Why presentations fail
And how better presentations create better decisions
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WHY PRESENTATIONS FAIL
Contents
Interactive
Executive Summary
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Introduction
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Problem 1
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Problem 2
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Problem 3
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Problem 4
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What did Sony do?
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Conclusion
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Executive Summary
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Discover the science behind storytelling to
explain why so many presentations fail, and
how you can turn your audience into active
listeners.
After 24 years of death by
PowerPoint, you deserve
something better.
Most of us have heard a tedious presenter
promise not to subject us to “death by
PowerPoint”, before immediately breaking
that promise. Presentations are embedded
in our lives at work and in learning, but
are often some of the most disappointing
and intimidating aspects of it. We’re
regularly forced to sit through uninformative
conferences, dull seminars and tedious
workshops. This is not just boring: it’s
bad for business.
Many of us have also stumbled through
a slideshow built out of buzzwords
and bullet points, trying to ignore the
uncomprehending faces of the audience.
Projectors, screens, cameras, video and
graphics standards are far better than
when PowerPoint was created. But
the experience of giving or watching
presentations is often worse.
We have failed to use technology to tell
compelling, interesting stories. Often, by
contrast, we feel that the technology is
controlling us. We decorate our
presentations using gimmicks and effects, or
rush through unreadable charts, or read out
presentations to the audience.
Research tells us the result is that, often, the
best thing about a presentation is we will
remember very little of it afterwards.
This paper reveals how to present better
so that you leave a lasting impression and
make better decisions. The good news: you
don’t need to learn any skills that you don’t
know already.
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Executive Summary
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1. Tell an engaging story:
2. Be authentic:
From an early age, we understand the world as a set
Lists of bullet points take our story and create a structure
of stories. A story has common elements, whatever the
that is impersonal and fails to convince. Presenters read
subject. This is how we tell anecdotes, describe sports,
their bullets, rather than telling us their thoughts. The titles
or explain our day at work. In fact, about the only time
of slides list remote or abstract outcomes.
that we communicate and don’t tell a story is when we
give a presentation.
3. Create active listeners:
4. Use rich media:
An audience that isn’t involved in the story can’t play
We all love rich, exciting material: high-resolution video,
their part in how it is told. This is impossible when there
images or live video communication, either on web pages or
is a linear structure of 50 slides. Presenters should be
created by our friends and colleagues. Yet presentations are
flexible and involve others.
still overwhelmingly text-based, using low-resolution charts and
tables on a single, static screen.
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Bad presentations don’t just bore
us. They may also lead to bad
decisions.
The space shuttle Columbia began its final flight, the 133rd
shuttle mission, on 16 January 2003. Seven astronauts were
on board. About 82 seconds after launch a suitcase-size
piece of foam broke off from the external fuel tank and
struck Columbia’s left wing. This created a hole at least 15cm
across which allowed hot gases to enter the wing when
Columbia re-entered the atmosphere on 1 February. Columbia
disintegrated in the air over Texas, and all seven died.
During the two weeks of the mission, NASA had conducted a
risk assessment of the damage. This had erroneously concluded
that the strike they had seen was unlikely to endanger the
mission. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board wanted to
investigate whether the risk assessment could have been more
effective. It invited Professor Edward Tufte, perhaps the world’s
leading expert in information design, to evaluate how NASA
presented information internally.
In his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Professor
Tufte concludes that NASA’s habit of squeezing complex
technical information into slide presentations meant that the
risk assessment was hard to understand and confused, but the
managers who saw the presentations made critical decisions
based on what they saw and heard.
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HTTP://UPLOAD.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKIPEDIA/COMMONS/4/41/SPACE_SHUTTLE_COLUMBIA_LAUNCHING.JPG:SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA LAUNCHING
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Introduction
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Introduction
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This tells us something important: bad presentations don’t just bore us. They may also lead to bad decisions. NASA’s problems were typical,
even if the situation was unusual. You probably recognise some of them:
A lack of narrative:
“It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this
slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation”,
NASA’s accident report said of an important slide in the risk
assessment. Because the audience couldn’t tell the story in their
own mind, they had no clear idea which pieces of information
were important, or how the information fitted together.
The wrong format:
NASA’s presentation style used text-heavy slides with five layers of
nested bullets. They did not use diagrams to explain how data related
to the problem, or to set out the probabilities in a way that would allow
the viewer’s brain to process complex information quickly. On the other
hand statistical reports, or white papers, explain complex or nuanced
information in depth. But the depth of information contained in NASA’s
engineering reports didn’t fit on a slide, and so information was often
condensed or summarised until it was hard to understand.
