One of our day-to-day business challenges is communicating effectively and efficiently. There is a real art to distilling complex ideas, organizations, methodologies or concepts into some format that is easy to understand while making it look easy, especially when it is not. If you want to differentiate yourself, learning to communicate those complexities so that anyone in your audience can understand it will win you fans and a lot of business because we all know it is more difficult to teach something than to merely "understand" it, and by conveying complex messages easily you will become a teacher and an adviser. It's also a great way to build confidence and trust.

When communicating keep a few things in mind:
1) Don't try to overwhelm them with buzz words and fancy phrases, no one likes feeling like they are being talked down to, especially when they already know what they don't know and that is why they have called you.
2) [paraphrase] It is wasteful to say with many words what can be said with few. -Unknown
3) Making other people feel smart and get it makes you look good and makes them feel good about you.

While we are pretty much all sick of the ubiquitous Powerpoint presentation, diagrams are one of the easiest and best ways to take those complex ideas and make them easy to communicate, though you have to put some serious thought into those slides to make them effective. Your challenge is to get as much info into one slide of a presentation as possible (and as necessary for the point you are trying to make) with as few words and as little explanation as you can get away with.

A few things to keep in mind or ask your self as you are creating a presentation slide/graphic:
1) If I don't "know" the subject matter in detail could I still get the concept without explanation?
2) Are there ways to convey multiple related pieces of information on a single graph or chart?
3) How can I show how seemingly exclusive things relate to each other?
4) Basic shapes can convey a lot of information and imply the degree of connectedness in relationships.
5) Color and gradients can also be a powerful way to show importance, position or imply other aspects of a relationship.
6) *Look at examples of what other people have done and think of ways to utilize those ideas and improve upon them.

My personal goal is to keep most of my presentations to 10 slides or less. I have had some of my most successful presentations take only 4 slides (not including the title slide and thank you slide at the end).

Finally, it is important to have the right tool for the right job. You have likely already read about my affinity for MindJet MindManager but there are others as well. Below is a list of tools I found through some convoluted trail of links I was following yesterday. There are some good tools and examples listed here so it's a good link to book mark for future reference (FYI some of them are free).

Tools (Gliffy is one in particular that looked interesting to me).

*Not a recommendation to steal or infringe upon anyone elses intellectual property so be careful, just learn to learn from what is there and try to improve upon it.

Labels: communication