Focusing on What People Need to Hear
PowerPoint gets a lot of bad press. There’s nothing wrong with the software, but there’s a ton of bad PowerPoint presentations out there. I think PowerPoint allows a bad presenter to give bad presentations more easily. Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire does a great job of moving away from the horrific presentations we’re used to.
Cliff urges us to consider what the audience wants to know and how the information will help them. Then take that information and put it in a classical Greek story format so that you’re not just giving facts, but telling a story. Good stuff. Cliff has also set up a template to help people storyboard and turn their information into a story. As a trial lawyer, I appreciate Cliff’s structure and find it helpful, but don’t feel the need to follow it 100% of the time.
I’ve also been reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds recently. Garr uses the same concepts as Cliff; e.g. getting away from bullet points, working to focus on what the audience wants to hear and using carefully selected graphics to anchor the points. Garr is an American living in Japan and when focusing on simplicity he focuses on a zen approach. As Garr quotes "Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means." — Dr. Koichi Kawana
For trial lawyers this is important stuff. How do we get across information so that people will actually understand and accept the information? It’s not enough that we say things, it has to be understood, accepted and internalized by the juror or audience member. If we don’t have that, we’re just talking in the wind.
