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Home | Articles
How to Gain Control of Your PowerPoint Culture
by Cliff Atkinson
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 About
Cliff Atkinson
As an independent management consultant and president of Sociable
Media, Cliff Atkinson (pictured right) advises
the senior leadership of some of the world's largest companies
on how they can engage the organizational phenomenon called
PowerPoint. These companies are beginning to understand
PowerPoint as more than just a presentation tool, and are
seeking answers to deeper questions about its organizational
use: How well does PowerPoint articulate and retain intellectual
assets? Do organizational policies help or hinder effective
PowerPoint communication? Are the right tools, resources
and training in place to support a healthy communications
ecology?
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Do you control your PowerPoint culture, or does PowerPoint control
you? For many organizations, what appears to be a situation under
control is in fact a system that’s out of control.
When organizations attempt to control branding by implementing
a typical PowerPoint template, they ensure their presenters overwhelm
or bore their audiences, which is a loss of control of brand.
When organizations seek to control information by encouraging
the use of bullet points on PowerPoint slides, they scatter their
intellectual assets into unmanageable fragments, which is a loss
of control of information.
And when organizations try to control messaging by a enforcing
a fill-in-the-blank PowerPoint approach, they lose the ability
to tailor an experience around a specific audience, which is a
loss of control of messaging.
What started as an honest attempt by organizations to control
PowerPoint has in fact yielded the opposite result. It’s not
that PowerPoint culture cannot be controlled, because it can. More
often than not, organizations are simply trying to control the
wrong things. And when they choose to take control of the right
things, they can finally gain real control of their PowerPoint
culture.
There are at least 5 things every organization should control
when it comes to PowerPoint:
Control the value
It’s difficult to control anything if you don’t know its value.
PowerPoint is many things to many people, but one of its most valuable roles
is as a platform that carries intellectual assets. What’s the value
of your organization’s intellectual assets residing on your PowerPoint
platform? That value is the starting point for an analysis of how effectively
your PowerPoint system captures, communicates, archives and repurposes your
intellectual assets. Knowing that value sets the context and imperative for
gaining control of PowerPoint.
Control the big picture
You don’t know what you’re dealing with until you can see it. That’s
what many organizations have discovered after they implemented digital asset
management systems to manage their PowerPoint assets. These visual interfaces
allow executives to see thumbnail-size views of all PowerPoint files across
every functional area. This first big picture view of the state of PowerPoint
in an organization is often not very pretty, usually revealing widespread
inconsistency and incoherence. Although it’s not the cure, gaining the
capability to see and monitor PowerPoint at an organizational level is an
important first step toward gaining control of the system.
Control the system
Most companies stop thinking about PowerPoint after they have a corporate
template, and that’s exactly where the problems start. The corporate
template is the DNA of your PowerPoint communications platform. The decisions
you make at the level of the corporate template determine whether your people
think inside the box, or out. By embedding effective media techniques into
the template itself, it can serve as the flexible foundation of a robust,
adaptive, and modern system of PowerPoint resources, tools and training.
Such a system maintains control by providing a flexible infrastructure from
which communication innovation and empowerment can grow.
Control the metrics
Do you measure how well you’re doing with PowerPoint? Clearly, PowerPoint
is notoriously difficult to quantify, since it is a tool that sits at the
intersection of so many communication variables. But one thing is for sure – PowerPoint
should not be judged only by its looks. You can only gain control of PowerPoint
by focusing on its effectiveness. One approach is by gap analysis: a presenter
wants to achieve measurable objectives with a PowerPoint, the audience rates
their experience by the same objectives, and the gap between the two numbers
determines effectiveness. This simple metric is a way to start to keep control
of the numbers. Whether you use this measure or another, at the very least
PowerPoint should be held to the same quality standards as the other products
and services in your organization.
Control the process
PowerPoint is a living, changing and dynamic new language your organization
is learning to speak. It will continually evolve and improve if you give
it the breathing room and resources to become what it can. This means providing
a good system, getting out of the way, and facilitating a process that brings
the best PowerPoint innovations to public view. This can take the form of
integrating metrics into your digital asset management system that might
include peer-rating systems widely available on consumer websites. If you
ask people the right questions and give them the right tools and process,
they will find the answers. The key is in controlling the right process.
If you’re interested in controlling your PowerPoint culture,
the hardest part will be making the decision to change. But once
you do, gaining control is as simple as letting go of control of
the things that cause you to lose control. And by controlling the
system, metrics and process, you’ll be well on your way toward
controlling an effective and measurable communications infrastructure
that just happens to reside on a PowerPoint platform.
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