A lack of authenticity:
A lack of interaction:
Tufte points out that NASA engineers talked of the presentation
“pitch”. They were instinctively marketing a point of view, rather
than explaining a complex situation in all its messiness and
uncertainty.
The format encouraged the audience to listen, not to question and
debate. The titles of the slides were often the conclusion of the
argument that followed, which short-circuited debate.
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Introduction
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Fortunately, few of us will have to respond to a crisis of
this importance and complexity. On the other hand,
most of us will, at some point, be given the task of
presenting information to an audience. This paper uses
both real-life experience from experts, and scientific
research into how we understand the stories we hear
and see, to show that the failures of this mission’s
presentation strategy are common.
The good news: given good tools and
effective advice, we can take our
natural storytelling ability and make it
work for both us and the audience.
We will take each of our four failures in turn and
discover what research tells us about how we can do
better. If you want to know more, we list some sources
at the end.
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Problem 1
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Presentations don’t tell a story
Telling a story inspires the problem-solving thinking that makes us human,as the biologist William
Calvin explained in a 2006 article on ‘The emergence of intelligence’:
“ Our abilities to plan gradually develop from childhood narratives and are a major foundation
for ethical choices, as we imagine a course of action, imagine its effects on others and decide
whether or not to do it. ”
For thousands of years we have told stories, which have:
A beginning
A middle
An end
A problem, a doubt, an inspiration.
The struggle to resolve the challenge and the
problems we overcame on the journey.
The better world that we experience
as a result.
So stories are not complicated, but we
have to begin with a real-world problem
that affects the audience, not with a
boast or an outcome. We have to explain
what we did, including the things that
didn’t work. We also have to explain it in
human terms: what we see, what we feel,
what we experience. But, in PowerPoint
hell, we often present a list of conceptual
lists when we think we are telling a story.
Our audience doesn’t know what’s
important, where the presentation is
heading or, most important, why they are
listening to us in the first place.
We can see great story telling in action
when we admire the presenters of the
TED talks. In the opinion of Chris Anderson,
who created the format, creating the
best possible story is the most important
part of a presentation. He explained in
the Harvard Business Review that speakers
don’t just show up and speak - they are
coached over a period of six months to
find a narrative structure:
“Presentations rise or fall on the
quality of the idea, the narrative,
and the passion of the speaker.
It’s about substance, not
speaking style or multimedia
pyrotechnics. It’s fairly easy
to “coach out” the problems
in a talk, but there’s no way to
‘coach in’ the basic story. ”
Chris Anderson
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Problem 1 - Presentations don’t tell a story
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Chris Anderson’s advice:
Don’t be afraid to let the audience draw its own
conclusions. Structure your presentation as a detective
story, which leads to an “aha” moment which the
audience discovers for itself. You can only do this if you
set up a challenge, a problem, and lead them through
it. Time spent on structure lets us become involved in the
story.
Recommendations
1. Every story starts with a problem or a challenge, or
something intriguing that we don’t know. Without this,
you have no story!
2. Take time to discover the excitement of the story
in conversation with others. The parts that you find
interesting might not excite an audience - and without
your audience, your story doesn’t exist.
3. Don’t over-explain: show, don’t tell.
4. Watch great storytellers in action: for example TED
talks or speakers that you admire, and analyse the
challenge, the struggle to overcome it, and why you
could relate the story to your experience.
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Problem 2
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Your message doesn’t feel authentic
Peter Norvig, now director of research at Google and a pioneer of artificial intelligence,
thinks that presentations create a world that is over-simplified and sometimes unrealistic. He
wrote an article in The Lancet, warning doctors that their complex ideas sometimes could
not be boiled down in this way:
“Imagine a world with almost no pronouns or punctuation. A world
where any complex thought must be broken into seven-word
chunks, with colourful blobs between them.”
