Boring Presentations: How to Banish Boredom From Your Presentations!

What is a highlight in the everyday life of every stock corporation?

Exactly, the publication of the quarterly figures!

If these are presented, the whole thing normally looks like this:

Honestly, don’t you have to suppress a yawn if you’re just seeing something like this? In fact, it is difficult to imagine anything more boring than regularly presenting the quarterly figures of a large company.

Logical: The team and all shareholders should be kept up to date. That also makes sense. But sitting quietly for an hour, listening to a monotonous lecture and looking at tables and endless rows of figures is hardly fun for anyone. (Unless the numbers are so unbelievably good that they already cause storms of enthusiasm.)

Don’t get us wrong: Of course, something like this is not just about fun. At such an occasion one wants to inform in the first place. But what if you can’t do that because the audience is so bored that they hardly notice anything? So how do you manage to convey a dry subject like numbers, data and statistics in an exciting and entertaining way? How can you grab and inspire your audience? We’ll tell you.

Visualization is the magic word!

In addition one must know that our bodies still function almost exactly the same as those of our ancestors, who lived in caves, dressed in skins and chased after mammoths. The physical characteristics developed over thousands of years have enabled them to survive in a hostile environment. Especially important: the eyes!

They were the dominant sensory organ for humans back then – and still are today. In most of our activities today, the sense of sight is indispensable: whether in front of the screen in the office, during leisure time in the theatre or cinema, playing football … even when playing poker with friends.

Researchers have discovered that we can recognize a familiar face in less than half a second. What used to make the difference between life and death can now be used to explain: The incredible power of sight.

Unfortunately, it is still often the case that a written text is given more meaning than an image. Endless studies stuffed full of complicated nested sentences and formulations are omnipresent in universities and are part and parcel of the good tone. If one would become aware that we are “visual beings” and that there is nothing reprehensible or even unacademic about explaining facts with an image, everyone would benefit.

To be quite honest, a picture is a thousand times more attractive to the eye, which dominates our perception, than monotonous text.

“All well and good, but I can’t draw well,” you might object now. That doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t matter how well you can draw. Anyone who can hold a pencil is able to put geometric figures such as squares, circles or cubes on the sheet. And honestly, that’s all it takes.

You need to give a presentation? Make generous use of the flip chart! You want to give a colleague an idea during lunch break? Out with the ballpoint pen and scribbled on the napkin! You want to explain something to the masses? Have an explanatory film made. You are a professor at a university and your students have trouble with a certain topic? Make a visual representation of the situation and distribute it! And even if you should be the most untalented artist in living memory (which is doubtful), a picture always attracts the attention of your audience, and only then have your efforts and your courage paid off.

(A small tip on the side: With the wonders of the Internet and the apps and open source programs that accompany it, you don’t even have to have paper and pen within reach. Here are a few links to recommended programs:

Paper by FiftyThree für Apple:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-by-fiftythree/id506003812?mt=8

Tayasui Sketches for Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tayasui-sketches-draw-paint/id641900855?mt=8)
Our call is therefore as follows: Only courage for figurative creativity! Nobody has to be a Michelangelo to be able to explain something with a picture. And with pictures you enhance every event – even something as dry as the presentation of quarterly figures.