Avoiding the kitchen sink

It’s common for presenters to create their presentations in a vacuum – giving very little thought to whom they are actually presenting. A symptom of this often manifests as a PowerPoint or Keynote deck with way too many slides – and slides that are jam-packed with far too much content.

Many presentation consultants fall into a trap of trying to enforce stringent guidelines – i.e., “only have one slide per minute” or “keep the number of your slides below 30.” While these guidelines are often valid, unfortunately they are rarely effective. What happens is that the presenter reduces the number of slides but simply crams more information onto each one – which ends up being more tortuous for the audience than having too many slides.

To avoid this, as a presenter it’s better to keep your focus on the audience from the beginning. Answer a few questions: Who will be in the audience? What are their top one or two concerns? What’s the main thing I want the audience to get from my presentation?

If you haven’t fully considered your audience, you are prone to throw everything into your slides including the kitchen sink – with the goal of trying to tell everything to everybody without leaving anything out. But when too much information is thrown at an audience, they are liable to tune out or become sidetracked.

Keep it simple. Realize that all your content has value. But given the limitations of time, all your content cannot be presented, no matter how valuable it is. And talking faster or rapidly clicking through slides is not the solution.

As a coach, I help each presenter determine what is most valuable for a particular message for a particular audience on a particular day. This information becomes the filter for what is left in the presentation and what is saved for a follow-up meeting or offered in a leave-behind. Leave the kitchen sink in the kitchen.

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