My soon-to-be ex-boss looks up from his desk with a quizzical expression, "you wanna keep…those? But why?". He's boxed up dozens of cardboard boxes. Thirty years' worth of groundwater papers and old reports that are no longer relevant but for some reason have made it through several office remodels. Some have a first-class ticket to the dumpster and some are going with him to sit in his home office and presumably collect as much dust as they've collected here over his career.

I've plucked a box out of the "trash" pile and am standing there on the other side of his desk holding a set of 35mm slides. The kind you put in a carousel and click along the slide projector. On it are little representations of groundwater wells and ASR rules of thumb.

The carousel on my shelf, collecting dust.

What holds my curiosity is not that these slides are useful - they're decades from that. Not only are they out of date, but I don't even have a light projector. I'll never be able to pull them out at a party and wow my guests by clicking through the theory of storing water underground for future drought retrieval. But they are precious reminders of the past. Of the technology we had and how it's evolved.

Prior to the 1900s, there wasn't a way to "tell a thousand words" as simply as we do today. With the 1930s came along reversal slides and kodachrome for color images. The movie industry was born out of this technology. For engineering professionals in the 1950s, a person's whole job was to do drawings for slides. Each slide collection took painstaking hours to create. And because of it, the slides were never the most up-to-date information or specific to a project. They contained relevant information that could be recycled for the next project.

Yet surprisingly, even with improved technology, we still make this mistake. We reuse slides for the simplicity of not having to recreate for a whole different presentation. In fact, I've seen these exact images before of ASR wells and calculating the productivity of the well. At some point in the very early 90s, he digitally crafted these on a computer, sent them off to be made into physical slides, and then converted them back when digital powerpoint came along.

Conceptual design of a ASR facility in 1991. Not much has changed in theory.

As our technology changes, so too should our understanding of how we implement this technology. Now we have the added bonus of being able to take from cognitive science theory, better understanding how people process information, to improve how we share science.

When we give technical information to any audience, there's a few key mistakes that we're likely all making.

Workflow Plan

The first key mistake is a failure to workflow plan. Many times when we're asked to present, we open up powerpoint and stare at the blank template. Or, like in the case with the old 35mm slides, we see which ones can be reused from an old presentation.

Just as you wouldn’t start a capital project by diving into the details, don’t start a presentation without understanding the larger context.

According to Melissa Marshall, a technical presenter expert, a blank presentation will make you all the more likely to develop your talk in the same linear progression in which you developed your theory. Instead, focus on how to explain the main point, regardless of the track you took to figure out that main point. Start with your why—what you need them to hear and what they came to find out. Then, plan out how to get that done. Once you know why you’re meeting, you’ll have a much easier time filtering out what does not need to be said.

Focus on Audience-Centered Teaching

In today’s world, being a talent engineer isn’t the only competency required. We have to be able to communicate with many audiences and that means telling others what we are experts in so we can coordinate with what they are experts in. Many times I've seen engineers get up in front of an audience and commandeer the time to bolster their ego or appeal to their insecurities. No matter what I say to get them back on track, they are singly focused on their self-serving mission. They'll go down a rabbit hole talking about what personally excites them or proving that their job is difficult. Worse, they'll be using big words to try to impress the audience instead of the main purpose of the presentation.

Expertise does not make good teachers. -John Medina

Instead, if you're really there for the why and you are respectful to their time, you'll put your own emotional needs aside for the presentation. An audience-centered approach is a technical term for telling your audience the information that they need to hear, in the way they need to hear it. The best teachers are ones that make you feel like you could teach someone else. They focus on how you are grasping the concept and know when to speed through something or go back and re-explain in a different way. The main idea is not to spend time on what's important to you or what you think they need to know but instead to spend time on what's actually going to help them. Do your best in setting up the flow in your pre-planning, but be flexible to changing as you evaluate the room during the presentation.

With the slide collection from the trash pile comes an old photo album of a team of white guys in their cowboy boots standing next to the large piping of Texas' first ASR well.

Cultural Mapping

This is something you also should do in the planning phase. It's understanding your audience, what they already know, what their personality is, and how they prefer to be presented information. One example is that an east Asian - focused audience may look first at context (the background, the environment) before focusing on what you’re discussing (the foreground, the detail). You may want to first talk about context, before diving into the big and little picture. It's a good idea to map how different your audience is from yourself before you start to put slides together. Use the Country mapping tool from Erin Meyer's book to help.

