limit the minutes and let the slides slide
If there were one myth I could debunk when it comes to business communications, it would be the belief that in all cases, the more slides you have, the longer your presentation will be.
Often, when managers or meeting organizers want to limit the time a team member presents, they will mandate a slide restriction. This stems from the belief that the number of slides and minutes presented are related.
This notion is silly because it depends on how you use your slides. There have been instances when I talked to a single slide for over ten minutes, and other times when a slide was only visible for 10-15 seconds before moving on to the next.
A low slide quantity can lead to a low slide quality
Connecting the quantity of slides you share to the number of minutes you discuss them isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem, and in my experience, it can be counterproductive. Say there is an upcoming business meeting with a packed agenda:
To ensure each topic can be discussed, all presenters are told to create only one or two slides. This allows the meeting deck to remain at a reasonable size and keep the meeting moving.
Unfortunately, while the slide count is low, the individual slides are usually packed with tons of information that is scaled down to fit.
A significant amount of time is wasted during the meeting simply trying to explain what’s on the slide and how to read it, because the audience is too overwhelmed to process it independently.
How many of us have faced this exact situation? More distressingly, how often are we the overwhelmed audience, slumped in our chairs, wishing that someone hadn’t tried to add the entire encyclopedia into a single PowerPoint slide?
A better alternative when faced with this scenario is to control minutes, not slide counts. If you are running a meeting, give your team a time limit for presenting and for answering questions. Empower them to decide how many slides they need—if any—to accomplish this. If you are contributing to a meeting, be sure to ask how much time you have, and prioritize the timing constraint over all other considerations.
More slides + fewer minutes = better engagement
This is a recommendation I made while leading a customized training session with a corporate client earlier this year. The main goal of the day was to upskill the team’s ability to communicate effectively with various audiences, particularly leaders.
Prior to our training session, the group shared examples of how they have communicated with data in the past. It’s helpful when an organization tells me about the challenges they are facing, but I can usually uncover much more when examining their existing graphs, reports, and slides.
The following slide was part of a deck shared at a previous board meeting. The goal was to discuss the competitive broadband market, and reassure board members that the company remained the top provider in the city, despite increased competition.
Before you critique the slide, it’s worth understanding the requirements. The team was instructed to create just one slide to discuss this matter, as the plan was to spend only 5-10 minutes on the topic. The team knew that pie charts probably weren’t the best solution, but resigned to using them because of the one-slide mandate.
To demonstrate to the group that slide count and minutes do not necessarily go hand in hand, I redesigned the data story using the same information. My version used nine slides and could be discussed in two minutes. I also had more space, so I explored other chart types, such as slope graphs and square area charts.
Feel free to watch the short presentation below. (All of the details have been changed to protect confidentiality.)
Remember: focus on clarity, not slide count
The next time you are faced with a slide constraint, do your best to recognize that slides and minutes aren’t proportional, and they aren’t equal. If you need to keep business presentations short and targeted, then the amount of time talking is more important than the number of slides used to convey that point.
If you enjoy seeing how we help real teams improve their business communications via example, order our latest book: storytelling with data: before & after. We share 20 powerful transformations of business communications from our client trainings. You can download a sample today, or join our launch team for early access to the book in exchange for your promotion.
