By Robert Lane and Chantal Bossé

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What if you were told you had an hour to speak but circumstances immediately before the event reduced your time slot to only 20 minutes? What would you do? If you’ve been in that situation, what DID you do? Now pretend a similar predicament arises, but this time you’re ready for it. You’ve added navigation elements to your slide shows and have the flexibility to completely restructure a talk on the spot, without making any changes to the actual PowerPoint slides. In other words, you can adjust the visual display to accommodate any circumstance, any audience question, any threat or opportunity…instantly.

Recently, Ellen Finkelstein contributed an excellent article to PresentationXpert entitled "Use a Menu to Create an Audience-Centered Presentation" where she described how to flexibly tailor a message to audiences. In those few paragraphs, she touched the tip of a very large iceberg indeed. You may have found yourself tantalized by the prospect that much more can be said about interactive speaking. That surely is the case.

In this article, we explore seven key principles that dive deeper into the marvelous and emerging world of visually interactive PowerPoint presentation.

The concepts below have been well worn by thousands of presenters over the years, from board rooms to classrooms, yet most PowerPoint users have never even heard of such concepts. If the ideas seem new to you, prepare for adventure ahead.

On the road to mastering interactive presentation, ponder these thoughts:

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Principle #1—Stay on Track: Just because we CAN jump around randomly between different pieces of content while speaking doesn’t give permission to be disorganized or lackadaisical while doing so. As ironic as it may sound, interactive performances should be very carefully planned. They absolutely never are completely spontaneous. Yes, the speaker has enormous freedom to make choices at any time, yet she simultaneously pursues a planned, methodical track from beginning to the end.

Here’s what that looks like:

We suggest an approach called the Content Ladder. Think of your overall message as a collection of small, sequential topics, like rungs on a ladder. During the talk, work your way up the ladder from topic to topic. Every once in a while it’s ok to dive off into a tangent, pulling in extra slides while answering questions or showing hidden detail, but return quickly to the planned track each time. Stay on it. Stay oriented with where you want to be at the end of the talk, even if that means skipping a planned topic or two along the way for sake of time.

Figure 1: Example of Nested Navigation with Content Ladder Graphic

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We also recommend a technique called the 75% Approach. If you have an hour to talk, plan only 45 minutes worth of content—leaving 15 minutes free for interactions throughout. At the beginning of the performance, tell the audience, “Ok, guys, we won’t have a question and answer session at the end of the talk because the question and answer session starts right now.”

Encourage questions while moving forward and gradually work through the track topics at the same time. Don’t be shy about mixing it up with the audience occasionally. You’ve already budgeted the time for such opportunities. Just remember to stay oriented.

What happens if viewers just sit there like rocks and don’t interact with you, resulting in an extra fifteen minutes of unused performance time? Well, plan for that possibility too. Have optional content such as examples or subtopics available that can be interwoven during the talk if needed.

Principle #2—Stay in Control: A related principle is to always, always stay in control of the performance agenda, no matter how dynamic it becomes. It’s your responsibility to provide viewers a quality experience that doesn’t inadvertently wander down unproductive rabbit paths. With practice you’ll master a delicate and intricate dance that balances viewer input with performance goals.

Figure 2

Be careful, too. Several situations will push you towards losing control. One is a contentious presentation environment. Perhaps it’s your task to announce layoffs and departmental cutbacks. In that case, pent up audience frustration and anger may motivate some individuals to abuse your interactive generosity as they ‘hog the floor,’ venting their emotions. Similarly, you may come across an occasional blowhard whose mission in life is to express his or her opinions during half your time slot. Or you may get so caught up in the excitement of interacting with certain energetic, fun audience members that ‘time just flies away before you know it.’ In all cases, stay in control. You must constantly monitor your role as moderator and pull up on the reins often.

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We use two subtle, yet very powerful techniques for quickly reasserting control. One is listening for transition points. When he says a word or phrase that relates to your content, gracefully interrupt and navigate to that information while saying something like, “You know Bill, that’s a good point. Let’s look a little more closely at that budget item.” Bill and the rest of the audience have no choice but to shut up and listen because you are acknowledging input and specifically addressing it. You’ve taken back control.

The other technique is simply waiting until the person takes a breath and then applying a more generic lead in, “You know what, that reminds me…let me show you something else you’ll probably find interesting.” That something else can be anything. It might be the next item in your track or another topic you planned to cover anyway. Regardless, the intervention completely stifles further interaction and again places you in control. With practice, you’ll be able to instantly and continually shift focus in this way without the audience even noticing. In essence, your presentation style will feel like a conversation.

Principle #3—Prioritize Content Importance: We’ve seen it so many times and probably you have too—a speaker miscalculates the length of her performance and starts rushing delivery, trying to reach those beloved conclusion slides on time. She has fifty slides in her show and believes the earth surely will freeze over if she doesn’t show every detail on every slide. She begins summarizing complex information too quickly for viewers to understand. Everyone knows she’s stressed and flustered. Her speaking effectiveness plummets.

