Storytelling is a pretty important skill in any business context. Senior leaders, clients, your company’s board of directors… none of those busy people want to spend time deciphering what you want to say and what you are asking them to do. You only get people’s attention if your point is clear and you express it in an engaging way. And only then will your audience start building on your work, thereby increasing its value.

Over the years, being good at curating and structuring information into compelling stories and recommendations has given me access and positive exposure to senior decision-makers and get access to interesting roles more quickly than average. Because PowerPoint is so often used as the main communication tool with both internal and external audiences in many businesses, I use it to do just that - and I can teach you to be really good at it too.

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Your work starts way before you even open PowerPoint

Your work starts with understanding your audience, clarifying what you need out of them as well as what they need out of you, and sketching out a structured and concise story that will enable you to get through to them.

Understand your audience

Are you building a recommendation for your CEO so they can make a strategic decision for the future of the company? Are you creating a paper to inform senior leaders on the progress you are making with your project? Are you pulling together a publication off the back of which hundreds of companies and experts will be making investment decisions? Depending on your goal and your audience, your job as a storyteller will be incredibly different.

So take the time to identify who you are writing this for, how they like to consume information and - importantly - to clarify what they want from you as well as what you need from them. This often means that you need to talk to your audience before you actually write anything, to clarify all those points. Talking to your audience before you send any material over will be hugely beneficial:

• First, this means your audience will have heard of the topic ahead of seeing the slides when they land in their inbox for information or a decision.
• Then, you will be structuring your content based on actual knowledge of what your audience cares about and actual thoughts that they have on the topic. This means that your audience will recognise the influence that they have had.

Make sure you talk to all the relevant people and only the relevant people so that the important opinions doesn’t get diluted by opinions that matter less.

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Structure a concise story

Once you know what your audience is expecting from you, it is time for you to step into the role of a storyteller. As a storyteller, your role is now to structure a concise and compelling  story that aligns with these expectations.

It’s really hard to make things simple and engaging, but you need to consider that part of the process as your responsibility, or people will not engage with your work. Any content of yours - however ground-breaking - that you do not share in a way that engages your audience will not be used by said audience. Do not expect your audience to put any effort in doing work that you should have done for them. Many times I’ve seen senior executives send back a document to its owner because it was either too long or unclear about the problem at hand or the expectations that were placed on the audience. Make sure your work doesn’t fall in that category!

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So how do you structure a concise story in a business context?

As a starting point, find a whiteboard. Or pick up a sheet of paper. Or open up your digital version of a sheet of paper. Just don’t open PowerPoint just yet… if you do, you will be tempted to start making slides instead of focusing on nailing the story.

Use your whiteboard, your paper or your digital app to sketch out your story, at a high level:

• Be structured i.e. be clear upfront about (i) the context you are operating in; (ii) the problem you are addressing; (iii) the solution you are recommending. Ideally, this should include a combination of 2 or 3 options, your recommended solution, and the reasons for your recommendation; and (iv) your proposed next steps;
• Be concise: no one wants to read twenty pages when two are enough. Only give out information that the audience needs to hear. For each of the above bullet points, ask yourself: what are the key messages that you want your audience to take away? Write down no more than 3 bullet points. If you share a list, people will remember that there was a list, not the content of the list.
• Join the dots: throughout this structure, make sure you highlight (i) any points you need the audience’s formal decision or opinion on, and that you include (ii) any useful transitions where your story needs them. Do not expect your audience to know what decisions you are expecting them to make, or to make those transitions themselves. Consider it your responsibility to make those decisions points and transitions obvious, and to generally make their jobs easier…

Interestingly, following the above guidance will already help you figure out if you are ready to tell your story or if you need to do more work. If you do not have clear answers for each of those sections, this means you probably need to progress the work a bit more before you are able to tell your story.

In the rest of this post, I will focus on executive presentations, i.e. presentations that are sent directly to your audience for information or for them to take action. Those presentations are ‘standalone’ because they are not accompanied with a live voiceover. If you are interested in slide decks as a support for live presentations, please see the note at the bottom of this post.

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Now open PowerPoint. Decide on length and style. Outline your story.

Now you can start pulling together the skeleton of your presentation in PowerPoint, and in the process, you can use PowerPoint to sharpen your thinking and your messaging. Your slide deck is the only document that your audience will be engaging with so be mindful about its length and consciously choose the style you want to use throughout.

