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Communicating to Transform: Formal Presentation Techniques with Nancy Duarte, CEO, Duarte Design and Author, Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols
Clarify your message with visuals
Visual communication, especially in business today, is very important because there’s a lot of information to convey and if people can see what you’re saying they understand you more clearly. It’s like a shorthand; it becomes some sort of a visual symbol, in a way, to communicate visually. The interesting thing about a tool, say, like presentation software – PowerPoint, Keynote, whatever you use – is it’s used actually two ways. You need to either use it as a backdrop to symbolically and creatively, or cinematically, be the stage that you’re standing on for you to convey your story. You become the primary visual and your screen is your secondary visual, so you’re like the stage setting when an actor walks on a scene. The context of the visual under which you’re speaking to is as important sometimes as what you’re saying itself. That’s a more cinematic visual expression of what you’re talking about.
Now there’s a polar opposite way that we also use PowerPoint, which is putting dense amounts of information on it. So we coined the term that you’re making a “slide doc.” So instead of calling that the enemy, we’re embracing it and saying you know what, if you’re going to use it as a document – because it is a really good visual expression tool, people just put tons and tons of content on it – well those slides that have tons and tons of content is about 85% of the presentation market versus 15% of it being cinematic. So what we encourage people to do is use that as your page layout software – it’s the novice’s version of page layout – and build out slide docs which has dense information. Just don’t present. Don’t stand in front of a complex visual and do a verbal dialogue. People can only understand one stream; they can either follow your verbal stream or read your visual stream. If you have a ton of text up there, they can’t listen to you and read your slides at the same time. So what you could do is package it all up. If it can travel around your organization without the help of a presenter, you’ve made a slide doc. Because they can read it and skim it, it’s bite-sized, and it’s more consumable content, and you can have those travel around your organization.
So visually communicating is very important, but understanding, “Wait, I need to be cinematic in this moment, or I can be dense in this other moment.” You need to be able to discern the two and use the tool the right way.
Find the narrative in data
You know, data’s interesting. I think we obsess over it today because we have so much of it. And the data itself is interesting, but a lot of people forget that there’s narrative in the data. And when you have the ability to verbally convey insights from the data, it’s important that you do that. So, the narrative in the data could be based on the scale of the numbers. Some of the numbers we deal with today are gargantuan. And so sometimes there’s narrative in the scale of the numbers. Other times there’s narrative in the role humans played to create that number. What did humans do to make that number go up, and what did humans do to make that number do down? So there’s all kinds of narrative in there that can be told and then it becomes more like a story. And stories are powerful because as we consume information in the form of a story, we can repeat it. It becomes digestible and repeatable and easier to convey that information. So even though we have a lot of data, identifying and communicating the meaning in the data is the more powerful use of the data.
Murder your darlings
Sometimes when you’ve put so much energy into finding a useful insight, we forget that our whole journey to get to this conclusion isn’t that interesting to people, right. We put too much framing, too much information, instead of just sharing the insight. We had something kind of similar even happen on the latest book that Patti and I co-wrote, where we had this moment where we had written the whole thing, and we were so happy. We were going to go away to Carmel to write the next book. Right before we got in our cars to go we called a customer who got an early version of the book, and she was just like, “You know, I was just expecting more from you guys.” So here, Patti and I, we were going to go away because we were all fired up coming off the heels of the book and we were going to start the next one. And instead we ended up, we tore the whole book up, threw it in a fire, rewrote the whole thing. We murdered the entire thing, and rewrote the entire book in about five months. Hardest thing I’ve ever done.
But filtering out the ideas in a way that someone else can consume it is the most important thing, because why put a body of work out there, or a presentation or a story, if no one can consume it. And you have to trim and trim and trim. So I think it was Churchill who said, “If I have an hour to talk, I’m ready now. But if you need it to be only 15 minutes, I’m going to need a week.” Right, because to get it really tight and refined and filtered, where you cut, you cut, you cut, and you murder all those little darlings, and to get it where it’s amazing and bite-sized and consumable, that takes a lot of work. That’s the magic of a TED Talk. I mean, they don’t do hour-long TED Talks; they’re 18 minutes. Now they’re experimenting with 3, 6, and 9-minute formats because the succinctness that you have to bring it to to make it amazing, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work, and some people don’t want to go through it and they don’t want to let go of parts of their body of work that they really just need to let go. So let it go. And let go of those things that you cherish so much because they’re not of value to anyone but you.