Interactive speakers easily avoid this situation by discretely skipping slides throughout the performance if necessary—but which slides should you skip? Here’s a big tip: Try not to make those kinds of decisions under pressure. Instead, analyze the message before the performance and prioritize each slide’s importance. Think to yourself, “Ok these 30 slides are really essential and I definitely must show them. These other ten slides are…well…helpful but I could live without them if I get in trouble. And these 10 are not vital at all—I could easily skip them altogether without substantially affecting message flow or meaning.” 

Figure 3

“What?!!! Are you crazy? ALL my slides are really important”. No they’re not. Some slides are more central than others. Or if all your slides truly do have equal weight, it probably indicates you are cramming way, way too much information into a single performance. Pretend your time slot will be cut from an hour to 20 minutes. Which slides make the cut? Those are your highest display priorities. Everything else is expendable to some degree.

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Principle #4—Be Willing to Change the Planned Track: Principle 1 aside, interactive speakers occasionally must modify or abandon the originally planned track—even in mid-performance. Novice dynamic presenters struggle greatly with this concept at first. They build sophisticated navigation structures into their slide shows, allowing for all conceivable contingencies, but then refuse to use such devices when circumstances clearly warrant a change of plans!

A classic situation is following a speaker who goes 20 minutes over his assigned time limit. His blunder doesn’t give you permission to go 20 minutes over your limit but are you willing to spontaneously adjust the delivery plan accordingly, cutting perhaps half your planned slides? In a sales situation, if the prospect shows obvious buying signs (or more often, impatience), are you willing to jump immediately to the close or otherwise get to the point, at the expense of your carefully prepared outline?

Figure 4—Showcase Navigation:
Courtesy Paul Franklin, Leeds University

All of us feel uncomfortable with such scenarios initially. We don’t want to change our momentum. Recognizing that fact and learning how to flow with the situation at hand is a key step towards mastery. Here’s a technique that can help. Think of your performances as conversations. Why? Because we often don’t get to say everything that’s on our mind during conversations, and yet easily adjust input as topics change, with little thought given to the process. In the same way, polished interactive speakers learn to flexibly adapt to their environments. Tailoring delivery to the circumstances becomes second nature.

Principle #5—Incorporate Visual Cues: A visual cue in cognitive psychology and media design is defined as any aspect of visual display that helps a user find information, understand available options, stay oriented in complex field of data, or relate new ideas to concepts already understood. In an interactive presentation context, visual cues are your friends—BIG TIME.

Incorporating various kinds of visual cues into navigation structures and slide displays makes a huge difference in how quickly a speaker can find needed slides and smoothly bring them into view. They also help him or her stay oriented when moving around within interlinked networks. Visual cues even act as cheat sheets, reminding the speaker of upcoming slides or entire categories of information that wait in the wings for immediate display.

Figure 5—Screenshot Visual Cues Used in a Menu

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Notice the menu in Figure 5, for example. The hyperlink sources in this case are small screenshots of the actual slides that will display once the respective links are clicked. A presenter can casually glance at this menu will discussing a topic and instantly see a preview of other available topics.

Imagine how comforting that fact can be to a nervous presenter. Visual cues incorporated in this way are so effective that experienced interactive speakers rarely use, or even need, notes. Visual elements on slides are like road maps, providing constant guides that smooth out delivery, even when the topics under discussion are spontaneous or audience-driven.

Principle #6—Know Your Content: Presenting in typical linear (non-interactive) fashion encourages a speaker to be practically dead and propped up behind the podium; PowerPoint spits out slides with robotic predictability, regardless of a speaker’s vital signs. Audience-tailored performances are different. They require at least a small amount of cognitive exertion. You are, after all, customizing displays to the interests, needs, and experience levels of viewers. Said another way, dynamic presenters must be intimately familiar with their materials, so that dynamic slide selection takes on the smoothness of words rolling off the tongue. Lazy performers need not apply.

Principle #7—Use Multiple Slide Shows: Principle 7 is the best saved for last. So you’ve started experimenting with interactive delivery? Probably your adventure began by adding hyperlinks within a single slide show, right, as was the case in Ellen’s example? Here’s a little-known secret; tailored delivery becomes REALLY fun only after you are comfortable jumping to other slide shows as well. In other words, you deliver multiple presentations during each performance.

Figure 6—Hierarchically Arranged Presentation Network

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Think of it this way. Imagine surfing the Internet and being forced to stay within a single Web site. That wouldn’t be much fun. The same phenomenon occurs with interactive presentation. There is only so much you can do with a single slide show. True visually expressive power comes from moving around between hundreds or perhaps even thousands of slides, selecting just the right content to match the current need. Building that kind of versatility into a single PowerPoint file is impossible. You must branch into additional shows with this kind of speaking.

Is that process difficult? No, not really. It’s no harder than moving around between Web sites. Why don’t you try it now? Simply use the Existing file of web page tab on the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box, immediately above the Place in this document tab shown in Ellen’s example. External links are slightly more complicated than their internal link cousins. So be sure to learn all about hyperlinks before taking such a multi-show network live.

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