Amy English
Instructional Design Specialist
Baker Communications, Inc.
The venture capitalist was getting bored. So far, these guys hadn’t shown him anything that convinced him their idea was all that brilliant, despite the fact that they were 60 slides into their PowerPoint and over half an hour into their meeting. He was really starting to regret giving them a whole hour of his time – he knew from experience that if they couldn’t pique his interest within the first five minutes, he wasn’t likely to get excited about anything later on. He sat resignedly as they continued to flick through slides and deliver their overheated pitch, thinking about where he might go for lunch. It was pretty hot out. It felt like it might be a sushi day. He was too busy for a long lunch, though. Maybe he could just pick up a sandwich from that place on the corner…
The Receiving End
Presentation and public speaking experts all have their own special tips and tricks for planning and delivering memorable and effective presentations. Their ideas are built on their own observations of what works, what doesn’t, and what kind of feedback and reactions they have seen from various audiences. We talk a lot about how things work from the presenter’s viewpoint. However, it’s surprising how seldom we hear directly from the people on the receiving end of those presentations.
Occasionally, though, we do. Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley author, speaker, marketing executive – and yes, venture capitalist – is the originator of a rule for presentations that is usually referred to as the 10/20/30 Rule. In 2005, Kawasaki blogged about how often he sat through horrible, overlong presentatations accompanied by absurd slide decks. He proposed and continued to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule as a useful tip for keeping presentations concise, clear, and effective.
So what exactly is the famous 10/20/30 Rule all about? Let’s look at each number.
10 Slides
According to Kawasaki, the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation is 10. He points out that pushing more than 10 concepts into one meeting constitutes information overload for most normal people. If you can’t get your ideas across in the course of ten slides, it’s probably time to take a step back, assess, and refocus on what the important stuff actually is.
Kawasaki went so far as to specify the ten specific topics that should be addressed when presenting to a venture capitalist or pitching a startup, but the 10-Slide rule can be generalized to most other situations as well. After all, if ten concepts is all most people can handle at a sitting, we can assume that any more than that will result in information being lost in transmission – whether it’s ignored, forgotten, or missed because our audience has tuned out and started thinking about lunch.
20 Minutes
Kawasaki assigned a 20-minute period to get through the 10 slides and deliver the pitch. Even if we have an hour of time, he reasoned, you have to have time for setup, and for discussion afterward. It’s also reasonable to leave some wiggle room for people coming into the meeting late or leaving early. Planning to deliver a one-hour presentation in a one-hour meeting is not only unnecessary – it’s impossible in practice.
30-Point Font
Interestingly, Guy Kawasaki assigns a specific number to the font size used in the presentation deck, and gives it equal importance to the length of the talk and the number of slides. While at first glance this seems odd, the 30-point font recommendation actually has merit. For one thing, it will prevent us from attempting to cram too much information onto a single slide – a temptation that is likely to become even harder to resist when we are restricted to a mere 10 slides.
For another, as Kawasaki points out, it ensures that we actually know our material and aren’t using the PowerPoint deck as a script. Experienced presenters know that reading the slides to the audience is a cardinal sin and frequent cause of “Death by PowerPoint.” Kawasaki asserts (quite accurately) that once the audience realizes the presenter is just reading the slides, they start reading instead of listening. Since people usually read faster than they talk, this results in the audience getting ahead of us. They finish the slide and then wait for us to stop talking. We’re out of synch with them. They’re bored. Our presence and our voice have become extraneous. Before we know it, our presentation has fallen flat.
Besides all of that, larger fonts are easier to read, and therefore easier for our audience to understand. We should make every effort to design clear, legible, and concise slides that assist our audience and support our presentation – otherwise, there’s not much point in having slides at all.
Using the 10/20/30 Rule
For those of us with presenting experience, these guidelines seem sensible, and can serve to remind us that a short, punchy presentation often beats out a long, detailed one. For those who are newer to presenting, the 10/20/30 Rule provides and excellent framework for creating a clean, clear, and effective presentation.
Baker Communications offers leading edge Presentations Training solutions that will help we address the goals and achieve the solutions addressed in this article. For more information about how our organization can achieve immediate and lasting behavior change that leads to success during presentations in any setting, click here.
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