Ive gone a bit quiet, haven’t I. It’s something I haven’t got enough momentum to do yet, really.
I blame the mayhem that buffets me in every area of my life at the moment. However what is really filling my head to overflowing at the moment is the presentation I have signed up to give next week at an IBM internal conference for IT Architects.
You see, I hate presentations. In my line of work I find myself in rooms looking at projections of Powerpoint slides at least once or twice a week. I’ve seen some truly awful stuff. Verbatim bullet point recitations vie with tiny fonts and detailed diagrams to give me a headache. Of course, it’s not all that bad, and it’s not all other people, either. However, I think that there is a huge scope for improvement in the way almost all presentations are created and delivered.
I have a goal to become an great communicator. Keeping this blog is part of that, but I’m currently focused on the part of it that is creating and delivering excellent presentations. I’m not aiming for average – i’m fed up to the back teeth with average in this field. I want to deliver presentations that are outstanding. They must be memorable and enjoyable, as well as conveying whatever message I have.
So I have been working very hard to come up with something a bit lot different for next week’s conference.
It was watching Alec Muffett’s presentation entitled Business Blogging – Innovate or Die which he delivered at the Blogs and Social Media Forum 2006 that started me thinking along these lines. That led me to Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation at OSCON 2005. Since then I’ve done a lot of investigation and have trawled the web looking for ideas and techniques. I read Garr Reynolds‘ blog Presentation Zen in my RSS reader, and I bought and read Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points.
.This is a kind of summary of what I have concluded from all this:
- plan the whole thing first, away from Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever;
- tell a narrative story – people remember stories;
- never use words when you could use a picture – take one yourself, or get them from iStockPhoto or the Creative Commons areas on Flickr;
- no bullet points. none. hate hate hate;
- surprise people – it wakes them up;
- consider abandoning the corporate templates and going for something much simpler.
Anyway, that’s enough procrastinationwriting about it. I need to get on with actually doing it.
If I can, I’ll publish the end result on here.
Technorati Tags: flickr, presentations, powerpoint, keynote
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I like all of these conclusions. And I really, really want to follow them.
Unfortunately the presentation I’m giving next week is hampered by a diktat to use a corporate template. I may just surprise them by turning up with my Macbook and abandoning the template.
The other issue (for me) is that a photos-only presentation – which I like the idea of – requires me to learn my script, or have more confidence in my story. My own strategy is to use the slides as a reminder of the points I want to make, and I’m sorry to confess that sometimes that leads to the hated bullets. I need to improve in this area.
Anyway – good luck with it.
Andy – you have succinctly covered all the things I’ve been wrestling with regarding this presentation.
I managed to persuade the ITAI stream leader that I was allowed to abandon the template, and I’ll be rehearsing like crazy just as soon as I finish the slides
My first slide comes from the template – it’s actually just a screenshot of it. Then I say I’m abandoning the template, and use the Keynote transition where the slide topples over forwards to reveal the one behind it which uses a minor variation on Keynote’s “Black” theme.