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How to avoid death By PowerPoint, Summaries of Business English

University of Karachi (UK)Business English

How to avoid death By PowerPoint David JP Phillips TEDxStockholmSalon

Typology: Summaries

2021/2022

Uploaded on 08/17/2023

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How to avoid death By PowerPoint David JP Phillips
TEDxStockholmSalon
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. There is a question which has puzzled me for quite a while, and that is,
why do our PowerPoints look the way they look? Or rather, how on earth can we accept that they look
the way they look? How can you do that? And you know what's even more intellectually challenging for
me to understand is how can a person sit over here in this meeting room with ten others, observing this
dismally bad PowerPoint filled with charts, graphical elements, page numbers fadding away five, seven
minutes, thinking of other things. You know, the feeling, the boredom, the waste of time. Him. This
person. After 40 minutes, he or she will stand up, bed day, still trodding off to his own office, coming into
his own computer, flipping it up, going like, oh, my God, I've got a presentation tomorrow. And I do have
a PowerPoint to build. Now, what is the chance that this person will build an equally bad PowerPoint as
the one that he or she was by herself tortured by in the other conference room? Is that a big chance?
Yeah. Now, what is that? Why do we do that? Is that vengeance? Is that where you go? Like, you did that
to me, I'm going to do it to you. You got it coming, bro. Is that the case? I don't think so. I don't think it
has got to do with vengeance. I don't think it has got to do with intelligence. I think it's got to do with
something else. Now, my passion in life is the brain, and an even bigger passion than that is presentation
skills. And I love combining these two. And about four years ago, I got so upset, I blew my top, because
the way that we do neural executions all over our boardrooms today is just not fair to our intelligence as
being Homo sapiens. So I thought, there's got to be something we can do about this. So, I searched the
world. I looked for seminars, I looked for training programs, I looked for books. That could solve this
question for me, but there was none to be found, so I thought, well, I'll just do as Franz Kafka said. If it
isn't written, write it yourself. And four years later, I have the great honor to stand here in front of you.
What am I talking about? What are the PowerPoints I'm referring to? Well, they can look like this. Now,
this is one of the top three universities in the world advising their students and their teachers on how to
build great PowerPoints. I received this from a customer. And you've got to be semi blind in order to
even have something like this in the company. I love this one. This one was awarded the prize of being
the worst PowerPoint delivered by a public CEO in 2010. It's a nice price to pick up, isn't it? Oh, yes.
Thank you. Well done, mate. And then you're like, this is bad. Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Now, this is
the UN in Afghanistan, the US military, describing the situation in the area. And, well, there are no
comments on that, but then we go, this one. My God. David Phillips. This has got to be the thing. This
has got limited amounts of text. It's got a supporting image, it's got a clear headline. This is the truth.
Well, the thing is, if you recognize yourself in any of these, which I think you do, nodding away, I want to
make you aware of the following, that if you've delivered a presentation with something like that behind
you, 90% of what you said was gone within 30 seconds. And then you go, no way, Jose. I know it's bad,
but it can't be that bad, can it, now? Really? Well, just let me give you an example of really how bad your
working memory is, and mine for that case. I want you to imagine this situation. You're at the train
station and you're waiting for the train. You can see it coming in the horizon. You're fiddling away. You
finally find where you put your ticket, and you take it up and you go, car five, C 42. Got it. Have. You
have absolutely no idea where you're going to sit, do you? So you're like, Is this only me or well, I'll check
five foot to two and you put it down again. Have you got it? No, you haven't got it. You'll do this on an
average of six times before you sit down. I've seen people in the train go, Five foot to two. Five foot to
two. Yes, this is my seat check. Now, the bad news in this situation is this you do not have a separate
working memory for PowerPoint and a separate working memory for train tickets. It's the same dismally
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How to avoid death By PowerPoint David JP Phillips