Lose the words

For shorter presentations, where you may want to rehearse a script beforehand, you can give the presentation more like a TED Talk. One option is to use the assertion evidence method. Each slide has a full sentence at the top in case anyone gets lost in the presentation. For me, this certainly adds to the texture of the conversation. Most of my presentations look more like all-day workshops than 3 - 20 minute learnings so this isn’t always applicable to every slide.

Our brains, by function, do not multi-task well when doing deliberate tasks. The prefrontal cortex splits into paying attention to the two different functions, which causes us to make 3 times as many mistakes. That is to say, if you're giving multiple pieces of information to the same brain region, your audience focus is reduced to all of the pieces because your attentional ability is something your brain must do sequentially. It literally cannot do both in parallel. Instead, the trick is to use visual media to say what your words cannot. Interestingly, content is stored in a different area of your brain than context (and even moving pictures versus static pictures are stored in different places). Try to appeal to different parts of the brain during your presentation and it will be easier for your audience to understand fully.

It’s also much easier for your brain to process one big picture than a series of tiny pictures (letters). If you can remove cognitive tasks, you will limit extra processing in what is known as the picture superiority effect.

The science behind this is known as cognitive overload. Your brain processing center is the same area of the brain used for visual words as for auditory words. This means that too many words will start to bog down that brain center. It doesn’t matter if the words are written or spoken. Another point is that the brain only remembers 10% of words - either heard or read. Visuals will be processed into memory much easier.

So the takeaway? Avoid using bullet points or many words on your slides. As a general rule, if you're not using the "notes" section to store your talking points, that's probably a good indicator that your slide has too many words.

Give Intelligence, Not Data

This takes practice. It's the critical analysis piece of understanding all the information and then how to articulate it in the message which you want your audience to walk away with. What's relevant to them is generally not everything that is relevant for you. This is the challenging art of shortening complex information. Good presenters, and authors, will be fluent in this skill.

Unless you plan on pointing out each axis and explaining each point on this graph, better block out all the extra information from your presentation. Or better yet, use a different visual to explain the point of this graph instead of the data itself.

For me, this is analogies. It's removing redundancies or restructuring so that your speech is focused on the key takeaways for your audience. When I'm writing a long blog post, I ruthlessly move paragraphs around until it's in a perfect order. This helpful guide likens it to moving into a new house. Rearrange the big furniture, then make the little stuff fit into the larger context.

Ask a Friend to Listen to the Presentation

The focus is not on dumbing down what I am saying but rather making it more accessible to everyone. I often find that my audience is technical, just not in the same discipline that I am technical. Nothing is worse than an engineer talking really slow and explaining things like "vector" or "pressure head". They may not be common words, but they're words everyone knows or words they will pick up with context. This is where reading the room becomes very important.

You can plan around this pitfall by having more conversations with a more diverse set of listeners. Pull in other people from your classes or your company. Chances are, if you have a really good presentation that's told in a relatable way with enthusiasm, it will be interesting to them.

Most of all: know your audience. If being casual is how you relate to them, then be casual. If they’d like a professional suit & tie, then be yourself in your professional look.

Death by Powerpoint

The one advantage those 1950s slides had that our modern powerpoints don't is that engineers were unlikely to have too many slides. The hitch is that making slides with less information on them, means it takes more time. More planning time, more thinking through it, more doctoring up the slides to remove information that might seem necessary but not for the point you are making.

They used to say to plan on one slide per minute. I have often found that this means presenters spend more than one minute per slide and then rush the end. Time management is a critical skill for consultants who are paid by the hour so they need to optimize each hour. You can’t overplan but you also shouldn’t underplan. And remember, done is better than perfect. One thing is for sure: execution comes down to how well you set yourself up for success. Remember to use your visuals to supplement your other senses, your body language, and your words. Good luck!

Listening: Naturally Tan by Tan France. I just finished the audiobook and it’s so so so good. I’ve enjoyed it so much that when I fainted the other day (don’t ask…) I had a short dream about meeting him at a crosswalk. If only.

Working: Trying to come up with KPIs (key performance indicators) for some of our priorities for the larger solutions & technology group at my company. We’ll cover these at a global meeting next month. Have I mentioned how much I love business travel?

Reading: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. It’s so raw and emotional. Like I say on my goodreads review, it’s a very intimate reading about her finding a sperm donor and seeing open brain surgery. It’s the story of her own personal route through therapy and the intense and often sad stories of her patients with her as their therapist. It touches on the science without diving into it and normalizes therapy and learning how to work through different issues. I couldn’t put it down.

I also read Brain Rules by John Medina which is very well written and has a lot of information that I referenced here. He’s uses the theory of describing the core concept in 10 minute segments and starting each concept with an emotional association for better audience brain processing.

From (35mm) slides to (ppt) slides