You’ve got a big presentation coming up. You’re trying to decide between making the slides yourself or hiring a presentation design agency. You’ve always created your own PowerPoint presentations before, but you’ve noticed recently that your competitors are stepping up their game. Your boss is putting pressure on you to elevate the look of your slides. What do you do?
Creating your own PowerPoint presentation is definitely the easiest, and therefore the best, decision, right?
Not necessarily. Let’s look at how our brains can use the path of least resistance to trick us into settling for low-hanging fruit. Then, we’ll see how embracing tension while maintaining control can help us advance.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Research has shown that our brains trick us when it comes to the path of least resistance. An article in Psychology Today explains it well. “Imagine you are in an orchard, trying to decide which of the many apples to pick…Does an apple at the top of the tree look more or less tempting than the low-hanging fruit? The answer, this study suggests, is that the low-hanging fruit will probably look more appealing to you.” Dr. Nobuhiro Hagura has found that “when one option is harder to get, we’re more likely to think it’s the wrong choice.”
That means our brains can convince us that it’s better to just create our own presentation because that’s the easy and comfortable choice. So we have to really think about what we want. Do we want to do what we’ve always done just because it’s what we’ve always done? Or is there flawed psychology at work that is keeping us comfortable, but stagnant?
We get it. Making that initial contact with a presentation designer can be scary. But we’ve compiled a list of 5 of the best presentation design agencies (yes, we’re in the mix) to help make your climb to the top of the apple tree a little easier.
Oscillation Vs. Advancement
When making your decision about whether or not to hire a presentation design agency, consider what your ultimate goals are and outline how to get there. In his book The Path of Least Resistance for Managers, Robert Fritz puts organizations into two categories: those that oscillate and those that advance. Those that oscillate do what they’ve always done. There even seems to be movement, but it’s not going anywhere. It just keeps circling back around to the same place. On the other hand, organizations structured for advancement build forward momentum. They embrace tension as the necessary force that gets them from where they are, to where they want to be. Fritz defines tension as “the difference between what we want and what we have.” It’s the difference between “our desired state as compared to our actual state.”
Creating your own slide deck is work. There’s time and effort involved. Still for many people, that feels more comfortable than contracting outside help. We get that. Both paths have some effort involved. But which one is more likely to find you oscillating and which one is more likely to help you truly advance?
If your boss is asking you to elevate your slides (or you are feeling your own desire to make them better), maybe it’s time to reach a little higher on the tree. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it; it just means you don’t have to do it alone any longer. A presentation design agency has the expertise to help you advance rather than oscillate.
Hiring a Presentation Design Agency While Still Maintaining Control
One of the reasons some presenters resist the thought of hiring a design agency is not because they are settling for low-hanging fruit or oscillating. It’s because they are afraid of losing control. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant talks about how important freedom of choice is. We want to echo what Grant says. A good presentation design agency will respect your autonomy and will value your input during the creative process. If loss of control is what is preventing you from reaching out to a presentation design company, we can assure you that we want to partner with you because we share your goal: to make your slide deck the best it can be.
We hope we’ve given you some more to think about as you consider hiring a presentation design agency. It could be that your brain has convinced you that the path of least resistance is the best. Or that the tension isn’t worth it. Or that you’ll lose control over your presentation. But, as we’ve shown, that’s not true.
Ready to climb the tree and embrace the tension that leads to the best fruit? Ready to take your presentation to the next level?