Design: Rethinking PowerPoint Design - A Strategy


About this lesson

A radical PowerPoint Design Strategy based on NYT Best Selling Daniel Pink’s book where we turn concepts into an action workflow. Learn how to build effective and persuasive slide decks by employing the six senses of Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.

The course will help you create powerful presentations with a step by step guide to get you started on the right track.

Topics

00:00 Intro
01:38 The Book Premise
02:55 The Six Senses for Success
05:52 The Six Steps to Building a Presentation
06:22 #1 Know the Assignment
08:29 #2 Identify the Goals
10:31 #3 Create Story Arc
12:31 #4 Shape the Message
14:26 #5 Build the Presentation
16:01 #6 Deliver the Presentation
17:29 The Call to Actions

Details

Subject Microsoft PowerPoint

Software Compatibility All versions of PowerPoint or even Apple Keynote and Google Slides

Level

Course Completed

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Transcript

(Music) “Rethinking PowerPoint Creation,” a reexamination of how you create your presentations to better persuade your audience based on ideas in the New York Times bestseller, a whole new mind, why right brainers will rule the future? by Daniel Pink, the following 15 minutes will upgrade your presentation creation skills to a new level of persuasion. So, what are we doing in this tutorial? exploring a new way to build effective slide decks in today’s changing world. This radical approach originated from ideas in Mr. Pink’s book, but which we have refined based on decades of PowerPoint slide creations. Along the way, you’re gonna get this roadmap for rethinking modern slideshow presentations. do see the link in the YouTube notes below. If you want to download the free PDF to take notes. Who are we? Well, I’m Les McCarter from power-up.training where I provide my my 30 years of corporate training and boardroom presentation experience to you for free. Our YouTube power-up.training channel has 100 plus training videos, these are not your normal click here, click here click here screencaptures but a deeper dive into the tools coupled with my longtime experience and wisdom. And all of it is free. Daniel Pink’s book is not about PowerPoint, but it dives into bigger historical trends and future business transformations. However, his ideas have significant implications on how PowerPoint or any slide creation tools can be used to do better communications. The big idea is that the world continues to transform. The 18th century was revolutionized by farmers in the agricultural age. And in the next century came the Industrial Revolution, with factories and mass production, followed again by the 20th century of the information age. The author contends that the information age was driven by analytical thinking based on left brain thinking filled with logics and numbers, which works great with computers. But the future century is going to be won by the right brain in which he calls the Conceptual Age. As we leverage the human ingenuity and creativity. Mr. Pink makes a strong point that for you to succeed in the future, you must change your perspective. And I’ll take this one step further. For you to succeed, you need to be better at persuading by changing your viewpoint to become more creative. The book lays out six new senses that works from the right side of the brain, going beyond logic. Let me walk you through them from the presentation perspective. Number one is DESIGN, which is obvious. Our world has become more visual and we need to make our presentations jump out to our audience and keep their attention to compete with distractions like their phones.

Number two: STORY. Our presentation is not just a series of design pretty images, but need to fit together to tell a story that keeps our audience engaged following our thoughts in a coherent story arc. They must focus on your storyline and not the other distractions around them. Number three is SYMPHONY which is taking the facts and numbers and statements and then synthesize them into the big picture. This is turning data into valuable information. Facts are not enough analysis and insight is needed to bring superiority to your presentation. This is heavy duty thinking and it will make you stand out as an independent thinker. Number four, EMPATHY. The conceptual age is all about connecting with your audience. And you must be aware of who will be watching your presentation and build specifically for audience for them to relate to you. You must relate to them as you create your slide deck. Number five, PLAY. heavy an empathetic pretty design Slide Show is not enough. You need to introduce a fun engagement with your audience. You need to connect with them to gain their enthusiasm and support Adding emotional engagement to all your slideshows is critical to becoming a superstar persuader. And number six, MEANING. Why even do this? If the presentation is not important to you and your audience, then no one’s really gonna care beyond the entertainment value. However, your presentation must have importance to drive change and action. Investing meaning in all your presentation provides you with a higher purpose. All fascinating, but how will these six senses help transform you into creating a more powerful PowerPoint slide deck. I contend that they are all critical, but not in the order presented in the book. Instead, let’s transform them into these six steps. Starting on the next slide, I will walk you through starting at when you get the assignment, and then clearly defining your goals. Then creating the story with a symphony of ideas transform to target your audience and move them to meaningful action. By the time you’re finished giving your presentation we will take the six senses and mold them into actionable steps creating your slide deck. While all the steps are essential. The first two are critical. If you fail to understand your assignment, and the goals, all the other steps are meaningless. Before we even get started, you must know the assignment. This is elementary, but it’s not uncommon for staff members to misunderstand what’s being asked of him. Oh my gosh. Who is giving you the assignment should be obvious, your boss or maybe your boss’s boss, your professor or the course curriculum. Whoever, make sure you are clear where the assignment originates from, as it impacts the following two questions. Clearly write down what the instructions are for the presentation. If you cannot clearly define in writing what’s being asked of you, you will never succeed in meeting the unknown. Go back and get clear clarification in person or email or through Slack or Teams. Those first two assignment question should be obvious. But what is not always clear is what results are expected from you. To succeed at your task is optimum to understand what your boss or professor or whoever’s giving you assignment expects to come out of the presentation. Some results may appear obvious, such as explain the status of your project. But deeper down? Do they want you to explain why you’re missing your deadlines? Or do they want you to impress their boss with your successes? Try to dig deep down to get the underlying sometimes unsaid assignment. And if it is not obvious. Don’t guess. Ask. Ask about the why and the what with your boss or professor. And asking the follow up questions may help build a more robust long term bond.

