The Power of an Iterative Process

I have to admit it, I was a crammer. I would procrastinate before exams, wait to write papers, and prepare presentations on the walk to class. Needless to say, I didn’t get as many A’s as I could have if I had started the process earlier. 

While many professionals would not openly admit to being “crammers,” they do get caught pulling together important presentations at the last minute.

After the fact, they lament that they would have liked more time to work on their talk track, make their slides more visual, or perfect their performance and be more conversational.

This problem can be easily solved by incorporating an iterative process to build, test, and revise a presentation. 

Here’s our 5-step, iterative process to develop and deliver a great presentation:

1) Identify your Takeaways:

Takeaways are a foundational element of any presentation. These are the central ideas you want your audience to ‘get’ after you’re done presenting. Research has reliably indicated that people are unlikely to retain more than four central ideas, so if your inclination is to “give them everything,” you would be wise to reconsider. 

Before you open a Powerpoint or start outlining your talk track, write down your exact takeaway messages and keep those front-and-center as you develop your content.

If you need more information on takeaways, their value, and the ‘watercooler test,’ read more here.

2) Build your Outline

Using your takeaways as a guide, develop your organizational structure and represent it as a skeleton outline.

Within each section, add data, examples, and strategic stories that bring to life your main ideas.

Refrain from writing a word-for-word script for a few reasons. First, if you don’t have days to perfectly memorize it, your presentation will lack authenticity as you focus more on word recall than conveying a specific message. Second, trying to recall exact wording is stressful and often amplifies speakers’ anxiety. Finally, it’s much more likely your mind ‘goes blank’ when trying to recall an exact script than when you’re ‘just talking’ to your audience. 

To connect to your audience, you want to be as conversational as possible, and this occurs when you talk from an outline.

3) Design the Slide Deck

Building slides should be the last step in your development process. It should occur after your outline has been completed. 

If you’ve ever been in a presentation where the slides were just blocks of text, you can bet the presenter started with the slide deck, and when that happens, the deck looks more like speaker notes than engaging visuals.

Waiting to build the deck until the end allows you to select images that reinforce your central ideas and you can purposefully turn sentences into phrases and phrases into words, to reduce your word count.

For more on designing visually appealing slide decks, read here.

4) Practice Incrementally

Do not set aside two hours to rehearse and think that will suffice. Practicing in one intense chunk is not optimal for perfecting your performance and locking in your content. 

Instead, practice incrementally. 

Rehearse one section at a time. Spend 15 to 20 minutes on each section. Take a break between sections, whether for 15 minutes or overnight, and then move on to the next section.

These distributed practice sessions will ensure that each section gets the time and attention it needs to be great.

5) Review, Enhance, Rehearse, Repeat

While you’re rehearsing each section, review your takeaways, talk track, slides, even your delivery. Throughout this process, continually adjust, experiment, revise, and most importantly enhance your presentation until it feels ‘just right.’   

By carving out time and using this iterative process you will ensure that you are better prepared, more conversational, and that you’ve made the edits and enhancements necessary to earn an A+ on your next professional presentation.