What Is the Key to Presentations With Impact?

When I was on a large staff, I once worked for an executive who was very, very busy. So busy, in fact, they did not have time for long briefings, stories, data, or discussions. This person was so busy they had a rule that if slides were involved in a presentation, each slide could only have three bullet points, each bullet point was one complete sentence with no commas, and each sentence must be seven words or less.

Some might believe these to be draconian measures, designed to undermine the complexity of the international situations we were dealing with. At first, I thought this as well. But I was lucky to have a boss and mentor wise to the ways of senior executives, who approached this issue differently.

“Think,” they said. These guidelines were not designed to make our lives difficult. In fact, they can make our lives easy if we think through it. It is a critical thinking exercise. Eating an elephant is one bite at a time—just like the complexity of our issues. We are simply going through the important bites he needs to take and how he might do it.

With this mindset, we quickly developed an overview criterion that met the needs of our senior leaders. Plus, this overview procedure helped us become more critical in thinking about answering the challenges, not just preparing data for others to digest. Using an oft-used structure, we whittled down our conversations to four key questions:

• Why is this important to us and to the audience? This answered the questions of "So what?" and "Who cares?"
• What are the three ideas we need to provide the audience? These three ideas were how we can make the information useful to the audience.
• How can they play a role in making these ideas happen? Very simply, this translated ideas into action.
• What if they accomplished this? What was the desired outcome? Reinforcing the importance of answering this question posed the idea of impact and the role the audience could play in making it happen.

When we put together our information, these were always the core ideas. Eventually, the senior leader asked us to add three more key slides. The first was a purpose slide. This clarified what the presentation was about. Are we simply providing information? An in-progress update? Are we asking for a decision? When?

The second slide he wanted us to put in was a questions slide. We would record the questions heard throughout the presentation and answer those. This slide also allowed the senior leader some open discussion time.

The last slide they wanted was the tagline. This is what we wanted them to remember and what we needed a future audience never to forget.

So here was our overall slide packet:

1. Purpose
2. Why is this important to us and to the audience?
3. What are the three ideas we need to provide the audience?
4. How can they play a role in making these ideas happen?
5. What if they accomplished this? What was the desired outcome?
6. Questions
7. Tagline

Communicating in this way served the dual purpose of making us think critically about our information, why it was important, what we wanted the leaders to do with it, and the impact it might have going forward.

From this, we went from just making slides to building policy and relationships that had a much greater impact.