Decide on the appropriate length of your deck

This will vary depending on your audience and the purpose of your presentation. But remember that you are telling a story that people will need to be able to understand even if you are not in the room. People are busy, and they lose interest pretty quickly so your job is to convey your message as concisely as possible.

If you are making a recommendation to a senior decision-maker in your company, make sure that the number of slides they need to read does not exceed 5. Those 5 slides are what we call in consulting and corporate jargon an Executive Summary, because it is destined to people who need to make many decisions in short spans of time. Typically, a 5-slide Executive Summary should be made out of:

• 1 slide that is structured following the structure of the story you just built on your whiteboard or your sheet of paper. Include the context, the objective, your recommendation as well as proposed next steps. This might be the only slide that your audience ends up reading; you will need that slide to be compelling both visually and in its content so your audience reads the rest of your document.
• 2-3 slides that dive into any key messages that need to be explained further e.g. to ensure your recommendation is supported or can be challenged appropriately.
• 1 slide that shares proposed next steps for both you and the audience.

If you are creating a story that presents the outputs from weeks or months of work to your audience, your output will be very different. Those slide decks can become content beasts. Here are a few recommendations on how not to make it feel so:

• At the beginning, introduce the purpose of the document and include a table of contents that outlines the key components to your story.
• Look at the different sections in your story and decide how many slides you want to dedicate to each section. Make sure the overall balance feels right.
• Within each section, spend extra time on structuring as concise a story as possible. Send to the appendix any slides that are not crucial to your core story.
• If the core of your slides (without appendices) is made out of more than 10 slides, create an Executive Summary (see above) and include it upfront.
• Throughout the presentation, sign-post which section the slides belong to e.g. through a little storyboard in the top-right-hand corner of each slide.
• Spend extra time on style. Include pictures, graphs, interactive elements. Enough variety so the reader stays interested but not too much that they get distracted.

Note on appendices: only include appendices that are absolutely necessary for the audience to understand your message. If you choose to include appendices, include a table of content and reference each appendix in your core slides. If you cannot find a spot in your core slides to reference a specific appendix, then it means that that appendix is not relevant to the story you are telling. You either need to change your story or delete that appendix.

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Decide on the style you want to use

You should use the same style (colours, shapes, fonts, font sizes etc.) throughout your slide deck. Take time to decide which style you want to use before you create anything. This will be useful for two reasons:

• For the reader: if your style is consistent, this means the reader will not be distracted by style changes from one slide to the next. You want the reader to focus on your content and not on misaligned font sizes in your titles.
• For you: by deciding which style you want to use ahead of time, you free yourself from constantly having to make style decision every time you create a new slide. Instead, you simply and efficiently follow the rules you have set for yourself.

If your company has templates, use those templates to ensure you are adopting the right colours, shapes, fonts and sizes. If you have no template to follow, decide what colours you want to use, where your slide margins are (the blank space at the top, bottom, left and right), and decide which font and font size and colour you want to use for your titles and for text in the body of the slide. To make sure all readers feel included, make sure the font size you choose is not too small and that the colours you choose to use don’t look too similar for people who are colour blind i.e. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women (see here for more info).

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Outline your story across your slide deck

If you haven’t already, now is the time to open PowerPoint. Create a blank slide deck made out of exactly the number of slides that you decided you wanted to include, and in the style you decided you want to use. Make sure each of your slide has a ‘title’ text box at the top that you can write in. That box needs to be in the exact same location and the exact same font and colour as the other text boxes at the top of the other slides.

Now take the ‘structured and concise story’ that you drafted on your whiteboard or your sheet of paper and write it in those text boxes. Each ‘title’ on each slide represents one element of your story. It should be written in an informative manner (see guidance below) and should fit in maximum two lines of that text box.

Guidance re. informative titles:

• Not: ‘Overview of the energy transition in the UK’

• But rather: ‘The UK energy transition started with the increase in wind and solar power from the year 2000 and is now in full swing.’

As you write your high-level story, feel free to paste some content onto the body of the slide (e.g. key messages you have already written, a compelling graph or figures that support your message) as well as any useful sources. But please leave it at that: do not start writing or re-writing anything; do not fiddle with the graph; do not create new content. Leave that for later as that kind of work requires a different headspace to the one that you are in right now. Make sure you keep your brain focused on the high-level story.