Storytelling makes authenticity possible,
not helping its business planning. What
but not inevitable. Much of our misguided
seemed like strategic thought was often
presentation planning accidentally
just the use of pre-packaged phrases.
involves weeding out spontaneity. Some of
The result was that its managers didn’t
this comes from the way software makes
think deeply about what was important,
us break our thoughts into bullets, which
the way in which the goals could be
are packaged in slides.
achieved, or the real problems and
We have all seen, and many of us
achievements along the way.
have given, a standardised corporate
Later, academics who studied how
presentation. They are commonly used
3M was so successful at internal
to give information, launch projects or to
communication wrote about how it
analyse business problems. For example,
creates business stories instead of flawed
3M discovered that its presentations were
bulleted lists:
“Bullets allow us to skip the thinking
step, genially tricking ourselves into
supposing that we have planned
when, in fact, we’ve only listed
some good things to do. Bullet lists
encourage us to be intellectually
lazy in three specific, and related,
ways. Bullet lists are typically too
generic; that is, they offer a series
of things to do that could apply to
any business. Bullets leave critical
relationships unspecified. Bullets
leave critical assumptions about
how the business works unstated.”
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Problem 2 - Your message doesn’t feel authentic
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You might recognise this problem. But this problem also has a
knock-on effect for the story-telling presenter. When you give
a presentation, it’s impossible to sound convincing, even if
you believe what you are saying. The “thinking step” is also
the “credibility step”.
When people see themselves in your story, or feel an
emotional response – concern, excitement, even fear - it
enhances their sense of commitment and involvement. Nick
Morgan, the founder of Public Words, who has worked with
business presenters for more than 20 years, has discovered
that when we are word-perfect, rehearsed and practiced,
we often sound less convincing. The pre-packaged phrases
make us forget the human emotion in what we do. Solve this
problem by emphasising communication rather than control,
he says:
“Tap into the basic impulses underlying your speech.
These should include four powerful aims: to be open, to
connect, to be passionate, and to listen… Try to imagine
giving your presentation to someone with whom you’re
completely relaxed – your spouse, a close friend, your
child… If you are able to sincerely realise these feelings,
your body language will take care of itself. ”
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Problem 2 - Your message doesn’t feel authentic
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Recommendations
1. Don’t just list accomplishments or goals, and avoid
nested bullet lists. People don’t think like that.
2. Don’t rely on abstract concepts: describe what we
see and feel in real life.
3. Try not to use a script, especially one written by
other people. Use small cards to remind you of the
elements of your stories if you are nervous.
4. Remember what excites you about the
presentation: if you don’t put that across, no one
else will feel excited about listening to it. Don’t be
afraid of your emotions and feelings!
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Problem 3
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Your audience is passive
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the social studies of science and technology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and the founder and current director of the MIT
Initiative on Technology and Self), studied the use of presentation software by teachers
and students, and concluded that we fail to teach people the effectiveness of debate as
a tool for understanding.
“PowerPoint encourages presentation not conversation...A strong presentation
is designed to close down debate, not open it up because it conveys absolute
authority…Computation gives us powerful tools to think about multiple realities but we
most often use them to think in terms of bullet points instead.”
Turkle found that books which “don’t give
good PowerPoint” - the ones that were
hard to summarise in a list of slides, or
had many meanings - were sometimes
removed from the reading list at school
precisely because it was difficult for
students to boil them down to a linear
progression of slides.
In negotiations and meetings, we adapt
our message to emphasise the points that
others want to know more about, or to
dive deeper into information our audience
thinks is important. The interactivity is
why they are called “negotiations” and
“meetings”. But a presentation doesn’t
have to be a monologue. The audience
Sherry Turkle, MIT
has become a group of passive listeners
because it senses that the presentation
is pre-determined. When we are the
audience we fail to do what we do in
conversation: interrupt, ask questions, get
clarification, or even give encouragement.
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Problem 3 - Your audience is passive
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“...a presentation doesn’t have to
be a monologue.”
Presenters who have the confidence and ability to take
a presentation and make it into a dialogue with the
audience are often memorable and exciting. We don’t
know what will happen next. We start to have our own
thoughts and ideas, and share them.
But there is a problem: if the audience tells us what it
wants to hear, and we have to follow this lead, does it
conflict with the idea of storytelling? Not necessarily. There
is a tension between allowing the audience to control the
story and our pre-planned idea of what the story would
be, but we solve this problem every day without realising
it. In business and life we regularly use conversation to
explain and to persuade without controlling every step.
