Nicholas B. Oulton
howtobooks, 2007.
ISBN 1845281845
Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
I approached this book with some trepidation. Was this going to be a hideous and flashy tome full of over-excited hype? Happily it is not.
Oulton, the "professor of presentology" (as he says his American clients call him) is absolutely opposed to bombarding people with graphics, or words for that matter.
A core idea of the book is perhaps
"Less information presented at the right speed to ensure assimilation." (page 87).
The slides, in other words, do not tell the whole story, nor can they be copied to a handout which can tell the whole story (and handouts can be fatal in several ways). In short:
"Good PowerPoint slides do not make sense until the presenter explains them, or builds them!"
Oulton calls this "making presentations 4-Dimensional" - the additional dimension being, of course, time. Slides are not pictures or pieces of text, but sequences of steps in a story (like actions in a Use Case, a requirements person might think). Each step is explained by the presenter, and just as importantly, by its context - by what happened before and perhaps by what is about to happen. The steps together build up in time to say what the presenter wants to put across.
There are two main things that presenters want to do, argues Oulton: to sell, and to teach. You transfer a wish to buy, or knowledge. Either way, you require belief: the audience must believe that you are worth listening to, that your message is relevant and truthful.
This isn't a matter of clipart or bullet-points. Oulton is actually very funny on both topics. Presentations are not improved by inserting trite little men who look puzzled or who joyfully click their heels together while leaping in an improbably balletic jeté. Presentations do not become more lively by drowning audiences in lists of bullet-pointed subheadings. Oulton finds it deeply ironic that he is forced by the exigencies of print to summarise each section of his book with a bulleted list.
So, a key task in designing presentations is to get out of the habit of writing down everything you want to say in bulletpoints. The slides are for the audience, not aide-memoires for the presenter. Yes, gulp. But surely you know what you want to say? If you need an aide memoire, you can use PowerPoint's notes area and Presenter View, or you can write note cards to hold in your hand when you speak. I suspect this is a Damascus moment for many presenters who come across Oulton's ideas for the first time: the slides can be liberated of all that wordy clutter. Instead, they can - should - focus exclusively on the message the audience need to see. The task becomes one of designing the simplest, clearest, sharpest sequence that builds up a correct understanding (and belief) in the audience's minds. If there are hardly any words in a slide as a result, that's fine.
The book comes with plenty of well-designed slides, as you'd expect. They are on the web, protected by a password that is published in the glossary of the book.
There are very many books on presentations, and on Microsoft Office tools. Oulton's book is genuinely a cut above the rest - it is properly thought out, and most of it would work with any presentation tool now or in the future. I warn you, though, that you will be forced to go through all your existing training or sales materials, weeding out all the rubbish. But if you study and absorb the book, you will never write a dull presentation again.
© Ian Alexander 2008