Once you are done, read those slide titles one after the next, as if you were reading novel. Does the story make sense? Yay! If not, adapt as you see fit. This is not just an opportunity to tell the story you had decided you wanted to tell, it is also an opportunity to clarify your own thinking, and to iterate on it in areas that you have not quite nailed just yet. This iteration exercise is a truly powerful thing - it invites you to question your own story and improve it as you build it.

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Then build your slides. One by one.

You’ve now outlined an engaging story at a high level. Great. The next phase of your work is going to require a different headspace so now is a good point to take a break if you need it. Now, your objective is to build your slides in a way that ensures the reader will focus on the content and not be distracted by anything else.

You can do this in the order you want! In the same way that film directors never film their scenes in the order of the script, you can choose to sort out all your graphs first, or all your sources, or start with the slides where proper writing is required. Whatever works for you, depending on the headspace you are in at that specific moment of the day or of your work.

‍Clarify the message within each slide

Reminder: your slide deck should only contain slides that are crucial to your story. No more. No less. There should only be one overarching message per slide, and it should feature in the title. If there are two messages in the title, make two separate slides.

The body of the slide (the space under the title) should be used to provide facts, figures, quotes that - altogether - support the message that you are sharing in the title. If you are sharing an important figure in your title, the reader should be able to find more detail on that figure in the body of your slide. If you are stating a truth which you gathered through talking with experts, then include some quotes. So think about what you genuinely want to convey, here. And again, if your thinking evolves as you are working and you need to change your slide title and potentially the overall story, that is fine. Not only is it fine, it’s actually really useful! Consider this an another opportunity to iterate on your thinking and update both your thinking and your story.

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Make it engaging

Make sure you focus your reader’s attention on the important parts of your content. It is your responsibility to make your story engaging. And I recommend you do so in a harmonious manner across your slide deck, and that you use the tools that feel right so that the reader understand visually what you are presenting before they even read the content:

• Assume the reader is scanning your slide from the top-left-hand corner to the bottom-right-hand corner. Position the various slide elements accordingly.
• Use graphs to illustrate a trend (and use the same graph style across slides)
• Use bullet points to highlight lists, or icons if you feel your list is a bit too dry. You can find really cool and simple icons on The Noun Project.
• Use italics to highlight quotes (and do not use italics for other purposes)
• Include a box in the right-hand side to present key messages (and use the same format anytime you want to present key messages or conclusions).

No animations though. Please. Unless you want your audience to think that your slides were created by someone who was discovering PowerPoint for the first time.

Remember: the style is there to serve the content. Not the other way around. So include enough tools that the audience finds variety as they are reading, and not too many tools that the audience is visually distracted every time they flick to a new slide. I usually pick graphs, one or two bright colours for slide titles and graph titles, as well as light grey text boxes which I use to signal key messages to my audience.

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Get rid of any distractions

This bit is a bit that consultancies are very good at and that people in corporate often disregard as a waste of time. I highly recommend you spend time building this part of the skill as this is what differentiates a good set of slides from a brilliant one.

Be attentive to detail when you build your slides. Build them consistently and harmoniously, in such a way that the audience’s attention will not be distracted with things that are displeasing or surprising to the eye or mind. Make sure that objects are aligned within and across slides, that words are spelled correctly, that slide numbers are included in each slide (if you choose to include them) etc.

The last thing you want is for your audience to spend even one second focusing on a spelling mistake or that things are not aligned with each other on the slide or across slides. Any second that is spent on that is a moment where the audience gets distracted from your content - and it is following by more time where they have to make an effort to mobilise their attention on the content again. Make sure you make their job (of focusing on the content) as easy as possible.

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Finally: put yourself in the shoes of the audience to  review your work.

You need to transition into a whole new headspace for this part of the work, so make sure you take a break before you start. Only come back to your work once you have spent time doing something else - or nothing, for that matter - and you feel refreshed.

Now pick up your slide deck and go through it assuming that you have a similar level of understanding of the topic at hand as your audience. Make sure that all stylistic distractions are corrected (within slide and across slides), take anything out that is not necessary, add things in that you feel are missing, and importantly - make sure your story flows well.

Congrats. You are now done.

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Like everything, practice makes perfect. Every time you spend time thinking about how to articulate a story for a specific audience, you become better at structuring your thinking. Every time you think about how to structure a specific slide to make your point visually obvious, it will become easier to create visually-compelling outputs next time you try. As you progress, you will notice that people look forward to receiving slides that you produce. And they will start asking you to address what feels like messier situations - and at that point you will have built the skills to do not only think about but also communicate on difficult situations.

Exciting stuff!