Results tagged “PowerPoint” from KM Edge: Where the best in Knowledge Management come together

I learned a few things when I was in graduate school studying cognitive and experimental psychology that have proven useful to me when I'm trying to send a message that will stick, either in a presentation or a blog.  Knowing about human beings' limited short-term memory and attention comes in quite handy. These limitations are hard-wired into us, regardless of how smart a particular person is. So, here are three important things I learned about making points memorable.

First, people will remember the first and last thing you tell them.  It is much harder to remember what's in the middle. This is caused by a combination of the primacy effect (remembering the first thing on a list) and the recency effect (remembering what you heard recently or last). Even though human short-term working memory can hold seven bits of information (plus or minus two), that information rapidly dissipates and is gone in seconds or is pushed out my more incoming data. That's why you can't remember the names of people when you first meet them at a party or retain a phone number long enough to write it down if there isn't a pencil handy. You are pushing your audience's limits if you ask them to remember more than three points, unless you give them handouts as memory aids.  That may be the reason for Death by PowerPoint: We have more than three things we wish our audience would remember, so we blast it out in 24 point font.

In a March 2, 2006 post on 43 Folders (a site focused on personal productivity that was dormant for a while and has only recently picked up activity), site owner Merlin Mann made the observation that "focus is cash in the economics of attention." He was commenting on a post by Annalee Newitz on her Web site about a study that concluded that attention overload leads to bad decisions (no kidding!). The really interesting thing about the study, as Newitz pointed out, was that "subjects who made incorrect decisions under 'noisy' conditions tended to have extremely high confidence that their decisions were right."

I have long been an opponent of multi-hour PowerPoint presentations because (a) they are used by speakers to attempt to control your attention and deliver information at their pace, and (b) they tend to waste time in delivering background information and short-sheet the time that should be spent working collaboratively on really tough problems. If you are going to trap me in a room for more than 30 minutes to read slides to me, I am going to get out my Blackberry in less than 10 minutes unless (a) you are speaking only to me or briefing me per my request* or (b) you have given me the slides in advance so I can read all the background material and we can "cut" to the conclusions and recommendations slides after I get my preliminary questions answered (to make sure I understand the main issue).

But not for the reasons posited by Edward Tufte. In his article "PowerPoint is Evil," Tufte's principal concern relates to the use of slideware for data reduction. His preference is for voluminous tables of statistical data, allowing the reader to interpret the entire set for himself. Eschewing the value of data reduction--in the form of graphs, in this case--Tufte goes so far as to say that the use of templated graphs leads to "an analytical disaster."