Slides are not about you

I was going back and forth with a client today about what words should go on a slide. She was arguing for one sentence and I was arguing for another. And she said to me, "Oh, you're thinking about the audience. I was thinking about me."

We both chuckled. But her realization was also a realization for me. 

I'm always putting myself in the seat of an audience member and I assume others are doing that, too. But I think it's tempting when you are the presenter to think first about what you need on the slide to remember what you're going to say. I call this using slides as crutches. You can do that, but it's at the cost of giving your audience the experience they deserve.

Thanking the team

I often work with speakers giving a presentation about a project that involves a bigger team. In nearly every case the speaker proposes including a slide with the team members listed on it, a list of committees or departments associated with the project, etc. I always counsel against this and am usually met with resistance. I think that resistance is noble: we want to give credit to others and not make it look like we did all the work ourselves. I get that.

But it is far more powerful to tell a story about your project team. Tell the audience what makes this team special, what's the thread that binds everyone together (high-performing teams usually have strong shared values). That story honors the team in a much more memorable way than a list on a slide.

For a compelling illustration of this, watch an awards show like the Oscars and notice that 90% of the acceptance speeches are boring, rattled-off lists of names we don't even know. What a missed opportunity. The best acceptance speeches use storytelling to talk about what we value.