Week 4: Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen is not your typical book on presentations. The author, Garr Reynolds, challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today's world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations.

In his introduction, he quotes Leonardo Da Vinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." In the training world, we do ourselves a disservice by over-complicating our visuals. Reynolds references some research done in the 80's that indicated that "it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you both verbally and in written form at the same time."

This, of course, is typically how we conduct our training sessions. The trainer gives verbally the same info that can be read by the learner on the screen (or in their hand-out of the slides in many cases). The most effective approach is for your slides to contain imagery that enhance the learning experience, imagery that supports the point you're trying to make.To give you an example, I've added some slides below from our approved curriculum on "True Colors." To the right of the original slides, I'm adding slides that Field Trainer Cindi Stevens reworked based on the Presentation Zen approach. Here is what she did. I know its hard to read - this slide introduces the color BLUE.

This next slide talks about the attributes of a Blue (how they like to be treated).

This last slide talks about behaviors that frustrate a Blue.

As you can see, the slides do not contain much text (if any). Rather, they contain images that enhance what is being taught. The detailed information is found in the speaker notes.

Another important element in this approach is the creation of a detailed takeaway document. Obviously, this document won't be a print-out of the slides, but rather a document designed to present text, statistics, charts, etc. This will allow the participants to leave with key information, but makes it unnecessary that you cram all of the information into your slides. After all, if the slides can stand by themselves as a document why would we need to present them?

The information above barely scratches the surface of the Presentation Zen approach. I encourage to buy and read the book. You can also find great information on this approach at the books website http://www.presentationzen.com/ or at the authors blog http://www.garrreynolds.com/index.html.