Ghost it out: Powerpoint Presentations, Anatomized and Simplified
Dear floundering Powerpoint presentation-makers of the universe:
I’m about to save you a lot of time. I’m also about to improve your communications with seniors and subordinates and make your thinking more structured. And I’m going to do it all with ghosts.
I’m not referring to your traditional poltergeists, but rather to what we in the consulting world call a “ghost deck.” Essentially, a ghost deck is a Powerpoint presentation. It looks eerily similar to the way you imagine your final presentation looking, with an important caveat: it lacks any actual analysis or data. Laying out such a document upfront has several benefits.
First, a potential ideological issue some of you might take with ghost-decking: it’s a top-down approach. You data analysts of the world have a right to find top-down approaches to information analysis upsetting. It runs the risk of leaving out crucial information that you might not have known about at the outset of your investigation. But rest assured: presentation-making is a separate process from whatever investigation you’re presenting. And post-investigation, you have the expertise to dictate the structure of a final presentation quite effectively. So fear not.
The Ghost Deck
To get us kicked off: it can be helpful to think of a ghost deck as an effective communications tool as much as a planning tool. It allows you to convey the flow of the story that you wish to tell, as well as your ingoing hypothesis. It ensures alignment with all members of your team, and it works in all directions. You can share it with a manager to make sure that he or she agrees with your direction and to avoid redoing work down the line. You can also help the team that you are managing to understand the key conclusions that you are working toward or to show where their work fits within the broader picture. Amongst your cohort, it’s an effective way to collaboratewith peers to ensure that everyone is aligned on a common vision.
Secondly, writing a ghost deck up front forces you to be outcome-oriented in your thinking. By laying out the storyline and even sketching out the supporting charts, you’ll be certain to only focus on analysis and research that really matters. It is all too common to see people taking a scattered approach to their analysis, or even worse, a “boil the ocean” approach in which they try to uncover every fact and figure, even if it is only tangentially relevant to the story at hand.
So tactically, how does one create a ghost deck? I break it into three steps.
Step one: the dot-dash
I tend to be a vertical thinker, which means that my first approach is to attempt to jot down the story in a few bullet points. (The term dot-dash refers to bullet points at different levels of indentation). Try to write your bullet points as though they are the titles of each slide in your presentation. This may take a few tries, but it is worth getting right before moving on. What is your central thesis? What are the most compelling facts that would support it? At this stage, don’t be afraid to leave placeholders, like “Over the last 10 years, sales have increased by X percent in country A, but only Y percent in country B”. We haven’t done the analysis, but now I know what data I’ll need to find, and I can even imagine the bar chart comparing sales growth across different countries.
Once you are comfortable with your dot-dash story, you’re ready to make the mini-deck.
Step two: the mini-deck
Think of the mini-deck as a zoomed out version of your final presentation. Take a piece of paper, and draw a grid of eight to sixteen boxes. Figure out which bullets from your dot-dash will fit into each slide. Aspire to keep it to one message per page, and draw a miniature version of any supporting charts. You may be surprised by how much you adjust your initial dot-dash in this phase. Read through the story out loud, as though you were presenting it, and test the flow.
Step three: The ghost deck
If you have an open-minded audience, or if you really only want to test the story at a high level, you can stop with step two and simply present the mini-deck. However, translating the mini deck into a full sized presentation can be a helpful way to get more constructive feedback, and also provides a great starting point for your analysis. The key here is not to spend too much time getting everything visually perfect. Keeping charts in a hand-written format is totally fine – I rarely present any draft material that isn’t on notebook paper to start. The final document that you present eventually may not look exactly like the ghost deck that you created on day one, but your path to get there will have been significantly more structured, transparent, and efficient.
Creating a ghost deck is a small upfront investment that will pay massive dividends down the line. Give it a try – you’ll be amazed by how much constructive input you can receive, or how much direction you can administer, before you’ve ever set forth on the actual analyses.
And that’s not spooky at all.
