What's the Point of your Slide Deck?

I have a question for you that is going to sound like a trick question, but it is 100 percent sincere:

What is the point of your slide deck?

Not, what is the point of your presentation? What is the point of your slide deck?

Lately, I have been coaching a lot of my public speaking clients through how to present from a text-dense slide deck. 

You have probably seen this kind of presentation before. The slides are chock full of information, graphs, numbers, and size 10 font.

Admittedly, these are not my favorite kinds of decks to present from. But they are a reality of the corporate world.

In my ideal world, my clients would always be presenting from slide decks that are clean, simple, and have a minimum font size of 30.

I’m a big fan of the rule-of-thumb introduced by Guy Kawasaki, that the minimum font size in any given presentation should be ½ the age of the oldest person in the room.

For the kinds of presentations that I typically give at companies, I try to stick to this rule.

However, the kinds of slide decks I usually prepare serve a very different function than the ones my clients are often presenting from.

Which brings me back to my original question:

What is the point of your slide deck?

To answer this, you need to be clear on two things:

• Who is my slide deck for?

• When is it for?

Let’s break that down.

Who Is Your Slide Deck For?

Is your slide deck 50% for you, the presenter, and 50% for the audience? 

Is it both a memory aid for you and a comprehension aid for them? 

Or, does your slide deck exist 100% for your audience’s benefit?

Note: the slide deck should never be entirely for the presenter’s benefit. If the only reason you have a slide deck is as a memory aid for you, I think you are better off using note cards and connecting directly to your audience sans slides. 

Oftentimes, in corporate settings, the slide deck is designed entirely for the benefit of the audience.

It is not meant to be a presentation aid for the speaker. 

And in fact, the amount of information on each slide will be a hindrance to the presenter if they try to use it as a presentation aid.

It is designed to be a resource for the audience.

And that brings us to the next crucial question…

When Is the Slide Deck For?

Is this a presentation aid for the here and now?

Or is it a take-home resource your audience is supposed to look at before or after the meeting?

The kinds of decks that follow the big font, minimal text rule are Here-and-Now Decks.

These are the kinds of decks I generally present from when I lead a workshop. I don’t send my deck to participants ahead of time, and they don’t get a copy after. They are meant as a presentation aid in the here and now.

But many of the text-dense corporate slide decks I coach people through are not really for the presentation happening in real time.

They are meant to be a take-home resource.

Something participants will, in theory, read the deck before the meeting or reference it after the meeting.

(Now, I also think it is worth asking what the likelihood is that they will actually read it before or after the meeting. But that is a discussion for another day…)

Most corporate workshops I encounter fall into the following category:

Who is the deck for? 100% the audience, 0% the presenter

When is it for? Before or after the presentation

Once you’ve identified what kind of deck you’re working with, the presentation becomes much easier to navigate.

If you’ve been treating your deck as a presentation aid when that’s explicitly not what it’s designed for, you’ve probably felt a number of the following frustrations:

• “I always seem to get in the weeds, and go into much more detail than necessary.”

• “People keep zoning out when I talk. They keep reading ahead or checking out entirely.”

• “I got to the end and realized there was an important piece of information I totally skipped.”

  
  

All of these issues pop up when we’ve misdiagnosed our slide deck.

In this context, your slide deck is not a presentation aid. It is a take-home-resource. 

Thus, your job is not to communicate all the information on the slides.

Your job is to control the flow of information and direct the attention of the audience where you need it in the here and now.

That might occasionally mean reading word-for-word important sections of the slide.

It might also mean saying something like:

“I am going to give you a general overview of this slide, but the most important thing I want you to focus on is in the upper left-hand corner, column A.”

Because here’s the thing…

We are really bad at reading and listening at the same time.

When your audience is presented with a text-dense slide, they are forced to make a decision. Are they going to listen to you, or are they going to read the slide in front of them?

If you do not guide them, they will make the decision for you. And you may find yourself competing with your own slide deck for attention.

If you are regularly asked to give these kinds of presentations, give yourself a bit of grace.

They are a heavy lift. 

You’re being asked to do a kind of speaking that requires every tool in the public speaking toolkit to keep it engaging. So if you’re finding it challenging, that’s because it is.

But at least now you know what you’re dealing with.

Once you’ve answered the question, “What’s the point of your slide deck?” it becomes a lot easier to figure out what to do with it.