Don’t think that your slides are your presentation. They’re not. Your slides are like beads lying on a table in a big messy pile until you assemble them into a coherent order and string them into a beautiful necklace.
I like to watch Law and Order. There are a certain number of scenes in episodes of Law and Order, and if they are not arranged in the right sequence, there is no drama, no message, no clarity, no meaning!
This is pretty obvious, and I imagine you’re good at arranging the scenes of your show into marching order. But what do you say to the audience when you’re moving from one scene to the next?
If you’re like most people, you say nothing. You just click the clicker to bring the next slide up. Then you stare at it for a few seconds to get oriented, and then you begin to talk about it.
When you do this, you’re giving up your power as the creator of the narrative, an act which diminishes your stature and your control of the message.
Better to link the next slide to the current one before you leave the current. Stitch the scenes together: Make them curious about what’s coming next. In Hollywood, it’s called foreshadowing.
For instance, at the end of a slide that provides quantitative evidence that there is a 3 to 1 return on advertising dollars, you might say, “So, you might think that the more we spend, the more money we will make. And it turns out, that’s not exactly how it works.”
And suddenly all your listeners are like bird dogs on a hunt, tense with interest as they await the nugget of insight you’re about to reveal–on the next slide.