All this information will play into creating the story and knowing what the message should be. With the assignment clearly understood, you now need to create your goals for the presentation. What do you want to accomplish? Hopefully it aligns with your boss’s objectives. document your goals will help you shape the story. But to flesh out the fullness of your goals, you have to identify the WHO the WHAT the WHEN the HOW and the WHY. The who will help you clearly identify your target audience, which is part of the empathy element, the who will impact how to effectively persuade the audience. For a large audience, you may need to break down the demographics to create a presentation that is understandable to both newbies and the jaded experts. The y is where you identify the meaning of the presentation. It will help you add importance to this slide deck so that you and your audience know why they should care about what you’re presenting. Like all of these, write them down. The what, when and how will all be used to construct the story gathered the facts, call of actions and time deadlines before you even begin to build your slides. Here is a slideshow meta note footnote. I constructed the design of this show by adding these two elements in the storyline. Keeping the six elements on the top helps you keep track of what elements are in play for each slide page. While the six steps on the bottom here, lets you act as a tracking guide to know where we are in the steps. While it’s not elegantly clean from a design perspective, it has been customized for your YouTube tutorials training to help you keep track of where we are in the process of this tutorial. So on to Step Three of creating the story, we assembled all the needed data and facts, and we know what our goals are. So we can now create the story script. Every slideshow must tell a story with a start, a middle, and an end. or more precisely, the intro must explain what the presentation is about. What’s the goal, and the middle section will walk our audience through the steps of understanding our end goal is where we convince them of why to accept our objectives. And the last part is where you make a call to action.

The call to action is the achieving of our original goal or our boss’s goal. It may be asking for people to volunteer, or for them to make a decision or acknowledge the status of a budget, your audience needs to be included in the last slide. To get their confirmation of the goal would you lead them through step by step in the story arc? Always start off with an outline. Building individual slides from the beginning is a rookie mistake, you will get distracted and forget about the goals. Instead use the outline to focus on the development of the message. See the example I use for this presentation. The intro, middle and ending call to action is just sketched out here in my sample outline. But from there, I did continue on to fill in the details. And as you fill in the details, you are focusing on turning all the key elements into a symphony of bigger ideas assembled from the supporting data building up to the top level meaning of the presentation. Step three is where you pull all the ideas into a coherent story that support the bigger meaning of your project. Step four is still outline based as you take the synthesis of your ideas. And now you shape your ideas into an approachable message for your target demographics of your audience. This is where empathy is applied. Make sure that the word the size of the ideas, the presentation pace matches your target audience. This is also where you start to introduce the magic sauce to make the presentation engaging so as to avoid death by PowerPoint. Start to consider where you’re going to personalize the story to connect you and your audience. One often recommendation is humor. Humor is hard. And it can be a big fail, especially if your job has no relevance to the presentation. For example, watch as I try to interact with my slide background. Oh, that hurts. Did that really enhance the presentation and less I add relevance, why bother doing it. So what is the point of all these color pencils doing in my presentation. The pencils down here are actually find your represent the various colorful choices in your PowerPoint toolkit to rethink our design decisions. There I was attempting to interact with my presentation and include you the viewer inside the presentation. Another design element for this video is the use of my talking head to reach out to you by connecting I to many other video tutorials on YouTube are devoid of personal interaction. This is one technique, which I use to connect closer to you inside my tutorials. At this point, we have the message, the storyline, the facts, the key points, plus a shaping to involve our audience. So now we get to build the presentation. This is so opposite to many other PowerPoint design tutorials. We don’t really fire a PowerPoint until Step five, very late in the process. But it should be clear that we have captured all the key items for our presentation. We basically storyboard storyboard our slide deck and we can Now implemented, focusing on the design and engagement components. This is where you marry the words and the images together. And more than just the words on the page, you should also be building your speaking presentation script. Or, if you’re not working office fully compose script, building your talking points. See this tutorial up here for discussion of scripts versus talking points. This is the most creative visual part of the process and storytelling, all in one design process. This is also the stage where you keep going back and editing the finished product. And when I say editing, I mean not just checking for spelling and grammar, and balance bullet point. But I mean cutting, most presentations are too long. Always go back and see how you can tighten up your message. Review, cut, review and cut. Oh, yes and spellcheck. The last step is number six, delivering the message.

And before you do the actual delivery, it is super super important that you practice giving the presentation, practice with a memorized script, or practice using your detailed talking points. And it’s just not knowing the words of your script. But how you plan to use your voice and pauses to bring weight to your presentation. The voiceover is possibly the most important part of connecting with your audience. So you need to practice with the slide and your script in unison. It’s only worth practice that your hard work and shine. And with all those steps done, you can be proud and confident and deliver the best presentation. Yes, this is a lot of work. We’re talking about you making an impression, making convincing presentations showing off the best of you. Each presentation you give is a test of your competence. And yes, you’re not paranoid people are judging you. And better presentations can make you more successful in your endeavors. The conceptual age is here, and you need to become the master of persuasion to succeed in your career and make a difference. And yes, we need to finish up with a call to action in my tutorial presentation. If you want to look in the YouTube notes below, you’re going to find a link to the free downloadable PDF checklist to use for all your future presentations. Print it out and complete it for each of your future slide decks. I also have an affiliate amazon link to Daniel Pink’s book, do like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. It gives you access to desk and said dozens and dozens of more specific Microsoft Office and PowerPoint training videos all for free. Don’t want to sit through someone else’s boring Slide Show and share this video with them. Also leave any comments or suggestions down below and define all of our training organized by level visit our web page of https://power-up.training.

Until next time, Go Power UP! (Music)

Transcribed by https://otter.ai