Practicing Presentation Zen

Photo by BSK at stock.xchng.

I recently finished reading the book “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds (read the review here). As luck would have it, I had a chance to put my new-found knowledge to work this week as I prepared for our quarterly internal product roadshow (more on this in a different post). Today, I will share with you the steps I took to create this presentation.

Key Message

I started the preparation phase a couple of weeks ago during a flight back from NYC. My first task was to spend some time thinking about the key message. When creating a presentation, it is important to determine your key point (and why it matters). The presentation needs to support and focus on this key point. This is hard when you have so many things you want to say to your audience. It took me a while, but I eventually nailed it down. Armed with a meaningful key message, I confidently proceeded to the next step.

Offline Outline

Still working offline (airplanes are great for this), I started to create the outline for the presentation. I ended up with three main sections (three is a good number) with an introduction and conclusion. I jotted down the main points to address in each section.

Slide Ideas

As I worked through the outline, I would have an idea for how I might depict a specific point visually. I recorded these ideas in a different part of my notebook. I ended up with 12 ideas of which I ended up using all but one. Over the next week or so, I continued to think about the presentation, what message I wanted to convey, and how to make the message stick.

Post-it Time

I didn’t find enough time to devote to actually putting the presentation together until this past Tuesday (one day before the beginning of the roadshow!). Tuesday is my productivity day. This is when I stay away from the office and work on projects that require peace and quiet. I spent the first several hours putting the presentation together on purple post-its. Using post-its works really well because it is easy to rearrange the order of the slides and remove/add slides as needed. I put a brief description of the slide and associated illustrations on each purple square. I ended up with a 6×8 grid of post-its on my wall.

Putting It All Together

Having gone through these various offline activities, it was now time to create the electronic version of the presentation. I decided to go with a blank white page as my “template.” My goal was to create a simple and minimalistic presentation. I spent a good bit of time on stock.xchng and iStockPhoto looking for good images to illustrate my points and help the audience remember the content. I tried to pick photos with white backgrounds so they could blend into the presentation slides. I used words sparingly and am proud to report that the presentation contained no bullets. The final deck included 45 slides, which was pretty much perfect for an hour session.

In Sum

Creating a presentation following the ideas in “Presentation Zen” is fun! It lets you use your creativity and results in a memorable event. It takes a while to put the presentation together, but as Garr Reynolds points out, if you’re going to take up a bunch of people’s time, you should give them your best. Give it a shot and enjoy the experience of standing in front of a captive audience, knowing that you have just given them a presentation to remember.