The evidence from research in a consulting firm into what
makes presentations to prospective clients effective
supports this:
“ When we talk with clients about the reasons we
selected a particular firm, we hear that the winner
‘really seemed interested in my needs and asked a
lot of questions’. A prepared PowerPoint presentation
makes a free-flowing conversation more difficult. ”
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Problem 3 - Your audience is passive
Even if the beginning and end of the
narrative are set, we are more familiar than
ever with the idea that the audience can
control the direction of the story. Video
games are an example. Sociologists Bride
Mallon and Brian Webb, who have worked
with games players to discover what they
enjoy about a story, pick out what they
call “hyper-narrative” as a vital part of the
excitement of playing a problem-solving
game, even though the gamers know that
there is a structure in which they
are working.
Given the right tools, we can make
presentations that the audience directs,
selecting the elements it wants, in the order
it thinks is best. Again, we communicate in
this way every day, when we navigate web
pages or read online news stories – any
application in which we actively follow our
interest to learn something new. We also
structure business processes to let people
use their curiosity, while directing it: for
example, an online shopping experience
can use hundreds of routes to take shoppers
to the same destination - in this case,
the purchase – depending on what the
customer needs to know.
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We also become better presenters when we
listen. If our audience consistently demands
to know more about one subject, that’s a
helpful piece of feedback. When we present
a single, linear structure, we never hear the
other side of the dialogue.
When we present, we often do it as if the
story must be told the same way, in the
same order, no matter what the audience
wants. If we prepare a presentation as a set
of linked topics, we can learn to respond to
the audience rather than force-feed it.
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Problem 3 - Your audience is passive
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Recommendations
1. Create modular stories by splitting the topic into
smaller parts, which can be told in many ways.
Don’t combine them in one giant presentation.
2. Practice flexibility: rehearse in front of people whose
job is to ask anything, at any time.
3. When you ask for interaction, do it at the beginning,
and ask what the audience wants to hear, if
possible: don’t say, “any questions?” 30 seconds
before the end of your slot.
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Problem 4
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The wrong media
We rely too much on chunks of text. Tufte points out in The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint that
the simplified structure of presentation slides is partly determined by a misreading of cognitive
science that seems to suggest we cannot hold more than a few items of information in our
minds at any time (the origin of the bullet point’s dominance), when it actually suggests that
we need graphical context and meaning to understand large amounts of information. He
observed that:
“Slides are very low resolution compared to paper, most computer screens, and
the immense visual capacities of the human eye-brain system.”
Professor Edward Tufte
In the last 10 years, it has become
straightforward to capture sophisticated
images and videos, edit and digitise them,
even for non-experts. We upload more
than 100 hours of self-produced video to
YouTube every minute. It is, though, difficult
to integrate them into a presentation.
If this seems unlikely, try presenting Pecha
A simple first step is to ask: would I present
better without any text on the screen at all?
The answer for many of us is “yes”.
on any subject at all. Many are recorded
Kucha style: the format, which means
“chit-chat” in Japanese, was created
in 2003 as a way to make architecture
presentations more interesting. Today there
are Pecha Kucha nights in more than 700
cities, where you can hear presentations
and available to watch at
There are three rules: no text on any slide,
exactly 20 slides, and each slide is on
screen for 20 seconds.
It forces presenters to choose high-quality
images carefully and explain what the
image means - rather than read out
text that everyone has already seen
on the slide.
www.pechakucha.org.
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Problem 4 - The wrong media
We also structure presentation too often
around a single slide on a single screen,
maybe because a single screen was all we
had in the past. We assume that presenting
more than one slide at once is always a
distraction: more sources of information
confuse the audience. But this ignores our
brain’s capacity to direct attention where it
is needed, and the additional meaning that
context can give to our presentations.
Research shows that when we present
videos and images from a menu, and direct
our attention while the other pictures, videos
and charts are still visible, we understand
better and remember more.
We assume that
presenting more than one
slide at once is always a
distraction
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the previous slide on the second screen. A
different other group saw the current slide on
both screens.
When they were tested afterwards, students
performed between 12% and 13% better
At the simplest level, we can remind the
audience of what they recently saw:
recently a group of educators experimented
with university students, to see how much
more information they retained when they
could see the previous slide in a complex
presentation alongside the current slide. In
the lecture hall there were two screens. In
the two-stream experiment, students saw
when they saw the previous slide as well. This
difference persisted when the students were
tested a week later. Not only did the authors
conclude that “extra screen real estate can
improve learning” through reminding the
audience of the context of the current slide,
they discovered that the audience preferred
it, too.
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Problem 4 - The wrong media
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Recommendations
1. Let pictures tell the story, not lists of words.
Tufte quotes the artist Ed Reinhardt: “As for a
picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the
hell with it”. This also means you won’t read out
your presentation.
