Because of the creative aspect of presentation development, we can often find guidance in other related fields of communication such as writing, television, and music. In yesterday's blog, you read advice from Mark Twain, and in previous blogs from such diverse sources as Oprah Winfrey and Fred Astaire. Today, we focus on a creative technique used by Mike Nichols, the noted director of big Broadway theater comedies (his most recent is Spamalot) and hit Hollywood films (his most recent is Charley Wilson's War). This week, Nichols was the subject of a retrospective of his earlier films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of a concurrent feature story in the New York Times.
In the story, Nichols described how he prepares for a film: "I really do think it's important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking." He calls this process "naming things," which he describes as "just explaining what happens in every scene."
You can use the "naming things" process in preparation for your presentation by analyzing the meaning of each slide, but do so after you have shaped your story. Mike Nichols employs his process with a shooting script in hand. In that same manner, apply "naming things" only when you have evolved your presentation through these important developmental steps:
•Set the context; the presentation objective and how it relates to your audience
•Brainstorm all the potential ideas that support your objective and provide benefits to your audience
•Distill the essential ideas (and discard the excess)
•Structure those final ideas into a logical flow
•Design graphics that illustrate your story
Having accomplished this, you are now ready to implement your own "naming things" process. Look at each slide in your deck and decide its main point. Then go back through the deck and speak your narrative aloud in rehearsal, stating those main points. As you move through the deck, maintain flow by making each slide relate to the preceding and following slides. Then go back through the deck once more and, this time, punctuate each slide with either a re-statement of your objective and/or a benefit to your audience. This puts the icing on the cake, and lifts your presentation to its optimal level.
Contrast this comprehensive approach with the more conventional method of cobbling together a disparate assortment of begged, borrowed, or stolen slides at the last minute, and then standing up in front of a mission-critical audience and reading the slides to them verbatim.
Mike Nichols, although an expert at comedy, would not be amused.