In business, an overloaded and confusing PowerPoint presentation is a nuisance that can result in lost sales. In a Navy SEAL mission, bad PowerPoint presentations could be deadly.
While conducting my research for a new book on persuasion, I talked to Navy SEAL instructors as well as leaders from several branches of the U.S. military. Some are using my books in their classes to identify the best communication practices from other fields.
The one area where better PowerPoint habits are being adopted is in the Navy SEAL Mission Brief. The mission brief is delivered after all the details of a combat operation are defined and analyzed. It’s then up to a leader to prioritize the information and present it in a format that’s simple, clear, and concise. The mission brief answers six questions about the combat operation: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Above all, complex information must be quickly internalized by the team who will execute the mission.
Among Navy SEALs–the most elite fighting force in the world–PowerPoint is ubiquitous. Some officers designate themselves “PowerPoint Rangers” as a joke because they feel buried under the weight of creating presentations. Of course, presentations serve a purpose–to convey information critical to the successful outcome of the mission. Done poorly, however, and presentations defeat the purpose. Given the life or death nature of these presentations, it shouldn’t be surprising that Navy SEAL trainers give presentation strategy a lot of thought.
Here’s what they’ve found.
PowerPoints laced with videos and images are far more effective than slides bloated with words, text and bullet points.
According to former Navy SEAL commander, Mark Devine, the best mission-briefing specialists will have some text on their slides, but most of the slides will be rich in images, photos, and videos. Devine told me that elite presenters “Point to pictures of the compound or the landing zone. They’ll show the visual representation of the route the helicopter is going to take. They’ll display photos of the secondary landing zone. They’re not reading from text. They’re showing you what is about to happen.”
This skill doesn’t come naturally to SEAL ‘PowerPoint Rangers,’ and it doesn’t come naturally to business professionals, either. It helps to teach mission commanders and business leaders the science behind the strategy. It’s called “dual-coding,” which was first introduced in 1971 by a University of Western Ontario psychology professor, Allan Paivio.
Stamp the Mission on Your Listener’s Brain
Dual-coding simply means that visual and verbal information are stored separately in our memory. Spoken words are encoded verbally. Remarkably, ideas that are presented in pictures are encoded as both visual and verbal. In other words, pictures are more richly stamped in our brain and easier to recall.
For example, if I ask you to remember the word “dog,” your brain will register it as a verbal code. If I show you a picture of a dog and ask you to remember the word, the concept will be recorded visually and verbally, which makes it easier to recall the information later. Now, everyone knows what a dog looks like. If your audience is familiar the concept, it increases your ability to recall it, regardless of how I present it. If, however, you are unfamiliar with the material, like the terrain of an enemy compound, storing the concept as pictures and words could save your life.
As a leader or entrepreneur, think about your own presentations. How many presentations do you give to people who are unfamiliar with your idea or who have little knowledge about it. These scenarios include:
- Pitching a new idea, product, company, or campaign.
- Explaining new rules, processes, or guidelines.
- Training employees or salespeople on new tools or customer service initiatives.
- Selling a product to a customer who’s never used heard of it.
Several years ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who teaches multimedia learning. “It is better to present an explanation in words and pictures than solely in words,” he told me. In Mayer’s experiments, people who were exposed to multisensory presentations–text, pictures, animation, and video–always, not sometimes, always had much more accurate recall of the information than those subjects who only heard the content or read it.
The human brain is built to process information visually and verbally. Include pictures, images, and video in your next presentation. You’re audience will thank you for it, and be more likely to act on the information you’ve presented.