Meet the MasterMinds: Cliff Atkinson Goes Beyond Bullet
Points
 Cliff
Atkinson is an expert on improving communications using
Microsoft PowerPoint, and the author of Beyond
Bullet Points. He is the president of
Sociable Media, and an independent management consultant
whose clients include companies ranked in the top five of
the Fortune 500.
Atkinson is also an instructor at UCLA Extension and a
senior contributor to the MarketingProfs
newsletter. His work has been featured in Strategy+Business
magazine, and Beyond Bullet Points
is now used as a course text at Wharton.
MCNews: What are your thoughts on the way consultants
use PowerPoint in presentations?
Atkinson: Most consulting firms have their
own ways of using PowerPoint, which are deeply ingrained
in their cultures. When you look at any organization’s
presentations, you see a very clear reflection of its underlying
culture of communication.
As educational psychologist Richard E. Mayer points out,
it can be one of two worldviews. The dominant worldview
is information presentation, which focuses
only on the display of data and has little or no regard
for the impact of the presentation on the audience. From
this perspective, understanding is simply not a criterion
for success: you drive the data across the slides, and you’re
done.
The other possible worldview is cognitive guidance,
which begins by first understanding how the human mind works,
and then aligns a PowerPoint presentation with that understanding.
This second worldview produces radically different PowerPoint
results because the information has been distilled, broken
into chunks, illustrated, and explained in a way that supports
short-term and long-term memory. The cognitive approach
provides real understanding that someone can apply in the
workplace.
Consultants everywhere should take a serious look at their
worldview to make sure it aligns with their own strategy
and that of their clients.
MCNews: Author Edward Tufte thinks that PowerPoint
templates “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning,
and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.” Do
you agree?
Atkinson: I disagree. Almost any medium
can be configured in ways that effectively facilitate cognitive
guidance. The great advantage that PowerPoint has over other
media (like paper) is that it can be easily used to manage
multimedia elements that support learning.
Just as there are poorly-produced novels, films, Web sites,
business plans, spreadsheets, emails, charts, and PowerPoint
presentations, there is also the potential in each of these
media and genres to produce something that helps other people
effectively grasp ideas.
MCNews: In Beyond Bullet Points, you adapt a filmmaker’s
three-step approach to producing a script and use it for
putting together a PowerPoint presentation. Can you describe
the three-step approach and why Hollywood’s techniques
inspired you?
We
can learn a lot from storytellers by adapting their
process and blending it with classical ideas of persuasion
and reasoning to produce a contemporary, human-mediated
experience. |
Atkinson: Hollywood is very effective
at communicating complex information using projected images
and spoken words—without a bullet point in sight.
They accomplish this by tapping into the classical techniques
of story structure that have worked for thousands of years.
Filmmakers adapt these ideas to a multimedia experience
by: 1. writing a script to focus their ideas; 2. storyboarding
the script to clarify those ideas; and 3. producing the
script to engage the audience.
We can learn a lot from storytellers by adapting their
process and blending it with classical ideas of persuasion
and reasoning to produce a contemporary, human-mediated
experience.
MCNews: Can you define storyboarding, and tell
us how it contributes to a stronger presentation?
Atkinson: Storyboarding takes on a very
specific meaning in my book. It describes a process that
is inspired by Hollywood but has evolved to a new form.
Where traditional storyboarding might involve sketching
selected scenes from a screenplay, a PowerPoint storyboard
maps every element of a story back to a PowerPoint file
in multiple ways.
Structure your story in advance of working in PowerPoint.
Using the Slide Sorter view, you can see each section of
your story by reading the headlines across the thumbnail
images of the slides. In Notes Page view, you capture what
you will show on each slide and, importantly, what you will
say with your spoken words. And in Normal view, you see
only what will be displayed on any single slide.
Disney’s animation division is beginning to storyboard
using PowerPoint, but they might learn a thing or two from
advanced PowerPoint storyboarding experts.
MCNews: What’s your view on how much information
should be placed on a single PowerPoint slide?
Atkinson: Actually the question should
really be: How much information should be presented, both
verbally and visually, given the time constraints of a presentation?
Whatever that amount, break it down into digestible chunks
at an even pace that is appropriate to your audience; then
place the corresponding chunks of information in the visual
area of the slide, and in the verbal area in the form of
the Notes Pages.
MCNews: Aren’t there instances when you simply
have to have very dense, data-driven PowerPoint slides?
Atkinson: You can show someone data all
day long if you are interested only in information presentation;
but if you care whether someone actually understands it,
you have to accommodate the limited capacity of the working
memory.
The great influx of information in our time demands even
greater effort to distill it down to its essence in a way
that the mind can easily comprehend. There are many techniques
that can help with this distillation.
For example, in my book I show how to apply a “logic
tree” technique that’s as old as Aristotle but
as contemporary as Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle,
which is taught at McKinsey, and many other consulting firms.
Consultants are expected to clearly discern what is most
important and what relates specifically to decisions clients
need to make. Dumping all the data on a deck of PowerPoint
slides unfortunately does not reflect discernment, nor does
it help people understand or make decisions.
MCNews: What’s your advice on how to use
headlines in a presentation?
Atkinson: Virtually all PowerPoint presentations
I’ve seen use category headings, which simply name
a category of information, and then force the viewer to
work hard to figure out what’s important among all
the items in the bulleted list below the heading.
By contrast, a headline written as a complete sentence
provides a clear signal to the audience about what you want
to communicate, so their attention can then turn to you.
MCNews: Some people believe that single keywords
are most effective for text on slides, while others believe
complete sentences communicate best. What tips have you
got for how to write text for slide presentations?
Atkinson: When we start talking about
text on a slide, it’s important to begin by affirming
the research: presenting text that is identical to narration
actually harms the ability of the audience to understand.
Removing the text from the screen improves the ability of
the audience to retain the information by 28%, and improves
their ability to apply the information by 79%.
Removing
the text from the screen improves the ability of the
audience to retain the information by 28%, and improves
their ability to apply the information
by 79%. |
Keeping in mind the imperative to minimize text on the screen,
the bulk of writing text for a PowerPoint presentation should
be in the headlines that form your story structure. Then
you write the narrative explanation of each of those headlines
in Notes Page view.
Because the words have already been captured in the form
of the headlines and notes, the screen is much less dependent
on text to convey information and more dependent on you
to communicate it with your spoken words and expressions.
With this approach, the PowerPoint screen becomes a much
more creative and interesting tool that can hold a few words,
or no words at all.
One example in my book shows how to create a powerful effect
by using only two simple animated words that appear on the
screen while you speak.
MCNews: When you see a PowerPoint presentation,
what is the most common area you think needs improvement?
Atkinson: By far, it is the critical thinking—or
lack thereof—that underlies the presentation. It’s
common to see presentations that are really “works
in progress” awaiting the presenter to come back and
distill the information into a form that the audience doesn’t
have to work so hard to get.
MCNews: Do you have any examples of PowerPoint
presentations that you believe are particularly effective?
Atkinson: There are examples in my Beyond
Bullets blog, such as the ones at www.beyondbullets.com/2005/02/notespages.html
and www.beyondbullets.com/2004/07/title.html.
If any of your readers come across any good ones, they
can send them my way and I’ll blog about them!
MCNews: Thanks for your time and the great tips.
Find out more about Cliff Atkinson at www.sociablemedia.com,
and visit his blog at www.beyondbullets.com.
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