True Business- real life for small businesses

Did you know that the war in Iraq has so far cost fifteen times more than Africa’s entire debt to the West?

Or six times more than it would cost to feed and educate every child on the planet for five years?

These are the statistics posited by David McCandless’ “Billion-Dollar-O-Gram”, which I found thanks to this BBC article.

What’s interesting is that the visuals of the Billion-Dollar-O-Gram are much more arresting than the words – even when the words are as astonishing as the facts I opened with here.

You can blame Michael Buerk and Bob Geldof, Greg Dyke and Rupert Murdoch, Piers Morgan and Tim Berners-Lee  for all this. Since the mid-1980s, we have become so connected to the facts (and atrocities) of the world around us, so overloaded with information, so self-aware and media-savvy, that it’s not only very hard to shock, but also very hard just to communicate effectively.

Believe me, I know: as a corporate journalist it’s my ever-harder job to make companies sound interesting. In fact, just being heard in the crowd is something of an achievement these days. Think about this as an example: when was the last time you heard a company use words like “innovative” or ”iconic” and thought… “Actually, they really are!”?

It’s a rarity. Maybe what your business does really is innovative, different, ground-breaking and iconic. It’s bloody hard to shout about it, though. I mean, if we’re desensitised to the starving children and mindless violence dribbling through our TV screens every day, how can something as minor as “my cool business idea” gain any interest or traction?

That’s why I like what McCandless’ is doing (although I suspect he’d not be impressed with my hijacking it for business purposes!): pictures have as much to offer businesses as words. It’s why I think PowerPoint is misused. If you use PowerPoint to display the words you’re going to say anyway; you’re completely missing the power of the tool. If, however, you use it to present visual endorsements of your words, then you’ll be doubling your ability to communicate. Nothing highlights differentials better than galloping graphs or layers of contrasting colours.

So next time you have a raft of boring figures to impart to a mind-numbed audience, or complex themes to get across to a sceptical audience, think visually. And that’s not just about charts:

• Use colours to identify pathways through complex themes: it helps your audience follow your threads
• Iconography can help too (don’t ask why, but I have a friend who puts farm animals in his slide shows. It’s usually around the tenth slide that someone will finally ask what the animals are for…)
• Graphical representations are instincively understood: a visual scale will often be understood faster than a percentage. Similarly graphics of different sizes express relationships in an instinctive way (think pictures of sumo wrestler next to a toddler as an example).

I will never be a graphic artist (I never graduated beyond crayons…) but I have no doubt that in a world where you have to shout to be heard; you need to use every technique in the communicator’s toolkit – and visual techniques are massively underrated.

PowerPoint is of course, part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, and you can get a free 60-day trial of Office  here.