TEDxStockholmSalon

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. There is a question which has puzzled me for quite a while, and that is, why do our PowerPoints look the way they look? Or rather, how on earth can we accept that they look the way they look? How can you do that? And you know what's even more intellectually challenging for me to understand is how can a person sit over here in this meeting room with ten others, observing this dismally bad PowerPoint filled with charts, graphical elements, page numbers fadding away five, seven minutes, thinking of other things. You know, the feeling, the boredom, the waste of time. Him. This person. After 40 minutes, he or she will stand up, bed day, still trodding off to his own office, coming into his own computer, flipping it up, going like, oh, my God, I've got a presentation tomorrow. And I do have a PowerPoint to build. Now, what is the chance that this person will build an equally bad PowerPoint as the one that he or she was by herself tortured by in the other conference room? Is that a big chance? Yeah. Now, what is that? Why do we do that? Is that vengeance? Is that where you go? Like, you did that to me, I'm going to do it to you. You got it coming, bro. Is that the case? I don't think so. I don't think it has got to do with vengeance. I don't think it has got to do with intelligence. I think it's got to do with something else. Now, my passion in life is the brain, and an even bigger passion than that is presentation skills. And I love combining these two. And about four years ago, I got so upset, I blew my top, because the way that we do neural executions all over our boardrooms today is just not fair to our intelligence as being Homo sapiens. So I thought, there's got to be something we can do about this. So, I searched the world. I looked for seminars, I looked for training programs, I looked for books. That could solve this question for me, but there was none to be found, so I thought, well, I'll just do as Franz Kafka said. If it isn't written, write it yourself. And four years later, I have the great honor to stand here in front of you. What am I talking about? What are the PowerPoints I'm referring to? Well, they can look like this. Now, this is one of the top three universities in the world advising their students and their teachers on how to build great PowerPoints. I received this from a customer. And you've got to be semi blind in order to even have something like this in the company. I love this one. This one was awarded the prize of being the worst PowerPoint delivered by a public CEO in 2010. It's a nice price to pick up, isn't it? Oh, yes. Thank you. Well done, mate. And then you're like, this is bad. Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Now, this is the UN in Afghanistan, the US military, describing the situation in the area. And, well, there are no comments on that, but then we go, this one. My God. David Phillips. This has got to be the thing. This has got limited amounts of text. It's got a supporting image, it's got a clear headline. This is the truth. Well, the thing is, if you recognize yourself in any of these, which I think you do, nodding away, I want to make you aware of the following, that if you've delivered a presentation with something like that behind you, 90% of what you said was gone within 30 seconds. And then you go, no way, Jose. I know it's bad, but it can't be that bad, can it, now? Really? Well, just let me give you an example of really how bad your working memory is, and mine for that case. I want you to imagine this situation. You're at the train station and you're waiting for the train. You can see it coming in the horizon. You're fiddling away. You finally find where you put your ticket, and you take it up and you go, car five, C 42. Got it. Have. You have absolutely no idea where you're going to sit, do you? So you're like, Is this only me or well, I'll check five foot to two and you put it down again. Have you got it? No, you haven't got it. You'll do this on an average of six times before you sit down. I've seen people in the train go, Five foot to two. Five foot to two. Yes, this is my seat check. Now, the bad news in this situation is this you do not have a separate working memory for PowerPoint and a separate working memory for train tickets. It's the same dismally

bad working memory for both activities. So I might be harsh when I say this, but there is one man on this earth who knows more about the brain than anybody else. One of the most leading neurologists called John Medina. And he puts it like this. 6s And it's with his words that I welcome you to hi. How to avoid death by PowerPoint. It. Now, my objective for this evening, for these 18 minutes is to give you five design principles that will cognitively and psychologically optimize your PowerPoint slides. And if you haven't used them before, they will make a tremendous difference to every PowerPoint you will be delivering from this day and on. So let's start. The first one of these five is one message. I received this from a customer and I said, hey, we've got a lot of issues in here, but let's start with the first one. You got two messages. Let's move one of them out of the way and just bring one message per slide. So why should we only have one message per slide? Well, I'll give you this beautiful example. You're at this nice party, you got the music going boom, boom. You got this person you're chatting away to, you're having a good time, chat, chat, chatta. Then you hear your name, you hear your name spoken somewhere. Your entire attention is now diverted in that direction. And then with this person, you're just nodding away, hoping that you're nodding in the right instances, yeah, yes. After about a minute, this one stops talking about you. So you divert your attention straight again. Now, that person will then say, well, don't you agree? Well, don't we just love that situation? We have got no clue what they've been talking about. The same thing goes for PowerPoint. If you got more than one message, the chance is big that they will be focusing on this one and not that one, or that one and this not this one. Just make it simple for human beings. Have one message per slide. We are extremely limited to understanding more. Let's move on. Go to working memory. I've already given you this bad vibe that your working memory is bad, and I'm afraid I'm not coming with better news. I'm coming with worse news. And it goes like this. This equation has the basis of John Sweller and Meyer, and they come to the conclusion that there is something in our brain called redundancy effect. And it works like this. If you have text sentences on your PowerPoint and you persist with the annoying idea of speaking at the same time, what will be remembered by the audience is zero, or very close to zero. Now, why is that? How does that come about? Well, it can't look like this. It's just not practical. You can't stand and have this and talk at the same time. So what are you supposed to do? Well, use PowerPoint for what it's supposed to be used for. Pick it like this. Pull down your text into the documentation field and use the area up there for the presentation material. Short, sweet bits of text and an image. That is what enhances your image. That is what enhances your message. So use PowerPoint as it's supposed to be used. It come to the third of these five principles and that's size. Before I go into that, I want to make you aware of something, and that is the following. Every time you open your eyes for the rest of your life, you will focus on four things moving objects, signaling colors like red, orange and yellow, contrast rich objects and big objects for the rest of your life. It give you a practical example of that. I want you to imagine yourself being home with a friend, a really good friend. Now, the television is on, but the sound is off. You're having a great conversation, but you find it easy to not look at the television. No. Why not? Because it's got moving objects, it's got signaling colors, it's high in contrast, and they're usually very big. These times it so why not use this to our benefit? If you look at this, where is your attention drawn to without you even having a chance of controlling it? It's going to the big three all the time. We'll have a look at a practical situation. Have a look at this. Where is your eyes drawn to? Well, I can see that they're drawn to constantly to the headline. Now, how often is the headline the most important part in a PowerPoint? It's very rare. Even so, every PowerPoint template is built like this, where the headline is the biggest object and the content is the smallest, going absolute opposite to our biological reactions. So what does this look like? If we just show it show you an example. Well, now I'll reduce the title and it looks like this. Do you see how your eyes now fall down into the

