The 10-20-30 Rule, devised by Guy Kawasaki, advocates for concise presentations with 10 slides, delivered within 20 minutes, and using a font size of 30 points or more. Its benefits include heightened audience engagement, clear messaging, and efficient time utilization. Widely adopted by TED speakers and entrepreneurs, it’s an essential tool for impactful communication.
The 10-20-30 Rule is a presentation principle popularized by Guy Kawasaki, a renowned entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. This rule provides straightforward guidelines for structuring your presentations effectively. Its core principles are as follows:
1. 10 Slides: Limit your presentation to a maximum of 10 slides. This constraint encourages you to focus on the most critical points and prevents your presentation from becoming overly lengthy or cluttered with unnecessary information.
2. 20 Minutes: Aim to deliver your entire presentation within 20 minutes. This time constraint forces you to be concise and ensures that your audience remains engaged throughout the presentation.
3. 30-Point Font Size: Use a minimum font size of 30 points for your slide text. This guideline promotes readability and discourages the use of dense, hard-to-read slides with small text.
Key Principles of the 10-20-30 Rule
To apply the 10-20-30 Rule effectively, it’s essential to understand its key principles:
1. Simplicity: The rule encourages simplicity in your presentation. By limiting the number of slides, the duration, and the font size, you naturally focus on the core message and avoid overwhelming your audience with unnecessary details.
2. Conciseness: Keeping your presentation to 10 slides and 20 minutes enforces conciseness. It challenges you to distill your message to its essence, which can make your presentation more memorable and impactful.
3. Audience Engagement: A shorter presentation with larger text is more likely to keep your audience engaged and attentive. It respects their time and attention span, increasing the chances of conveying your message effectively.
4. Visual Aid: The 10-20-30 Rule encourages you to use visuals effectively. Visuals can be powerful tools for conveying information and enhancing audience understanding. It’s not about cramming text onto slides but using visuals strategically.
Practical Tips for Applying the 10-20-30 Rule
Now that you understand the principles of the 10-20-30 Rule, here are some practical tips for applying it to your business presentations:
1. Start with a Clear Message: Before creating your presentation, identify the core message or key takeaway you want your audience to remember. Your entire presentation should revolve around this central idea.
2. Outline Your Content: Create an outline of your presentation to ensure that you cover all the essential points within the 10-slide, 20-minute limit. This outline will serve as a roadmap for your presentation.
3. Choose Visuals Wisely: Instead of text-heavy slides, use visuals such as images, charts, graphs, and diagrams to convey your message. Visuals can make complex information more digestible and engaging.
4. Practice and Time Yourself: Rehearse your presentation multiple times to ensure that you can deliver it within 20 minutes. Practice also helps you become more comfortable with the content, reducing the chances of nervousness during the actual presentation.
5. Use Speaker Notes: While your slides should be concise and visual, you can include additional information and talking points in your speaker notes. This allows you to expand on key points during your presentation without cluttering your slides.
6. Engage Your Audience: Encourage audience engagement through questions, anecdotes, or interactive elements. Engagement keeps your audience focused and helps them connect with your message.
7. Prepare for Q&A: Anticipate questions your audience might have and prepare concise, well-thought-out answers. Q&A sessions should be an opportunity to clarify and expand on your presentation, not a chance to reiterate your entire talk.
8. Feedback and Iteration: After delivering your presentation, seek feedback from colleagues or peers. Use their input to refine and improve your presentation for future audiences.
Applications in Business Scenarios
The 10-20-30 Rule can be applied effectively in various business scenarios, including:
1. Investor Pitches: When pitching your business idea to potential investors, a concise and focused presentation can make a strong impression. Use the 10-20-30 Rule to highlight the key aspects of your proposal.
2. Sales Presentations: Sales professionals can use this rule to create persuasive and succinct presentations that resonate with customers and lead to more successful sales.
3. Project Updates: When updating your team or stakeholders on a project’s progress, the 10-20-30 Rule ensures that you convey critical information efficiently and keep everyone on the same page.
4. Conference Speaking: Speaking at conferences or industry events often comes with strict time limits. Adhering to the 10-20-30 Rule helps you make the most of your allotted time and deliver a memorable presentation.
5. Training Sessions: Whether you’re training new employees or conducting workshops, concise presentations help learners absorb information effectively.
Potential Criticisms and Limitations
While the 10-20-30 Rule offers valuable guidelines for effective presentations, it may not be suitable for every situation. Some potential criticisms and limitations to consider include:
1. Complex Topics: For highly complex or technical subjects, adhering strictly to 10 slides and 20 minutes might not allow for adequate coverage. In such cases, flexibility is key.
2. Audience Expectations: The rule assumes a general audience and may not align with specific audience expectations. Tailor your presentation approach to your audience’s needs.
3. Content Depth: If your presentation requires in-depth exploration of multiple facets, you may need to extend the duration beyond 20 minutes. However, ensure that your content justifies the extra time.
4. Delivery Style: Some presenters have a naturally fast or slow speaking style. Adhering to a fixed 20-minute timeframe may lead to rushed or extended presentations, depending on your delivery style.
Conclusion
The 10-20-30 Rule provides a valuable framework for creating effective and engaging business presentations. By focusing on simplicity, conciseness, and audience engagement, you can enhance your communication skills and increase the impact of your presentations. While the rule is not a strict formula, it offers guidelines that, when applied thoughtfully, can help you convey your message with clarity and efficiency. Whether you’re a seasoned presenter or just starting, incorporating the principles of the 10-20-30 Rule into your presentations can lead to more successful and memorable communication in the business world.
