audio from the clip so you can focus solely on my body language. I scan the audience and don’t look anyone in the eye, I’m swaying and leaning on one foot or the other, I keep my hands cupped in front of me and my legs crossed. I thought I came across as comfortable and casual in front of a crowd but in reality, I look uncomfortable and possibly even uncaring.

Now look at the transformation. In this video it looks like I’m talking to people instead of at them. My movements are more intentional, my stance is more grounded and my eyes aren’t darting around from side to side.

Kelly felt like I had good facial expression but she had to work on my eye contact for quite a while. She’d put photos of people with various expressions on the chairs and had me hold their eyes for 5 seconds. It was uncomfortable at first but the results are visible in the video clip.

She’d snap her fingers when it was time to move to another set of eyes to gaze into. Last Friday I spoke at the HOW Conference in Austin and received the most positive feedback I have had to date. People felt like I was speaking directly to them (and I was).

When Kelly saw enough improvement in my eye contact, we began to focus on posture and gestures. My son feels that I already talk too much with my hands, so for Kelly to instruct me to use even bigger gestures was counter-intuitive.

Below on the left we’re practicing at the Decker offices and the photo on the right has me utilizing big gestures by workin’ the How Conference crowd:

When I was done writing my presentation for HOW, I actually rehearsed the presentation and mapped out some moments that could use gestures in a dramatic way.

Once Kelly had my posture and gestures tidied up, I got to work in the infamous Decker Grid creating new content.

She walked me though brainstorming about the listeners, considering their point of view, the action steps I want them to take, and the benefits to them. I love the idea of using a folder and sticky notes to prepare  presentations in an analog environment before opening up your presentation application. We borrowed this idea and made our own version of a content development system. The difference between theirs and ours if that ours is focused on the creation of presentations, and theirs is a tool to be used for all communications including phone calls and 1:1’s. It works very well!

The coaching Kelly gave for handling a Q&A had a huge impact on me. She played the role of hostile Q&A girl and I had to make sure she didn’t lure me into her Q&A trap.

Man, she was good. She’d have a sweet unassuming face as she asked a question and then trapped me with an accusation. She also questioned my credibility and then cornered me to answer a huge string of questions. To break away from her caustic-ness, she helped me visually block her from my view, break away via body language, look another direction, throw my arm in the air and ask if there are any more questions. It worked WONDERS!

She also identified a pretty significant “filler word” I use that I’d never noticed before. She’d absconded a tape from my speaking engagement at FWE&E and queued it up to the Q&A session. For some reason I use the word “right?” as punctuation. It’s like I’m trying to get them to agree with me. It sounds horrible. In this clip alone I say “right?” six times in one minute. Now I can hear myself saying it and am working on eliminating it from my delivery.

We can go through our careers feeling “good enough”. But in reality, I kinda sucked. It took the insights and patience of the Decker program to break some of my repetitive patterns. My body can “feel” the movement I’m to make, I can see the audience more sincerely and I can hear verbal patterns that were unidentified before.

Kelly was kind enough to graduate me, probably because I rallied to be the teacher’s pet by taking her to having drinks! It was a lovely day with the lovely Kelly Decker, and I am forever changed because of it.

Topic: Delivery, Diary, Technology, Video
Tags: audio, communication, decker, development, kelly decker, training

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SlideShare Storytelling Winners Announced Today!

Today the winners were announced for SlideShare’s “Tell a Story” contest. The contest was sponsored by Fuze Meeting and the top winner won $5,000!

Drunkenomics won the $5,000 grand prize:

Our very own Alex Varanese won for best design:

Best story telling goes to Lubomir Panayotov:

Most popular went to Denise Caron:

Best use of multimedia went to Alan Brody:

Congratulations to all the participants!

Topic: Design, Event, Video
Tags: alex varanese, contest, Design, fuzemeeting, slideshare, storytelling, winner

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Memorable Presentations Go Beyond the Slides

Topic: Delivery, Strategy, Video
Tags: beyond the slides, memorable

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Judging Books by Their Covers

Ready for a quick design lesson?

Click on the picture to go to Joseph Sullivan’s list of Favorite Book Covers for 2008. (That one’s my favorite, by the way.)

Now, imagine you wrote a book this year. And your book just entered the market, along with the 172,000 other books published in the U.S. that year.¹

And it’s a FANTASTIC book: engaging characters, compelling story, a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter.

And all you have to do is get people to choose your book out of the veritable ocean of other books in the world. (Yeah, welcome to the long tail.)

When Mrs. Foster told you, way back in the First Grade, that you “shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, she wasn’t really talking about books. She was talking about people. Or vegetables. Or whatever. But definitely not about books.

Because everybody judges books by their covers. That’s how it works! How else would you sort through Amazon.com or the world’s endless bookshelves trying to find something to keep you occupied during the four hours between San Francisco and Cleveland? (Hi, Mom.)

Here’s the lesson: People see far too many presentations every year to judge them based on content alone. And this becomes more true the higher up the ladder you climb. So, like it or not, people are going to judge you by your cover. And that means everything visual about your presentation, from your slides themselves all the way down to your shoes. (Yes, they check out your shoes.)

It’s still not nice to judge people by their covers, and all vegetables deserve the benefit of the doubt, but if you imagine your audience judging you by your visuals, it might give you the motivation you need to make them worthy of the attention.

Good luck!

¹ 2006 numbers

Topic: Design
Tags: communication, Design, messaging, Visuals

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