HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 55th STC CONFERENCE

The Power (and Risk) of PowerPoint

By Lois Marsh

"If effective communication is about getting messages across, then slides should focus on conveying these messages: not the detailed information (the what), but what this information means to the audience (the so what)."

- Jean-Luc Doumont, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Slides Are Not All Evil", Technical Communication, February 2005

Although my immediate team’s main focus is on process analysis and policy & procedure development, the group we support specializes in measuring the financial risks of trading and underwriting for a large financial institution. In light of recent stresses to the credit and stock markets and the ever more complex derivative products, we’ve been asked to help our reporting group improve their PowerPoint presentations to make the implications of the risks reported more easily understood.

Great project, but where to start? Other than making sure slides are clean and the language easy to understand, what else could I contribute? STC to the rescue! In June, I attended two excellent presentations on scientific communication and the use of PowerPoint at STC’s 55th annual conference. They focused on the work of two proponents of effective scientific communication: Jean-Luc Doumont, an engineer and PhD in applied physics and Edward R. Tufte, Professor Emeritus of statistics and information design at Yale University ("the da Vinci of Data").

What did I learn? That PowerPoint is the de facto standard for delivering presentations on scientific and business data, but many of us don’t use this tool effectively. We cram too much text onto each slide and fail to ‘tell a story’ throughout the presentation. There is little use of color or other design elements to guide the reader through the text. As a result, audiences are tuning out from boring or unintelligible PowerPoint presentations.

So what’s the answer? There are two challenges: one format and design-related, the other content-related. Should we use more colour? Yes, for sure. Animation? Yes, but only if it contributes to the discussion. One presenter showed us a slide displaying radiation data. Animation was added (the graph populated in one second increments) and also the sound of a Geiger counter that got louder as the amount of radiation increased. Extremely dramatic and effective!

The bigger challenge is to ensure the viewer or reader can quickly grasp a central message from each slide, and relate it to the rest of the presentation. We need to focus on the ‘so what’ and ensure that our slides transition logically so the reader/listener can follow the ‘story’. Jean-Luc Doumont suggests that each individual slide should feature:

• a clear message supported by visual evidence
• as little text as possible
• headlines of not more than two lines
• full sentences with subjects and verbs
• the audience should be able to grasp the slide ‘as a single thought’ and at the same time grasp its relationship to a narrative or argument of which it is an integral part

How important is getting the message across effectively? Here’s a quote from the Journal of Science Communication about the devastating tsunami in 2004:

"At the heart of the devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunamis lies a failure to communicate scientific information adequately to either decision-makers or the community. Important lessons are to be learnt about the need for professional [communications] skills."

Experts in risk management face similar challenges to those in other highly technical fields (although not usually life-threatening). By adopting some of the principles suggested by Doumont and Tufte, we hope to get the message out to our audience in a more powerful way.