Booher BanterBusiness Communication Consultant

Many users have become more intrigued with the technology than the message. Their presentations and customer communications have become all flash with little fodder or foresight.

In our presentations workshops, it’s not unusual to have attendees walk in with their prepared deck of 15-30 slides for a 5-minute presentation. They have photos, imbedded video or audio clips, even live web interaction planned, and all sorts of animation and transitions. When the whiz-bang has ended, the group can’t tell you their point.

Recently, one of our trainers returned to the office with this pronouncement about the day’s experience at a client organization: “Their CEO won’t let anyone in the company use anything on a visual but bullet points. Just an informative heading and bullet points! No photos. No color. Nothing. So everything I tried to introduce to them in our session on how to prepare and design effective visuals was a waste of time. They just said, ‘No, we can’t do that. The CEO has put his foot down—he won’t permit anything but black-and-white bullets.’”

Well, as you can imagine, I had to get to the bottom of that mandate. So I made a call to find out what was going on.

Answer: The CEO’s black-and-white-bullets-only mandate was his response to the frustration to the same problem stated earlier: Glitzy visuals that obscured the message his staff members intended to deliver. (Granted, his mandate seems as extreme as the technology overkill that he hated, but that’s another blog….)

How do you know if technology has become a nuisance in your organization?

Ten Tell-Tale Signs of Troublesome Technology in Communication

• Listeners ask “How did you do that?” questions when you finish a presentation? (Such questions are a big clue that your use of technology distracts rather than supports your message.)
• Listeners can’t summarize your main points when you finish your slideshow.
• Presenters spend more time developing their visuals than their message.
• Presenters find themselves altering what they want to say because they don’t know how to render the message on a visual with the available technology.
• Everyone’s time is wasted in a meeting because of “technical difficulties” in getting equipment to operate properly.
• Speakers complain to conference sponsors about all being required to use the same slide template “for consistency” and “to ensure that the technology works properly” when multiple speakers and sessions are involved.
• Presenters worry more about how the technology will work than how the listeners will react to their message.
• Budgets for “editing” your executives before the organization presents them online grow astronomical.
• When customers and the public meet and hear presenters “live” and in person from your organization, they don’t even recognize them because their “personae” and their presentations have been edited and altered so dramatically with technology.
• Your hallways buzz more frequently about the latest model gadget or gizmo than profits and problems.

It all comes down to this: All technology eventually loses its “newness,” and then users are back to the fundamentals of communication and human nature: Trust. Credibility. Integrity. Inclusiveness. Listening.

Leadership communication is about people and the message first and foremost. Clarity. Brevity. Messages aligned with action. Repetition.

Technology is only a means to the end. Leaders of the future must continually cut through the clutter to the core message.

Dianna Booher, an expert in effective communications, founded Booher Consultants in 1980.  Dianna has written more than forty books in the fields of business communication and productivity.  As a high-caliber keynote speaker who inspires audiences worldwide, Dianna delivers focused programs to address specific issues.

Contact Booher Consultants, Inc. for additional information.

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