Key Highlights
Simplicity: The rule advocates for 10 slides, a 20-minute presentation, and a font size of 30 points or more.
Engagement: Short presentations hold audience attention and increase message retention.
Clarity: Presenters focus on key points, reducing ambiguity and information overload.
Time Management: The 20-minute limit keeps presenters concise and on track.
Versatility: Applicable in various contexts, from business meetings to public speaking events.
Influential Adoption: Used by Steve Jobs and TED speakers for impactful communication.
Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Lindy Effect is a theory about the ageing of non-perishable things, like technology or ideas. Popularized by author Nicholas Nassim Taleb, the Lindy Effect states that non-perishable things like technology age – linearly – in reverse. Therefore, the older an idea or a technology, the same will be its life expectancy.
Antifragility was first coined as a term by author, and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragility is a characteristic of systems that thrive as a result of stressors, volatility, and randomness. Therefore, Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Where a fragile thing breaks up to volatility; a robust thing resists volatility. An antifragile thing gets stronger from volatility (provided the level of stressors and randomness doesn’t pass a certain threshold).
Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.
Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.
Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).
The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.
The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.
The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
The recognition heuristic is a psychological model of judgment and decision making. It is part of a suite of simple and economical heuristics proposed by psychologists Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer. The recognition heuristic argues that inferences are made about an object based on whether it is recognized or not.
The representativeness heuristic was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The representativeness heuristic judges the probability of an event according to the degree to which that event resembles a broader class. When queried, most will choose the first option because the description of John matches the stereotype we may hold for an archaeologist.
The take-the-best heuristic is a decision-making shortcut that helps an individual choose between several alternatives. The take-the-best (TTB) heuristic decides between two or more alternatives based on a single good attribute, otherwise known as a cue. In the process, less desirable attributes are ignored.
The bundling bias is a cognitive bias in e-commerce where a consumer tends not to use all of the products bought as a group, or bundle. Bundling occurs when individual products or services are sold together as a bundle. Common examples are tickets and experiences. The bundling bias dictates that consumers are less likely to use each item in the bundle. This means that the value of the bundle and indeed the value of each item in the bundle is decreased.
The Barnum Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that generic information – which applies to most people – is specifically tailored for themselves.
First-principles thinking – sometimes called reasoning from first principles – is used to reverse-engineer complex problems and encourage creativity. It involves breaking down problems into basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up. Elon Musk is among the strongest proponents of this way of thinking.
The ladder of inference is a conscious or subconscious thinking process where an individual moves from a fact to a decision or action. The ladder of inference was created by academic Chris Argyris to illustrate how people form and then use mental models to make decisions.
Goodhart’s Law is named after British monetary policy theorist and economist Charles Goodhart. Speaking at a conference in Sydney in 1975, Goodhart said that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The Six Thinking Hats model was created by psychologist Edward de Bono in 1986, who noted that personality type was a key driver of how people approached problem-solving. For example, optimists view situations differently from pessimists. Analytical individuals may generate ideas that a more emotional person would not, and vice versa.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What in marketing can be associated with social proof.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. This observation was made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and it become a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry and has had far-reaching implications for technology as a whole.
Disruptive innovation as a term was first described by Clayton M. Christensen, an American academic and business consultant whom The Economist called “the most influential management thinker of his time.” Disruptive innovation describes the process by which a product or service takes hold at the bottom of a market and eventually displaces established competitors, products, firms, or alliances.
Value migration was first described by author Adrian Slywotzky in his 1996 book Value Migration – How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition. Value migration is the transferal of value-creating forces from outdated business models to something better able to satisfy consumer demands.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
Groupthink occurs when well-intentioned individuals make non-optimal or irrational decisions based on a belief that dissent is impossible or on a motivation to conform. Groupthink occurs when members of a group reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternatives and their consequences.
A stereotype is a fixed and over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people. These beliefs are based on the false assumption that certain characteristics are common to every individual residing in that group. Many stereotypes have a long and sometimes controversial history and are a direct consequence of various political, social, or economic events. Stereotyping is the process of making assumptions about a person or group of people based on various attributes, including gender, race, religion, or physical traits.
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Murphy’s Law was named after aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy. During his time working at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949, Murphy cursed a technician who had improperly wired an electrical component and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
The law of unintended consequences was first mentioned by British philosopher John Locke when writing to parliament about the unintended effects of interest rate rises. However, it was popularized in 1936 by American sociologist Robert K. Merton who looked at unexpected, unanticipated, and unintended consequences and their impact on society.
Fundamental attribution error is a bias people display when judging the behavior of others. The tendency is to over-emphasize personal characteristics and under-emphasize environmental and situational factors.
Outcome bias describes a tendency to evaluate a decision based on its outcome and not on the process by which the decision was reached. In other words, the quality of a decision is only determined once the outcome is known. Outcome bias occurs when a decision is based on the outcome of previous events without regard for how those events developed.
Hindsight bias is the tendency for people to perceive past events as more predictable than they actually were. The result of a presidential election, for example, seems more obvious when the winner is announced. The same can also be said for the avid sports fan who predicted the correct outcome of a match regardless of whether their team won or lost. Hindsight bias, therefore, is the tendency for an individual to convince themselves that they accurately predicted an event before it happened.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
