Here’s a fun fact: Nolan was actually a magician in the past! An award-winning one! But now, his passion is all about presentation design. Nolan was one of the four speakers that held masterclasses during the first day of Present to Succeed 2021. His masterclass was about crafting data visualizations for effective communication. As our co-founder and Present to Succeed host Iva described him, he’s very straightforward and can explain very complicated topics in a very understandable way, and we loved that.

Nolan trains organizations to think visually, and in his Present to Succeed 2021 session, he made us think about how our presentations are being consumed by an ever-changing, diverse audience.

As Nolan explained in the very beginning, the idea is not about political correctness or yelling at people on Twitter for using the wrong word, as he said. The idea is to create presentations that are free of outdated stereotypes and represent the actual reality of the audience.

Inclusivity is a vast topic that includes accessibility. But the most important thing is to be authentic and accurate to the audience that you’re talking to. Because, as Simon Morton taught us in his Present to Succeed 2021 session, “the audience is the most important stakeholder in any presentation.”

Nolan calmed us that it’s ok to make mistakes from an inclusivity standpoint. But the main thing he wanted us to take from his session was that we all really need to make a best faith effort.

So, what does the theme of inclusivity involve? As Nolan said, a lot of stuff, but here are the main ones: race and ethnicity, gender and sex, age, language, and ability. Nolan talked about those in the context of slide design, imagery, delivery, language, and something that will be interesting for our US audience, 508 compliance – a requirement for safe and accessible content for people with disabilities.

Nolan talked about all the aspects of inclusivity in presentations.

Something cool Nolan said that we have discussed before ourselves is that online speaker presentations should be like a good billboard – understandable in just a few seconds. Nolan talked about the Picture superiority effect – the scientifically proven fact that people process information far better as images than text.

He provided the audience with specific tips on making your slides more accessible, like increasing the text size and making the slides color-safe. That means being sure that the slides are understandable if there are people with certain types of color deficiency in your audience.

You can’t ask someone to take a business decision based on full-color charts and graphs if you know they can’t distinguish different colors.

Nolan continued with specific examples on inclusivity related to gender. For example, the stereotype that all CEOs are male, nurses are female, and so on. And that’s important not just from a politically correct standpoint, but also from an authenticity standpoint. Are all CEOs white men in shirts, Nolan asked, and of course, the answer is no. So, it’s the right thing to not work with stereotypes or defaults, as Nolan calls them, in our presentations if we want to reflect the actual reality of our audiences.

“Are all CEOs young white men in striped shirts with beards? No.”