3 Tips For Better Visual Presentations: Martin J. Eppler (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Martin J. Eppler’s talk titled “3 Tips For Better Visual Presentations” at TEDxDonauinsel 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Power of Visualization in the Workplace

Hello, everyone. How can we use the power of pictures at work? How can you visualize what you think, what you know, and make that accessible for others to improve collaboration? I have been obsessed with this question for 30 years, in 20 books, in 200 articles, in more than dozens of experiments, and what I found are amazing benefits that happen when you draw, when you use visualization software, when you sketch, when you doodle.

You boost your creativity, you improve collaboration and communication at better conflicts, and you also improve your decision quality when you visualize the information that you have. But what I also found was that many of us don’t use the potential of visualization at all. We stick to old ways of presenting, of discussing.

Can I ask you this? Who among you still loves standard presentation slides with bullet points? Who loves to sit through that? Okay, we have four people. For the rest, can you give me alternatives? What can you do instead of bombarding people with slides? What would be a visual way of working?

Storytelling, what else? Prezi. Yes. Sketching, what else? Mind mapping. Whiteboard. Right? There are many ways. When you invite people to visualize with you, to co-create, what you’re actually doing, and this is the first of many visual metaphors to come, you’re sort of laying out a mini red carpet to invite them to shine. It’s also a red thread that the conversation has when you invite others to visualize with you.

Three Practices for Effective Visualization

So what I’d like to share in the next five to six minutes with you are three practices that help you to invite others to visualize together. But first, can I take you back just a minute to my very first high-stake presentation, not as a university professor, but in my former life as a consultant?

A client had asked us to analyze if they should enter a new multi-billion market, and we worked very hard to analyze this market, and I had produced about 40 data-driven slides to show the client that we had worked hard and that he should not enter this business. Just as I was ready to go and bombard the client with those slides, my then boss said, “Take a seat, hold your horses,” and instead of me going through the slides, he showed the perplexed audience one sketch, one visual metaphor, and it was this one.

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It was a fortress built on sand. This guy had just summarized all of my 40 slides in a single image, because he was right. This new market was like a fortress, very hard to conquer because of patent shields, because of scale contracts, and it was not even worth conquering. It was sinking into the sand, so to speak, because the technology was being replaced by another one.

And of course, the client then asked about details like the patent analysis I had done or the contracts and so forth, and I could show finally my slides with that analysis. But this leading with a visual metaphor really changed the dynamics of the conversation. It was much more collaborative. First the overview with this visual metaphor, and then the details on demand.

Practice 1: Make It Ugly

And I realized it’s all about a conversation. It’s much better this way when you first show overview with the help of a metaphor that, by the way, the client picked up and used also verbally. And that got me thinking as a researcher. And in many experiments with managers and students, we found three practices that I want to share with you that you can use to really reap the power of pictures professionally.

And the first one might shock you, especially the design aficionados among you. If you want visualization, graphic representations to work for you and for collaboration, make them ugly. Beauty is the enemy of collaboration. If something looks too nice, it looks like it doesn’t need revision or improvement.

I call this the museum effect. People just stared and say, “Yeah, that looks perfect,” and the thinking stops there. So you want to use the power of provisionality. You want to signal with your drawings, this is a work in progress, and invite collaboration in this way.

So this is good news for all of us who are terrible at drawing, right? So it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The technical term is low-perceived or low-perceived finishness, right? It looks provisional. It invites collaboration. And by the way, banks and telecom companies and insurances have been using this all along. It’s called pencil selling, right? When instead of using shiny slides, you just sketch something with a pencil for a client, like a product.

In our experiments, we were able to show this actually is much better, leads to more sales, and has the salesperson being perceived as more competent than if he or she uses pre-made slides. So if you want to harness the power of visualization for collaboration, make them look ugly. Make them look provisional. Use sketches and doodles, and we’ve shown in our experiments even little tweaks to software to make it look more sketchy, boosts collaboration and creativity.

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Practice 2: Lead with Visual Metaphors

And this brings me to the second advice I’d like to share with you. Like my boss, lead with visual metaphors. Don’t just use diagrams, although they are powerful, or charts or maps. Visual metaphors are magical. They access what people already know. They bring out new solution ideas. They make things much more concrete, like a mini red carpet or a red thread.

Let me give you an example. In a study that we originally did for BMW Financial Services and then published, we used the identical strategy of BMW and communicated it to different staff members, groups.

Once we used standard bullet point slides, then we used a diagram. And for the third group, we used the mountain trail visual metaphor with the same content as the other two.

And guess what? For the group where we visualized through the mountain trail the strategy, not only did they remember a lot more later on, they were also much more motivated to implement the strategy, and they had a better understanding of how the different parts of the strategy worked together.

Now, I’ve never met a metaphor I didn’t like, but clearly not all metaphors are equally well suited. You want to make sure that the metaphor is simpler than what you’re trying to explain, that it’s concrete and that people have a connection with it, and that is hopefully the right connection. I will never use again the volcano metaphor as I did once for creativity in a country that is at risk of active volcanoes.

So choose your metaphors well, and if you do that, then it will resonate with people, it will be much more memorable, it sticks like a red ribbon on the floor. Here’s another example of such a visual metaphor. It can come from nature, it can come from technology, it can come from mythology, you name it. Here I used the bridge to visualize a few, I’m a professor of communications management, a few communication problems.

Practice 3: Visual Variation

And so it’s simple, also visually, and the beauty of this kind of visual, we can learn that from comic strips, is that it starts a series that people then want to complete, and I think that’s very powerful in collaboration. I call this third practice that I want to share with you in conclusion, I call this visual variation. You use a metaphor or a diagram, and then you vary it, you repeat it, but slightly differently. And the magic that this does for collaboration is people start to extend the series you’re giving them.

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So for example, here, communication is one-sided because of a lack of listening, right? One-way street, or the bridge is not aligned, there’s misunderstandings, or it’s too full, the too many messages crowd out the key message, and people automatically think of other communication problems through the metaphor of the bridge, like one car going off the bridge, maybe because the person is too emotional, right? Or the bridge being shaky, maybe because there’s no trust in the relationship. Visual metaphors spark the imagination, especially if they come in a series of images.

This is, by the way, a very empirically validated theory, it’s called variation theory, and it basically says that you do not understand anything until you understand it in more than one way. And so if you ask me for advice how to make visuals more part of your everyday work, I would say start a series, start a simple image, it doesn’t have to be sophisticated, and invite others to build on that.

Here’s my final example for that. As university professors, we often advise students, and many of our students still have this stereotypical career path in mind, that it only goes upwards in terms of salary or hierarchy, and I drew this visual variation to invite them to think about alternative career trajectories, so the career doesn’t have to be linear. In fact, I find, I don’t know about you, that the most intriguing careers are often non-linear. Are different than this upward staircase model.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, go forth and visualize or vanish, use the power of pictures, and when you do that, you will see it boosts your creativity, it improves decision, especially if you use images that signal that they’re a work in progress, that invite others, like a carpet, a red carpet, to shine together, to co-create something new together. Secondly, if you don’t just rely on abstract diagrams or charts, but use the power of visual metaphors to activate what people already know. And thirdly, of course, if you don’t just use a single image and overload that one, but start a sequence that your colleagues can build upon. Thank you very much.