Effective Presentations

Some of my earlier posts have touched on the art of presentations and how I have been working hard on improving my presentation skills - oral and written. On the written side, I have discovered how less is more - Less slides, less text and numbers. As a reforming lawyer this less slides and less writing is strongly against my training. Instinctively, I want to create a detailed argument that creates a complete story - the more details, the more real and understandable my argument becomes. Of course for a presentation, this is completely wrong. A human mind can only absorb so much of a visual presentation (Check out my other post on this topic). Visual is the key word; a wealth of text or numbers on a slide just overwhelms the majority of human minds.
This doesn't mean you can't create slide decks with detailed information. You just can't use it as a presentation. Keep your presentation to the point - Intro, The point of your presentation (or why it is in their interest to listen for the next 10 minutes), key supporting reasons (just high level points), Conclusion. Use your detailed presentation as a supporting document given to your audience after the presentation.
Keeping in the theme of more visual - less reading, marketing guru Seth Godin has a very interesting article about the use of charts in presentations. Again, a person like myself thinks if I actually get a visual representation of data in my presentation, my work is done. Seth shows that this is not the case and that it can be made much more effective if you take the time to dig into what is the true point that the chart is trying to convey. You can find the article here.