| Home > Presentation Skills/Keynote > The right tool for the right job at the right time - when not to use a slide show: Lessons from Trump's "The Apprentice" |
| The right tool for the right job at the right time - when not to use a slide show: Lessons from Trump's "The Apprentice" | | Date Created: 29 May, 2006, 11:36 AM |
 Series Five of Donald Trump's The Apprentice is drawing to a close.
I don't know the contestants who remain, as I have only seen Episodes 1-4 of the current series, with local free-to-air TV not yet broadcasting the series. So other means have had to be found to watch it, with more episodes still "in the can" ready to be watched before the grand finale next week.
Viewers of popular free-to-air shows such as Lost and Desperate Housewives amongst the more popular fare know that each episode builds towards a climactic season concluding episode. Or, in the words of one of the Lost production crew in their final ABC official podcast for Season 2: "It's a semi-pilot for the next season". The need to keep away from the internet lest North American viewers spoil the plot is a new experience now that the internet allows wide dispersion of information out of synch with local viewing patterns.
Both ABC shows, as well as others of the serial-type, have their fair share of conflict which is one of the "story lines" I encourage presenters to think about when they slideshow with rather dry material or plenty of data and charts which are likely to induce slideshow overload.
If you remind yourself of some of the best and most memorable presentations you've seen, with or eschewing slides, you'll recall that they had their share of humour, surprise, variation, unexpected out-of-the-park connecting ideas, and the resolution of conflict, having couched the conflict as the point of the presentation. I'll elaborate on that shortly.
Two events these past few days confirm my views, and re-confirm that congress goers need to be spruced up when it comes to presentation skills. I say this having written to my professional society's conference committee withdrawing my spoken presentation on Technologies for psychologists in the 21st century, once they responded that it would become a poster presentation.
I could do a poster, I suppose, but the value of a presentation is the dynamic aspect of exploring the changes technology is bringing faster than a freight train. To render it a flat and listless poster is anathema to my way of thinking and doing, so I withdrew. The same committee also rejected a workshop offer of Better Presentation Skills for psychologists (in business and academia), perhaps more in favour of clinical workshops.
My argument would be, if asked, that the skills I was willing to share are nowadays essential in both practice, especially in the training sector, and academia.
To judge from what I saw at a weekend national congress for another allied health profession, psychologists are not alone in poor utilisation of slideshows. From very senior health advisors through Professors and Deans, to newly graduated practitioners, the slideshows made all the common errors I have written about.
The slide (top left) was not shown but is a typical slide you'll see all to often, |
 Despite having two very large plasma screens on the floor, mirroring the two very large video projectors displaying the slides (see low res phone camera pic, right), presenters still looked over the shoulders to read from the slides. They continued to throw up lists of bullet points then slowly work their way down the list while the audience had long ago finished reading, and some persisted with flinging in whole sentences from screen left or bottom.
You know - all the usual mistakes people make when they've not been trained and are simply given their institute's templates to fill in with their Word documents.
I now see I am going to have a hard time sitting through any lecture or workshop in the future because I seem not to be able to see the message, but only the medium. Hopefully, I can get passed this phase soon!
Getting back to The Apprentice, Episode 4 revolved around developing a large billboard for the Post cereal company who were about to release a new product.
As in Season 4, the graphics assistants used Macs to develop the billboards, and it was clear by the time the billboards were unfurled at Post HQ who was going to be the winning team. |
Here's their respective finished banners, hanging in the Post company Atrium |
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The losing team decided to go an extra distance by having a Powerpoint slide show to enhance its message.
The team chose Sean, perhaps overly influenced by the attractiveness to some of his accent (not to Aussie ears it isn't!) and he totally cocked it up.
Here he is with the usual Powerpoint stack (below). Note the "hanging word" - brand - which is a real multimedia no-no! |
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This was never going to work in a large open atrium filled with light using a screen usually reserved for viewing the holidays snaps.
Sean read from his notes, fumbled and stumbled, perhaps overwhelmed by the task at hand, but it was clear he had no control over the message. In this case, the slides drove the message, which was all text on the slide.
Had he put down the notepad he was holding and reading, and projected high quality pictures of the product encapsulating his team's spoken message, he may have rescued the presentation and made it a closer call.
But the initial concept of an older man and his alleged daughter sharing a transgenerational moment was less clear than the opposing team's young athletic female about to scoff down cascading cereal.
A good presentation might have saved them. But in this case it was the wrong tool at the wrong time with the wrong message in the wrong place. |
Trump cuts Sean's show: "Enough with the slideshow - we got the message (or, in fact you didn't make the message clear and time's up)" |
 And the team paid the price.
Actually, it was not so bad for them, as they finally said goodbye and good riddance to fired member Brent (left) who stood out like a saw thumb from the other thin attractive contestants. I can only think he was kept on because audiences were waiting to see how else he could upset his colleagues and how long Trump would keep him on. But in Episode 4, even good ratings I presume could not save Brent. Had he been kept around for fun, it would have cast a pall over the show and seen it accused of being exploitative. Which it isn't, is it? |
So a word to the wise.
Don't feel forced to use Powerpoint or Keynote or any other visual medium unless you have really thought through how it's going to aid your message delivery.
How might it actually interfere, through cognitive overload or data ambiguity, with your primary messages?
How could you use these aids to better tell a story, to illustrate the conflict you are seeking to resolve? Even if you're presenting random controlled trial (RCT) data, there is conflict embedded here:
1. Which hypothesis will be shown to be true even though both might claim to provide the best explanation;
2. Which intervention will best show an effect?
3. Which group will change most with which intervention?
You might not see this as "conflict" in the argumentative sense of the word, but they point to how data can conflict with expectations, which your presentation will attempt to describe, predict, and explain - then point to future research.
When you start to think in these terms, you can bring "dry" data alive, and your own presentation skill (and your passion for your work) will be better demonstrated. |
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