Presentations

In “The McKinsey Way,” author Ethan M. Rasiel presents numerous insights to problem solving, analytical reasoning and effective communication practiced at McKinsey and Company, one of the world’s foremost management-consulting firms.

Pre-Wiring a Presentation

Pre-wiring a presentation involves discussing your findings and recommendations with key decision-makers independently ahead of a group presentation. By getting various participants’ buy-in to the contents of your presentation, you ensure their support to your conclusions and avoid surprise reactions and disagreements.

There should be no surprises on the day of the presentation. All the major players should be taken through the solution in private. This way, necessary negotiation, compromise, and new facts that are integral to the acceptance of the proposal will be integrated by the time of the presentation. Pre-wiring removes much of the good to what risk from the presentation and allows the team to shine.

Following the practice of pre-wiring at McKinsey, organizations such as Wipro Technologies have started promoting pre-wiring. See article from Fast Company magazine.

Possible Reactions to a Pre-wired Presentation

• If your research is thorough and conclusions are logical, each decision-maker you meet ahead of a presentation may accept the contents of your presentation and agree to support your presentation.
• During the course of your conversations, you may uncover new details that may compel you to adjust your conclusions. Quite possibly, you may have to negotiate and make compromises in your conclusions.
• If a key decision-maker raises objections to your conclusions, you may rethink through your entire analysis and develop an alternate solution to the problem at hand.

Benefits of Pre-wiring a Presentation

• Prevents Blindsiding: Clearly, the biggest advantage of discussing a presentation with key decision-makers ahead of a group presentation is that it keeps you “from getting blindsided by major objections to your solution.” By avoiding surprises, you ensure each participant’s backing to your conclusions.
• Helps Get Buy-In: Presentations are usually time-constrained. There may not be sufficient time to describe finer aspects of your research, your deductions and recommended actions. Meeting with individual participants can help you supply all the relevant details to each participant, help him/her appreciate how your recommendations may affect him/her and get a buy-in.
• Develops Perspective: Presenting your findings to individuals allows you to gather additional inputs that help you develop a broader perspective. You may uncover new details that may compel you to adjust your conclusions.
• Helps prepare for the final presentation and tailor your message to suit the audience.

Concluding Thoughts

Pre-wiring a presentation improves the likelihood that your audience will identify with your approach and consent to your recommendations.

Suppose you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation with pictures from prototype testing of a design or pictures from your vacation. When you insert pictures into the PowerPoint file, you may realize that the file’s size will balloon with addition of each picture. You may end-up with a large PowerPoint file that may perhaps be difficult to distribute or email.

The reason for larger PowerPoint files is twofold. Firstly, Microsoft PowerPoint may not store picture data in an optimum format. Secondly, while today’s digital cameras can capture pictures at high resolutions (between three to five megapixels per picture,) on-screen display requires pictures of just 96 DPI (dots per inch) resolutions. In addition, typical office-document printing requires pictures of no more than 200 to 300 DPI resolutions.

The more-recent versions of Microsoft PowerPoint facilitate compressing pictures easily to create smaller files.

If you desire to compress a single picture or a group of pictures, highlight the pictures. The Picture toolbar will appear, as illustrated in Figure 1. Now, choose “Compress Pictures” from the Picture toolbar. In the resulting dialogue box, make appropriate selections to execute the command.

If you desire to compress all the pictures in your PowerPoint file, an easier approach involves the “Save As” dialogue. From the menu bar, choose “File” – “Save As … .” In the resulting dialogue box, open the “Tools” dropdown and choose the “Compress Pictures” command, as illustrated in Figure 2.

‘B’ for Blank Screen, ‘W’ for White Screen

During a presentation, when you are running a slideshow in PowerPoint, you may want to divert the attention of your audience away from the contents of your PowerPoint slide. When you are answering a question on a topic unrelated to a current slide, you may not want the audience to focus on the illustrations or graphs on your slide. Instead, you may want to be the focus of their attention.

• If you press the ‘B’ key or the ‘.’ key during your PowerPoint slideshow, the screen will go blank. This will enable you to redirect your audience’s attention to yourself and your talk. When you are ready to continue, press the ‘B’ key or the ‘.’ key to resume the slideshow.
• Alternately, press the ‘W’ key or the ‘,’ key to display a white screen. Press the ‘W’ key or the ‘,’ key a second time to resume the slideshow.

In general, it is always a good idea to have a blank screen to help get your audience to focus on you when beginning or concluding your presentation, introducing yourself or answering questions. The later versions of Microsoft PowerPoint end with a blank “End of slideshow, click to exit” screen by default.

[Number] + Enter to Transit to a Particular Slide

As with all communication processes, your PowerPoint slides and verbal presentation should consist of a logical flow of ideas and supporting material. Unfortunately, presenters often overlook this necessity.

Presenters habitually transit to a prior slide to show a graph or some data— “As I said in slide four…let me go to slide number four…here it is… .” Alternately, they sometimes transit to a further slide or to a slide in the appendix— “Edward, I am glad you brought that up…in fact, I included a chart in the last slide…let me show it to you now… .”

Moving to a prior slide or a further slide (by using the ‘Page Up’ or ‘Page Down’ keys) can distract the audience. If you must transit to a particular slide, hit the slide number and press ‘Enter.’ Note down the current slide number to use when you want to resume the slideshow. Refer to your handouts or a printout of your slideshow for slide numbers.

Additional

• In the PowerPoint slideshow mode, hit the ‘F1’ key to access a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use during slideshows.
• My article from November, ‘You, not Your Slides, are Your Presentation,’ offers tips on engaging your audience during public speaking.