2. Stop thinking about slides, and think instead
about the best format for the information: short
videos and video links are compelling. Why tell
someone about a web site in 50 slides, when
you can walk them through the site?
3. Don’t be scared to have more than one
element of the story available. As long as
the extra elements are not a distraction, they
can help the audience makes sense of (and
remember) your story.
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At the end of 2012, a group of product
managers met in Sony headquarters in
Japan. They included the groups responsible
for displays, video and still cameras,
videoconferencing, software and business
development. From the outside, the meeting
would have seemed routine - but the
most unusual thing about it was that it was
happening at all. These groups rarely met,
and never before to collaborate to build a
single product.
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What did Sony do?
That product would become
Sony Vision Presenter.
The group knew and understood, as we all
do, that presentations should be better. Sony’s
advantage was that all the elements that
could help were part of its product portfolio,
because for years it has been helping its
customers, from individuals to broadcasters,
to tell stories. The company’s founding
prospectus, in 1946, promised “a spirit of
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freedom and open-mindedness” in our work
to help engineers solve problems together.
Creative freedom led Sony’s engineers to make
cameras to produce compelling, cost-effective
video or high-resolution images; software to
edit, organise and control how that material is
presented; high-resolution and 4K displays and
projection systems to show off the images, and
communications technology so that we don’t
need to be in the room to share the story.
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What did Sony do?
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“Sony imagined a system in
which all the elements would be
available in a mosaic on screen.”
Why, they asked themselves, can we not
combine these elements so that everyone
can use them? With help from a small group
of its customers who shared the vision, Sony
imagined a system in which all the elements
would be available in a mosaic on screen. As
presenter, you would be able to select and
bring one to the large central screen at any
time, whether video, live communication, a
web site, graphics or text. Training takes a few
minutes. You would no longer be a slave to
your software.
One of the remarkable things in the
development of Vision Presenter was that, as
more customers saw what Sony was doing, it
sparked their imagination about using it in other
parts of the business: they understood how it
could transform all types of information delivery,
allowing the audience to guide the story, rather
than be fed it. So why not use it in cinemas
to help customers choose their film, they
suggested? In learning environments, could we
create entire multi-screen shows so that we can
learn in the way we want?
Vision Presenter’s creators, and
its future users, will hopefully
have a common experience:
they can discover that sharinga
common story can be a creative
moment.
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Conclusion
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The boredom and stress of presentation culture is half the
problem, but we might not realise that bad presentations
are bad business. When presentations fail, we can’t relate
to them and we don’t remember them either.
We all have the ability to discuss, argue, pull apart a
problem and put it back together in a different way. To
do this we spend our lives telling easy-to-understand,
authentic, interactive stories, instinctively picking the right
tools for the job. When we arrange the salt and pepper
pots on a table to explain how to get to an address, or
pick out a photo on our phone to finish a family story,
we’re presenting effectively, listening to our audience,
and responding flexibly.
When we do this, we work more
effectively. This is what creativity
means. Death by PowerPoint is not
only boring: it stops us thinking.
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Find out more about how Sony’s Vision Presenter can help you to
access numerous multimedia sources to create more exciting,
interactive presentations and learning experiences.
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References
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Anderson, C. 2013. How to give a killer presentation: Lessons from TED. Harvard Business Review, June 2013.
Calvin, W.H. 2006. The Emergence of Intelligence. Scientific American, 17 May 2006.
Mallon, B. and Webb, B. 2000. Structure, causality, visibility and interaction: propositions for evaluating engagement in narrative multimedia. International Journal of
Human-Computer Studies 53, pp. 269-287.
McLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Morgan, N. 2008. How to become an authentic speaker. Harvard Business Review, November 2008.
Norvig, P. 2003. PowerPoint: shot with its own bullets. The Lancet, Volume 362, Issue 9381, pp. 343-344.
Parker, I. 2001. Absolute PowerPoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts? The New Yorker, 28 May 2001.
Satterfield, M. 2004. Gentle Rain: a blueprint for gaining traction with clients. Consulting to Management, 15(4), pp. 5-11.
Shaw, G., Brown, R. and Bromiley, P. 1998. Strategic Stories: How 3M Is Rewriting Business Planning. Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998.
Tufte, E. 2003. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Available for download from http://www.edwardtufte.com.
Turkle, S. 2003. From Powerful Ideas to PowerPoint. Convergence, Vol 9 number 2, pp. 19-28.
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