This is the best resource I’ve seen to help clarify the dimensions of the debate and what’s at stake. Its clarity is due to Dan Roam’s mastery of visual thinking as a means to organize and focus the key aspects of complex topics and then communicate those insights in a simple and straightforward manner that is easily grasped. As I wrote a year ago, I loved Roam’s book on visual thinking, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This slideshow is a great example of the power of visual thinking.

This debate matters to me because I own a small business and there are no good, affordable alternatives for small businesses. I hope that this slideshow helps to illuminate the issues, and help the government reach a consensus that serves the consumer and tax payer, without continuing to enrich the private insurers at the expense of the consumer (which is the status quo).

We all know the seductive ease of creating a new presentation: setting up a dozen slides with titles, and then filling in the slides with endless bullet points.

It’s Too Easy to be Boring

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to remember the details of your message: if you can see the screen, you just read what’s on your slides. This practice is all-too common when the people who create and those who present the slide decks are different.

But it’s deadly for your audience when you add nothing fresh beyond what appears on the slides.

According to presentation gurus, this is absolutely the wrong approach for designing and delivering slide decks. Wrong, that is, if you care about getting your point across — and being remembered for what you say or believe.

I can just hear my husband’s rebuttal: in today’s hyper-busy business world, there’s no alternative to decks full of bullet-point slides. What else, after all, can you do when creating a presentation due later today while watching yet another yaddah-yaddah webinar or attending an all-hands audio conference?

My counter-argument: if presentations were more clear and memorable for people in the audience, perhaps we wouldn’t waste our time in so many unproductive meetings or webinars.

What People Do Better Than Machines

As presentation guru Garr Reynolds writes in Presentation Zen, 

Remember that we are living in a time when fundamental human talents are in great demand. Anyone — indeed any machine — can read a list of features or give a stream of facts to an audience. That’s not what we need or want. What we yearn for is to listen to an intelligent and evocative — perhaps at times even provocative — human being who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stimulates us with knowledge plus meaning, context, and emotion in a way that is memorable.

Although this point is often forgotten (especially in high-tech product marketing circles), Garr Reynolds reminds us that:

Presentations are not just about following a formula for transferring facts in your head [or the product manager’s head — ed. note] to the heads of those sitting before you by reciting a list of points on a slide. (If it were, why not send an email and cancel the presentation?) What people want is fundamentally more human. They want to hear “the story” of your facts.

In Presentation Zen Reynolds offers numerous examples of visually stunning and memorable slides, clearly designed by people with a visual eye and a knack for storytelling. He also lays out a set of principles for designing slides when you aspire to similar zen-like simplicity and memorability.

If you follow Reynolds’ principles (and license stock imagery from Getty, Corbis or iStockphoto.com), you too can produce more memorable slide decks.

This assumes you have a clear story to tell, have clarified what you want to say, and understand how best to get your points across to your audience.

Back in the Real World…

People who market high-tech products are among the least likely to practice the principles of “presentation zen.” Think about all those product managers — people who are paid to agonize over and fight for all the gory details of their products. After all their effort getting the product ready for the market, they want you to appreciate all those details too. Point by point, slide by slide. Stack diagram after stack diagram.

Sixty-seven slides later, what do you remember of the presentation? Can you remember anything the next day?

The Best of Both

If you lack designerly skills to create visually stunning presentations, what’s the alternative (besides hiring a designer)?

I’ve blogged about the power of visual thinking, and have recommended a book by Dan Roam, Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This is a great resource for business people (and teachers).

This book can help you learn how to think through and then convey complex situations through the power of simple visuals. Throughout his book Dan Roam uses simple, cartoon-like sketches to illustrate his points (as he does here on his company’s web site).

I think the approach that Dan Roam teaches offers wonderful possibilities for helping you crystallize your thinking and share your ideas — and how you got there — with others in very powerful ways. But some people might find his visual style too casual…

For situations that require more formality or visual elegance, the best of both approaches is to:

• apply Roam’s framework for thinking through the challenges and your communications options, and
• design the presentation (and your voice-over commentary) with the help of the principles outlined in Presentation Zen.

In a nutshell Presentation Zen explains that what makes messages memorable is some combination of:

• simplicity
• unexpectedness
• concreteness
• credibility
• emotions
• stories

I wish I had learned these principles back in school — or at least, much earlier in my career!

For Your Bookshelves

And now there’s a deceptively simple business book that can help you become less dependent upon consultants’ help, if you learn how to apply visual thinking to problem solving and group communications.

This book is written especially for people like me and you who think they can’t draw. It focuses on helping you see differently, explore and think things through visually, and then convey the insights you develop by this visual thinking technique.

In its own way, this is a practical guide for people who want to “Think Different.”

Simply Powerful

Besides its charming stick-figure sketches, the secret to The Back of the Napkin is its simple but powerful framework and the explanations on how to apply this framework to real-world problems:

• “seeing” problems in terms of the classic 6 W’s: who, what, when, where, how and why;
• exploring what’s most important to understand and then convey — for you as problem solvers, and for your audience (or the people you’re trying to convince) — via 5 key dimensions the author calls “SQVID”;
• discovering insights or fresh alternatives through the patterns that emerge from your visual combinations;
• and then applying the best communications approach given the audience and your objectives.

As evidence for the power of his framework, the book’s author, Dan Roam, cites scientific research that reveals the brain is “hard-wired” for fast processing in response to the 6 W’s, when information is conveyed visually.

As an antidote to “death by PowerPoint,” I highly recommend The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam.

Have Markers, Will Travel

When you’ve mastered the visual thinking framework laid out in Dan Roam’s book, all you need for client presentations is a set of markers and a surface to draw on. (The surface depends on the size of the team you’re interacting with: a napkin or piece of paper works fine in small meetings, a whiteboard or easel pad for larger groups.)

For situations that require PowerPoint (or Apple’s Keynote), the author recommends scanning hand-drawn sketches and inserting those graphics into your slide deck. He’s not suggesting you stop using PowerPoint, but instead learn how to visualize and convey important problems using his framework:

When we think about the more elaborate and insightful pictures required to show complex interactions of when, where, how, and why, the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

Making Your Point

For best results, Roam recommends thinking through what should be drawn on the whiteboard before others arrive, and how to stage elements to be added later. He’s learned through experience that sometimes the best communications occur when you take people through an abbreviated tour of your visual thinking journey.

People who master visual thinking will find themselves in great demand in the business world or in situations involving multiple stakeholders and lots of complexity or ambiguity.

And as American schools fail more and more to teach students how to think critically and communicate clearly, books like Back of the Napkin have something important to offer.