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ASSESSORIA EXECUTIVA VIRTUAL

Damiana Alves | Treinamento e Assessoria remota

Foto do escritorDamiana Alves

To Persuade People, Trade PowerPoint for Papier-Mâché


Someone once told me that most PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point. I cannot recollect, in 30 years of work, a single PowerPoint presentation I saw or gave that altered the course of anything. Yet in meeting after meeting around the world, PowerPoint is the medium of choice. In fact, according to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint presentations given every day.

When someone chooses to use PowerPoint or any other slide deck program, the choice has consequences. It establishes a power structure that is less relevant in today’s networked world, with the subject matter expert speaking at the front of the room and the audience passively receiving information. It keeps teams indoors, in closed rooms, in a seated position for prolonged periods which, as Mayo Clinic reports, increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and shortens life expectancy. And, most unfortunate, PowerPoint places technology at the center of the room with a heavy weight toward text, charts, sound bites, and bullet points.

When I helped start a social innovation organization called Civilla, in partnership with Adam and Lena Selzer, we gave ourselves an operating constraint: There would be no PowerPoint. None.

But saying no to something is easy. Figuring out what takes its place is harder. We remember standing in front of a blank whiteboard as we began to think through how we might communicate some very complex information. We had recently completed four months of analyzing Michigan’s public benefit system, which distributes over $18 billion in Medicaid, food, and child care assistance to over a million residents on an annual basis. Important work — but it required people to complete a 40-page eligibility form, the longest of its kind in America. Michigan’s government asked us to imagine a new way to deliver benefits that was more humane and efficient, so we rolled up our sleeves and used an approach called human-centered design to figure out a better method for both caseworkers and residents. We thought we had found one, but how could we communicate it without everyone’s favorite slide deck program?

We knew we had to capture the minds and hearts of the state’s leaders if we were going to be persuasive. We needed to bring our insights, data, ideas, and stories to life. With PowerPoint off the table, we turned to a different suite of tools: foam core, duct tape, fishing line, photographs, rope, twine, and papier-mâché. We used these tools to build a large installation that activated multiple human senses and delivered our results in an interactive, meaningful way.

As we brought our presentation to life, we relied on three methods that can benefit any team choosing to say no to PowerPoint.

Immerse the Audience

PowerPoint asks your audience to learn by listening. We wanted our audience to learn by doing. We knew from research that experiential learning outperforms passive instruction, so we converted our hallway into a public benefit office that simulated the environment that caseworkers and residents experience every day. We had our audience, Michigan’s leaders, experience the reality of residents and caseworkers by having them sit in that “office” and complete the 40-page form. We even played recorded office background noise of people talking, typing, and shuffling papers as they worked. When the simulation was over, I recall one leader saying, “I had no idea of the complexity until I was filling it out myself.”

Leverage the Power of Scale

With PowerPoint, the size of the presentation is constrained by the technology or the screen size. Free from those constraints, we decided to use scale as a key tool in delivering our content — and we went big.

To leave our audience with no doubt about whom the project was in service of, we created portraits of residents and caseworkers to orient the conversation.

To bring to life the insight that residents felt there was no clear path for them when they entered the public benefit system, we produced a 10-foot-high photograph of a seemingly infinite maze.

And instead of a single slide of the ethnographic journey for residents and caseworkers, we created a 100-foot journey map that became a walking storyboard.

As we led leaders past these dramatically oversized objects, we heard them say things like “I’ve never realized…” and “I see the problem in a new way…” These fresh insights and dialogue were a direct result of our choice to break out of PowerPoint’s scale.

Use Symbolism

PowerPoint encourages presenters to rely on a slide’s literal content instead of abstraction or symbolism, which are often more memorable and thought provoking and foster empathy. We wanted to communicate the overwhelming client-to-caseworker ratio. The caseworkers we talked to feel this deeply, as they navigated so many pages for so many clients. The high volume takes a toll on the caseworker’s heart and soul. They want to help residents but feel stretched too thin. We used papier-mâché to create a series of shrinking hearts and hung them in sequence. We brought the heavy caseloads to life with 750 dangling ropes, each one symbolizing a client. Our visitors had to walk through and spread apart the maze of 10-foot-long ropes to navigate the immersive experience.

We also took the 40-page benefit form, cut out every redundancy, crossed out every line of legal text, and displayed what remained so that the audience could step back, contemplate, and use their imagination.

At the end of the visit, one state leader said it was the most powerful meeting he had been to in 32 years. With simple tools, creativity, and elbow grease, we made our content come alive. When we ditched PowerPoint, we created something that was able to speak to both the head and the heart. We pushed our audience to change the way public benefits are accessed and delivered in Michigan by piloting a new form that is 80% shorter.

The physical act of walking someone through your work is powerful. Think about: standing and strolling versus sitting. Interaction versus passive observation. Tactile materials versus pixels. Story versus spreadsheet. Symbols versus data points. Stories rooted in people versus statistics. These are shifts that move audiences to action, that engage the mind and heart to effect change.

Source: HBR

 

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