Slide Shows Are Dandy, But Stories Can Educate - employee training presentations - Brief Article

HR Magazine, August, 2001 by John T. Adams III

At first, making a presentation meant only talking. Imagine the early humans: A small band of hunter-gatherers sits around a fire, contemplating its future. Fall is coming and the days will be cold and food will be scarce. The leader wants to move now, follow the herds to the south. Others want to stay on a few more weeks. They haven't been in their camp Long and traveling is difficult.

Some might imagine a confrontation between the leader and the most vocal dissident, a grunting, biting, rolling-in-the-dirt struggle until one point of view wins.

I imagine a meeting: a presentation. The leader, speaking from his long experience, tells the group of past summers, when berries were hard to find and fattened game was scarce. He recounts tales passed down to him from his father and his father's father about bands that had starved in the snow because they waited too long to break camp.

These stories touch the hearts of the others, and they begin to plan their journey.

Move ahead a few dozen millennia to a modern presentation.

We've passed through blackboards, flip charts, overhead projectors, slide projectors.

When we make a presentation today we know what we need: a digital projector, a laptop, a laser pointer. The "slides" we create are really digital images stored in the computer. The help files in the slide software tell us how to craft a "compelling" presentation: Use bullets, use color, use graphics. For a finishing touch, click a button to produce handouts, pictures of the slides.

The audience arrives. You distribute your handouts. You show your slides and talk about each one. The audience applauds and heads off to the next presentation.

Maybe they got your point. Maybe you trained them. Maybe you even educated them. Maybe not.

Education requires an emotional bond between educator and student, a connection that requires more than bullet charts and animated graphics. Educating isn't training or improving skills or distributing information. To educate people you must touch them.

Successful speakers know that mere slide shows won't do that. Stories will.

Why is bullet item No. 3 on slide No. 16 important? Maybe there's a story you can tell, something that happened to you or to a friend. Something that makes the item important to you. A story.

What about the pie chart? Whatever the numbers represent, they relate to people. People are stories.

Next time you conduct a workshop, make a presentation, argue for your viewpoint in a staff meeting, remember that stories are as important as the facts and figures you've so carefully pulled together. It's the stories that will educate.

Do you use stories in your presentations? To share them, e-mail me at jadams@shrm.org.