Eye of the needle!

Today, I stumbled upon this great article most presentations arent bullet proof  by Seth Godin .  This must be a millionth article on why mixing bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation is injurious to audience’s mental health !

In his excellent book “Beyond Bullet Points”, the author Cliff Atkinson provides an interesting metaphor to explain why bullet points do not work in a PowerPoint…Psychologists have found that any sensory information that we receive(Seeing, hearing, smell, touch ) in the present , has to pass through an “eye of a needle” test for it to be registered in the long term memory. What does this mean ? 

Take the example of your daily commute to office through your regular route for the past year or so .Even though your sensory memory was (and is) working  every single day (otherwise you would not be reading this !) , it is never etched on to your long-term memory.  However, I am sure though that you would be able to recall your commute on a particular day even  dating several years back .. a day on which it rained heavily during commute  or there was an accident on your route or you had to take a detour due to a major festival  …or some other striking event which caused the day’s ride to be etched on to the long-term memory.

So the Message to all the modern day PowerPoint presenters of the world is …Humans have a limited brain capacity (!!!) due to which our brain purges all the sensory information through a filter setup in the eye of a needle …anything that passes through the filter remains etched in memory for long…others are scrupulously erased from long-term memory. Unfortunately, all the bullet point efforts will not be remembered even to the basic level because they do not pass through “eye of the needle”. So, what does pass through the eye of the needle in our brain? not very much !

I recently came across this book “Made To Stick” –Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip & Dan Heath that provides some clue .The authors have the following elements  to express our idea in a way that it will make stick to the audience mind :

S  -          Simple –           Have only one core message that you wish to convey in a presentation

U –         Unexpected –   Make others to Pay attention

C-            Credible         -   Drive authenticity in the message

C-            Concrete       -    Use simple language…not jargons 

E-            Emotional     -    While data is good, Humans are a bundle of emotions !

S-            Stories           -     Narrate a Story !

I am sure you will complain that the above list again looks like a bullet-point list without bullets marked in front…Ladies and Gentlemen, so just take one message out of this …In every presentation TELL A STORY …….not three stories…just one story…your audience will be kinder with you…

In the next post , we will see how to weave a story!