that be correct? So what you've just experienced is the following. That the cognitive process of counting takes 500% longer time, requires 500% more energy resources to execute than just seeing. So what I want you to keep in mind at all times, what I want you to keep in your head is this, which is a Swedish number for this. The magical number is six. It's not five. It's not seven. It's six. And I want you to make you aware of this. When you go into a presentation in the future and you've built this amazing PowerPoint, if you've got more than seven objects or seven or more objects, you have to be aware that all the people in there, they have to use 500% more energy and cognitive resources to understand what's in your PowerPoint. Now, how do you think their energy saving brain by nature behaves? Will it go like, OOH, easily, invest 500% more cognitive resources to understand this? We had a slide or I won't that's. I won't. And you've just incurred death by PowerPoint. Now, what does this look like in real life? Well, have a look at this. 16 objects. Can we agree that that's too many? Yes, we can. So what does it look like if we reduce it? Look at this. We go from this to this. And this is where your brain goes. And this is where your brain goes. Ah. And I assume that in the future when you deliver PowerPoints to your colleagues, to your fellow people, you want them to go. When you show them your slides, you don't want them to go. Now there is a have you seen this movie the Rain Man by Dustin Hoffman? Seen that? It's beauty, isn't it? He comes into this cafeteria and somebody drops toothpicks and he goes like, boom. Two foot seven. It's amazing, isn't it? His perceptive limit is here. Your perceptive limit is here. Now, what amazes me is that whichever country I go to, whichever company I see, it seems like they build PowerPoints in the hope that all their fellow colleagues are autistic or savants which obviously is not the so. But then you go like this but David, my God. This means that I have to have more slides. Yes, that is entirely correct. You have understood me clearly. I want to make one thing clear here, and that is that the amount of slides in your PowerPoint has never been the problem. It is the amount of objects per slide which has been the problem. This stupid idea that corporate organizations all over the world have come up with limitations, going like, OOH, we've got this clever idea. You can't use 40 slides, you can only use four. So what do people do? Well, they take the content of the rest, 36, and they jam it in the first four. My God, is that counterproductive or what? And we call ourselves intelligent them. No. All right, so compared I started off with 95 of those, we ended up with 135 of these. And yes, it gave an immediate result to the application that we were working for. So, to summarize this, let's have some fun and do a cross examination, because obviously I have to prove my point. Do you remember more than 90% of what I said? I'm not going to be that harsh. Let's do a crossword instead. It's going to go like this. Words are going to come up. I'm going to ask you to screen them out as loud as you can as we go along. How many messages are you supposed to have per slide? One. Very good. I think you were looking for a different word there. What can we use to steer? Focus. Yes. And another one. Well done. What should we avoid using if speaking at the same time? Beautiful. And what should we strive? What kind of background should we have? We should have dark. And finally now you can say it. How many objects per slide? Six. That is magnificent. Thank you very much.