Often, the way that an idea is presented can have a big influence on how we assess the idea's value. When describing an innovative opportunity or proposing a new initiative for example, whether to fellow colleagues or to a potential client, people usually rely on a written business plan or a set of powerpoint slides and bullet points to get across the key message. But although these methods may be the easiest to complete – they fit within our comfort zone - they do not always capture the essence of the idea, the key points of the proposition or the customer benefit. Nor do they articulate the process and people changes that managers must grapple with to push a new innovation through. Nevertheless, there are signs of change. Recently, we came across one firm that is trying to alter the way we might “visualise value”....
The bullet-point point
When Edward Tufte critiqued Powerpoint as a medium for conveying ideas and information, he had a point. In fact, his main point was about the way we organise and analyse ideas using a series of bullet points.
“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organised onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”
Overcoming Powerpoint myopia
One company trying to change the current powerpoint fixation is St Louis, Missouri-based, Xplane which calls itself a “visual thinking company”. They help companies to communicate complex issues, new value propositions or complex processes to achieve support and buy-in from key execs, particularly those that may be affected by any change initiative.
To do this, they have created a highly innovative and powerful visualisation technique called PictonicsTM, plenty of examples of which can be viewed on their website at www.xplane.com. Yet Xplane is not just a sophisticated presentation design company. Rather, to create their XPLANATIONS as they call them, they take their customers on a journey through the communications process itself.
As they explain, first they ensure that there are clear linkages between business goals and communication goals. They then develop a set of communication metrics to test comprehension and communication effectiveness. Next, they examine ways to visualize complex issues in group sessions, primarily so that individuals build up a personal investment in the success of the initiative and are more ready and willing to execute. They then examine ways to eliminate the "unnecessary and irrelevant" to determine what information is "need to know" (essential for success) and what is merely "nice to know." This provides the final input to the visualisation of the process, problem or opportunity.
Check out Xplane at www.xplane.com. (sorry, I cant get the link on the "After Image" above to work - use this instead, http://www.xplane.com/clients/employeematters/) In fact, there are a host of other downloadable examples of this fascinating approach. Who knows, if they can provide a desktop version of the technique, then maybe we can predict the slow demise of the bullet-point.
[This article was first pubished in The OMC Group newsletter, Customer Create. Click here to register to receive future editions.]
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