Death to death by PowerPoint

Part of our Best Employer initiatives is regular communication across the business on what and how we are doing and where we are doing it. We recently had the past quarter company update that is a morning session comprising of about 8 different corporate and divisional presentations, supposedly for an hour but some quarters long past are remembered for their record breaking overruns!

It was not unusual for these sessions to turn into "death by PowerPoint" and you all know what I mean by that. Over the last couple of years a brave group of pioneers started to change the way they built their presentations. Rather than a slide buried in bullet points there would appear a single topic along with a picture. Now when I say "picture" I don't mean a graph or a logo, I mean a genuine photograph or cartoon of people, places or situations that was in some way evocative of the topic in hand. The presenter then talked to the topic whilst ideally drawing in some reference, however obliquely, to the picture. Very novel. Mind you, this was skunk-works, nothing officially mandated.

It had two outcomes, these presentations started to be rated as the "best" in the following online survey, they also tended to stay within their allotted time - no bloat. The message to all? people like pictures. Last week the presentations were riddled with pictures and it only ran marginally late - possibly a record breaker. Purely through exposing everyone to different ways of doing something the mass had adopted the change as a norm.

So strip out all the bullet points in your next presentation, put one key message on the slide and support it with picture that ties your message up in a memorable package. Give it a try, you might find it fun.

Now, where to get the pictures? The Internet dummy! There is a raft of stock photography suppliers online that sell low res images at very affordable rates. I'm not going to favour any one over another by naming them. I have really been delighted with the kind and generous nature of many of the amateur photographers that post on http://www.flickr.com/. There are millions of images here and I have found that generally the owners are delighted for you to use an image of theirs at no cost as long as the source is referenced and the presentation is not something that is being sold as part of a commercial offering. Find one you like and ask the owner - you may be surprised. The world is full of givers just waiting to be asked.