The application of visual thinking to presentations

Welcome to this blog – my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Olivia

I’ve just finished reading Dan Roam’s book. I highly recommend it if you’re wanting to delve more deeply into visual thinking. I’ve also been doing other reading and web-surfing on visual thinking.

Here’s my thoughts so far on the application of visual thinking to presentations.

First, if we can express something visually as well as verbally – the audience will be likely to understand it and recall it better. From John Medina’s book BrainRules come the following figures:

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The power of the flipchart

Dan Roam has a great line in his book The Back of the Napkin – “the hand is mightier than the mouse”. Hand-drawing in front of an audience has power and energy. I think most presenters have forgotten this. People hardly use the term Visual Aids anymore – because the only visual aid most presenters use is PowerPoint.

On our courses, we use a flipchart (along with PowerPoint). There’s a particular session we do on reducing nervousness which we do entirely with the flipchart. During this session I tell the story of an occasion when nervousness got the better of me and demonstrate what was going on in my mind on the flipchart.

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Use words and visuals

I’m reading Dan Roam’s great new book Back of the Napkin. It’s led me to explore all the resources on the web for visual thinking. What I’m seeing is that there’s a whole movement out there for visual thinking, infographics etc. But yet most presenters, presentation trainers and consultants still think in terms of the verbal narrative of a presentation being the most important – and the visual side is just a visual aid.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Our audience can take things in, in two major ways: words and pictures. They correspond to the verbal channel and the visual channel of our brains (see Richard Mayer in Multimedia Learning). So in our presentations we should use both – without one being more important than the other.