How I successfully quit my powerpoint habit. Mistakes were made!

The big consultancies all have a big back office with lots of graphic designers to work on their presentation slides, their reports, white papers etc. Great, they can afford it. But what can you do as an employee with no resources, a freelancer or a small business? Here's what I figured out with months of experiments that burned through 3.000€ and over 50 platforms.

I'm sharing this with you because I had a talk with a friend about this. They were looking to make great design affordable and to somewhat optimise and automate their process. Well, I'm trying to do everything on a shoestring budget, so I think I squeezed as much efficiency out of it as humanly possible at this point.

What I tried

Since you'll probably want to know how I got to my solution and what I did try (and fail at) along the way, I'll also share my approach with you. If you don't care about that, I get it. Time is limited et cetera et cetera. Just scroll down to the solution.

The Virtual Backoffice

So my first approach was to do exactly what the big guys were doing. Consultants at BCG, McKinsey, Deloitte the other big companies just send their powerpoint disasters to someone and it'll come back shiny and wonderful, right? Well, the truth is more of a back-and-forth between a number of people, probably including lots of emails, version chaos and at the end, lots of powerpoint karaoke on the consultant's part.

I wasn't going to have any of that. My process would be well defined. The files would all be shared on the cloud, with detailed instructions to my back office, which would consist of top designers around the world.

Enter reality...

After using upwork, fiverr and a host of other freelancing platforms to source designers, I ended up with stuff like this.

Yeah, not pretty. Initially, I thought it was a matter of freelancer quality. Nope. Than I thought it was my process, the way I hand over documents. Nope. Maybe the onboarding? Nope. Language barriers? Nope. Cultural barriers? Nope.

It's the basic principle. If you hand over something to be "designed", then the designer will give you their interpretation and understanding of it. It will take iterative cycles to end up where you think you need to be. If, at the same time, your own understanding of aesthetics and information visualisation and storytelling is different (not necessarily lacking), the experience will feel like root canal treatment. So that's FAIL #1.

Design Templates

Obviously, I tried this next. If having a back office is not a solution, maybe I can just have a series of well designed templates. After all, lots of these are sold with graphics and charts and layouts for all kinds of purposes. So you just need to modularise what you are doing to click and assemble what you need. Easy, right? Why didn't I start with that?

Obviously, you know where this is headed... but let's not jump ahead.

So off I go to envato elements, templatemonster and other collections. What do they have? How do others build templates? I buy a few, experiment with them, build some of my own...

I have 150 slide types to play with... right?

Next, I used Templafy, Slidehunter, Pitchdeck and other tools and platforms. I built, rearranged, organised and at some point wondered... what was I trying to do again? Oh right, having an easy and sort of automated way of creating slides. Only, this didn't feel easy.

All this does is recreate the problem you have in presentation tools like powerpoint at a much higher level. You know, the problem of starting up the program and wondering what template you should pick today. Sure, you might have your corporate templates. But those never quite fit, do they? FAIL #2

( started promising though... )

Automated Generation

Pitchdeck got me thinking: Hang on, I am a computer scientist. Moving pixels is outdated anyway. Why am I using 20th century approaches when we're in the 21st century? There had to be some AI startup working on a presentation tool that automates what a back office does.

Lo and behold... there was. Enter Slidebean.

I should have become sceptical once I saw that in creating a presentation outline, their understanding of "content" blocks were text, media and charts... Still, I pressed on, dreaming of a beautiful AI future. Hours of experimentation later...

What the AI does is to rearrange stuff on the slide... aaand... yeah, no, that's it. I'll spare you the 5 other AI presentation tools I wasted hours in. I like the algorithmic design, but as a tip: something should smell fishy if an AI tool starts with showing you a range of templates. FAIL #3

No Slides

At this point, I've become pretty frustrated, annoyed and desperate. That's it! Screw slides. My presentations will just be me, maybe a few photos or videos but that's it. I refuse to be a part of the slide madness. Who needs them anyway? Well...

( Yes, that's a chalkboard. So that happened. )

Guess what the number 1 question is people ask before and after a presentation?

Right, people want slides. I caved and started using a small number of pictures just to have something. But to really hit this home with you, here's a verbatim conversation I had after a conference. And no, I am not kidding.

• Me: "That's it. Thanks for your attention. Any Questions?"
• Elderly Man: "Yeah, can we have your slides?"
• Me (baffled, looking at him, at the screen, then back at him): "Seriously?"
• He shrugs and nods.
• Me: "I literally just showed you a total of 3 pictures."
• Elderly Man: "Yeah, can I have those?"
• Me: ... (speechless)

Fail #4

The Solution

Ok, enough build-up of tension. So what worked for me, or rather where am I at now?

I went back to basics, really. After realising that I am wasting valuable time and not making much real progress, I wondered what the cause of this was. It clicked while I was listening to a client at a project. ( Sorry, I do listen closely but sometimes, a stray thought pops in. )

Reframing

I wasn't looking at presentations like a product. Usually, when people talk about presentations, they mean the combination of their speech and the visuals. Or they think about the combination of slide-deck and discussion. I shifted my mind towards thinking:

What if this was a product?

