August 6, 2007

Agnieszka Girling

You may think of PowerPoint as simply the best way to deliver a presentation and communicate ideas (which, of course, it is). But as this week's columnist, Agnieszka Girling, explains, if you're "designing an argument," you need to go beyond tables and bullet points to in order to get your audience to really "see" things your way.

I don't know about you, but I happen to be a prolific Microsoft PowerPoint user. It's not because I love it so much — though I do love it — it's more because my job is largely about developing and communicating complex business or technical analysis, and PowerPoint is the best tool I have found that allows me to do my job well.

PowerPoint has become an established format for communicating ideas, creating project plans, and just about everything else, and not only at Microsoft. The world seems to have embraced PowerPoint as the vehicle for delivering a message, sometimes to a fault (like when your company's CEO shows up at the Christmas party with a holiday message in a PPT or PPTX format). But that's beside the point. While PowerPoint is great at enabling you to deliver the presentation (for the most part), it's not optimized to help with the early steps of formulating the presentation flow, i.e., designing the argument. Yet that step is necessary to make a compelling point and truly drive your message home with your audience.

Before I offer thoughts on the solution, let me explain what I mean by "designing the argument." Has any of the following happened to you while you are delivering a presentation to an audience?

• People ask you about things you are just about to tell them (This causes you to jump ahead, then back, show them appendix slides, and possibly lose track of your presentation flow.)
• You get asked questions you have not predicted that made you think "Doh! How could I have missed it?"
• Your audience gets stuck on issues that are purely "rat holes," and it is difficult moving them off these random topics onto issues that are at the heart of your presentation.
• Your audience expects something different than what you are presenting. For example, the audience misunderstood what your presentation was going to be about (or ... maybe you have misunderstood what your presentation was supposed to be about).

These types of things signify a weak argument design, and interrupt presentation flow. If you answered yes to any of the above, you may need help in designing your argument to be more effective, so please read on for a method to accomplish this.

Let's examine the tools people have — or don't have — to develop a solid argument. Here are the Slide 1 and Slide 2 of the generic PowerPoint template, this is generally the first thing you see when building a presentation (even though they do come in a variety of designs, possible layouts, or background themes):

Look familiar? Assuming you know what you want to call a presentation, you type it in thinking you'll revisit it later (when you are more sure of what you want the title to be), and when you add another slide, it has a framework for adding bullets (or charts or tables), but that really doesn't help you think about what the flow should be. I am not trying to be critical, but, most people use a presentation framework that does not facilitate creating a solid argument flow. The blank slides serve as containers; however, our job as presentation creators is to take a step back and design the argument flow before building the actual presentation (a.k.a. "filling the containers)". You should consider that step as the way to ensure that the presentation will have a solid flow, will anticipate questions, and will answer them in due course. This will allow you to deliver a clear, well-backed, well-thought-out argument.

It was in my own experience of attempting to design a solid argument flow that I stumbled on the idea of PowerPoint story boards (a.k.a. "scribble decks"). The concept is really simple: just as movie directors develop simple visuals to communicate the progression of scenes and drive for clarity of direction, so can presentation creators use storyboards to develop a simple plan to drive for a clear and effective presentation. These decks are working decks you create in PowerPoint to illustrate your objective and thus plan your argument before starting to build the formal presentation.

It all started when I was working on a project with a hired market research company. I realized that in order to optimize the activities of the researchers, I needed some way of communicating to them the end result. However, this is when I realized, that I didn't have a clear end result in mind. Without much effect, I had just been poring through volumes of market data myself, in an attempt to understand market opportunity for a new product. Hiring a research vendor had a positive effect (with more people we could pore through even more data), but it required some direction. The need to develop a tool to communicate the desired outcome became clear to both me and the researchers I worked with, and it is also important to recognize that having a clear end in mind is necessary regardless of whether you are directing your own or someone else's presentation creation efforts. This is how our first PowerPoint story board was born.

I am an avid Tablet PC user, so I put my stylus and tablet to work; however, I have since seen several story boards developed by others without the use of a Tablet PC, and they served the same purpose just as well. You simply use pen and paper or a whiteboard then scan or take a picture, or you use PowerPoint's built-in capabilities to describe what types of graphs, charts, other visuals or messages you envision in the final deliverable, or you just use Microsoft Paint or another drawing program and just paste your "scribbles" into the scribble deck. Remember, the idea of the scribble deck is that it is rapid framework development that helps you structure and communicate your argument, and the simplicity is the reason why I called out Paint, and not Adobe Photoshop, as the appropriate tool to do your "scribbles."

Instead of showing you entire story boards, let me focus on one example of a scribble slide that resulted in slides that were clear for the final presentation. This single story board was drawn to describe the health of an ecosystem for Product X (some product-specific details have been stripped to protect the sensitive nature of the data):

This doesn't look like much, does it? Yet, it was this mechanism that forced the discussion about whether the arrows represented the right relationships between different value providers. It also caused us to think about measure of growth (whether dollars, the number of customers, or percentage of share we take away from or lose to competitors was the right measure). It forced the debate over how we defined infrastructure providers and parts manufacturers. It clarified advertising's role (whether advertising was an inherent part of the business model for Product X, or simply an orthogonal thing that's just going on everywhere). It raised questions about what we should do with the chart once we built it. On the latter, we decided that the areas of growth or shrinkage in the Product X's ecosystem would give us insight into where future business opportunities lay, and where our business partners may be suffering a squeeze and would therefore require a transformation of their own business model.

Here is one of several charts that evolved from the above scribble slide:

The analysis that followed took weeks and multiple sources of data to complete. But the scribble chart always provided direction, and initiated many fruitful discussions.

You should keep in mind that your argument design is not set in stone. As the thinking evolves, it may depart in places from the original argument idea, and that's acceptable and expected. However, the original argument design is an important tool in capturing the purpose of doing the work, and therefore can help short-circuit many unproductive discussions, and ensure that the productive ones happen.

About the author

Agnieszka Girling works as Lead Product Planner at Microsoft. Previously a Group Program Manager in Visual Studio, Agnieszka has recently switched from a technical role to a business-focused role and has worked on defining product strategy for both established and emerging software products. Agnieszka is an avid user of technology, including mobile devices, and — of course — Tablet PC and PowerPoint! She has two young children who love to draw pictures on a Tablet PC.