Something that people would actually pay me to get. What would it have to be? What need or pain point would it answer? What job would it do? What would it gain someone?

That's when it clicked.

Every single (!!!) tool or platform I looked at approaches presentations as a structuring and visualisation problem. Whether they are using slides or zoom-ins or some other structuring approach doesn't really matter. But that's not the right problem space. Not at all.

It's a tooling problem.

The Job of a Presentation

If you aren't familiar with the Jobs To Be Done framework, here's a quick primer:

Don't think of the outcome people expect from a tool. A power drill makes holes, so people just want a perfect hole. Right? It depends. Maybe they just need their picture on the wall. They'll take the quickest, easiest, most convenient way to do it. Start with the outcome, think about the job, then about the tooling.

We all know that different presentations have different intents: startup pitch decks, agency pitch decks, slide deck reports, conference slides, sales slides... they are all trying to do a different job, right? So why are they all using the same hammer?

Please, please, let that sink in for a bit.

If you look at slide:ology, presentation zen or similar publications, they all start at the right point. Who is your audience? What is your intention? What is the message? Do you want to entertain, amuse, inspire, educate, explain, convince, sell... what? They're the right questions to ask.

BUT...

All these books and articles then move to "now let's create the slides". Hammer --> Nail!

So naturally, that's what I was doing and that's why all the tools out there were failing me.

What job do my presentations solve?

Now that you know my thinking process, how did I solve this conundrum?

First, I really looked hard at the question: what job is this type of presentation trying to solve? Then I asked myself: does this job need presentation slides? To my honest surprise, in 90% of the cases, the answer was no.

Pitch Deck? Nope. Startups are actually moving away from that.

Agency Deck? Nope. No one wants to know your history and how great you are.

Slide Deck Reports? Nope. Smart companies are banning those.

Training Decks? Yeah, right. No.

I'll spare you the 12 other types of presentations decks I went through. Here's the only (!) thing that remained:

A slide show, in the old, literal sense of the word. The really good presentations are shows, with the slides being the shadows on the cavern wall. They place the audience into a different time and space. They're the holodeck changing reality. They're a phantasmagoria that you conjure for entertainment, inspiration and connection.

The last bit is what I realised for me. I hold presentations to connect with people. That's the only reason I talk at meetups, conferences, company events or in-house workshops. Not to explain, educate or to convince, but to connect.

It's also something I've been doing for years, in my private life. Here's my dirty little secret:

That's me, roleplaying. I've been creating storytelling experiences as a game master for the past 25 years. Not sure why I am looking worried here. Maybe because we ran out of cake?

Anyway, back to the topic. The reason I am sharing this with you is for you to understand where I am coming from. Looking over all the presentations I've made over the past 10 years, I realised that I use presentations to invite people into my world and share experiences I had. Mostly, I'm hoping to spare people some of my mistakes and offer them a different perspective or approach to their problems.

My Solution

So now I knew what type of presentations to create and why, I went back to automation.

Here's my current setup. It will not work for you. Unless you are trying to create the type of presentation I just mentioned for similar reasons. Still, my process might inform yours, so:

Since I am actually telling a story, I am using tools like Scrivener and Persona to create it as a text, keeping in mind the audience, the intent, the message. These are tools usually used by fiction authors, with functionalities not found in any presentation tool I've seen. This is the part that I love to do, so it's the thing that I am not handing off or automating. Instead, I am building a repertoire of anecdotes, characters and settings.

The output of that automatically (dropbox + zapier) gets handed over to a virtual assistant with a background in graphics, usually on upwork. Here, my virtual backoffice experiment actually helped. What I have them do is to search for images using stock photo sites that illustrate the story. I have defined criteria for the image quality and the mood.

As it is a story, I want it to move like a story, so it's a single scrolling landscape. Similar to the Bayeux Tapestry that I'd seen while on student exchange in the UK many moons ago. I use Canva to build a slide template with what I learned while looking into design templates.

Finally, I use deepart and enhanceeverything from my AI experiments to make sure that all images are consistent in style and quality. Doing this manually would be very expensive.

Since doing all of this is a detailed process with many steps, I documented it in google docs, but I am now switching to Process Street which allows me to A LOT with Zapier.

That's my semi-automated process.

What does the result look like?

Well, if you are interested in that, I have another big talk coming up at this design thinking event in Berlin on September 19th this year. If you're interested, I can document the process I outlined above with the intermediate results.

What's your approach? What tools are you using? Let me know in the comments.

~

I have helped people throughout Europe and Asia to successfully introduce, build, manage, and operate design thinking practices.

To discover how I can help you personally to learn design thinking practices or help you implement and scale them throughout your organisation, get in touch with me today.

Follow me for content about #designthinking, #creativity, #personaldevelopment and #NoBS.

~