| Which professional groups offer up the worst Powerpoints (and should really get coaching in using Keynote)? | | Date Created: 21 Apr, 2006, 07:41 AM |
 Based on feedback I've been getting about things I've written in various places and presented in various places, audiences are enjoying my take on presentation skills, and how to avoid death by Powerpoint.
In some venues, I've made mention that I'm using Apple's Keynote for my own presentation, and for others I'll only mention my tool of choice if asked.
No matter who the audience is - and they have varied - I've seen my task as telling a story:
- about the rise of presentations in both the corporate and educational settings (with a brief mention of Sunday morning sermons too in some parts of the world), where I question the veracity of Microsoft's claim that 30 million powerpoint presentations occur daily;
|
|
"Where do they get these phony numbers from?"
- which leads to a discussion of the history of presentations and persuasive communication such as smoke signals and semaphores (suggesting to the audience a theme that one chooses the best tool for that job instead of slavishly following what's fashionable). A few cartoons also illustrate the point of choosing the right technology for the task. (write and I'll send you a few I've collected)
- which leads to a discussion of Powerpoint's origins as a Mac program c.1987 to support the production of overhead projector "foils" which were the technological media of choice for presentations until the rise of Powerpoint with the advent of laptops and data projectors.
The book cover about the 501 uses for overhead projectors (above left) usually gets a nostalgiac laugh or titter.
Depending on the audience I'll spend more or less time talking about presentation technologies, and then move on to the current state of presentations: lousy.
I challenge the audience to recall the most recent Powerpoint they saw that impressed them, when they could recall more than one or two details the next day; and the proportion of shows they could label as sleep-inducing, triggering questions like "Why didn't I stay longer at lunch?; I should have slept in an hour longer in comfort..."
Do I need to tell you the range of responses I get? No, you're right... reflecting on the current state of how people present usually draws the same responses of displeasure and disappointment.
Our task for the rest of my presentation is to explore together why the state of the art is so bad (I then discuss my concept of Powerpointwacking where you enter an esoteric term into Google, add ppt to request they be Powerpoint files, then view the results - they will be almost universally lousy).
I especially pour vitriol over the slides I show to some audiences which have been produced by two groups with whom I have regular contact and hence get exposed to their slideshows most regularly:
1. Psychologists 2. Knowledge Management Practitioners
What these two groups have in common is they should know best how to communicate, persuade, and share ideas.
But in my experience they produce the worst slideshows!
It's as if they've got so much to share that every slide must be stuffed full of cut-and-pasted text (from Word, no doubt); they hardly ever use photos or videos (too much to know how to use technology); they slavishly used Microsoft's Auto-wizard so the shows have a "boring" sameness about them; and they overuse "builds" and transitions without thought of how their message is being delivered.
The antithesis of how a clinical psychologist working with patients chooses his or her words.
These two groups have also produced a huge amount of research about memory, persuasion, perception, creativity and sharing, and yet... it's as if they've never opened a book or publication on presentation skills (of which the better ones use this research, rather than just teach Powerpoint "secrets").
So, it came as something of a disappointment (now we get to the point of this entry) to be told that my offer of a presentation skills workshop had been rejected by a psychology conference with the usual boiler plate "we had so many to choose from and needed to limit our choices" or such words.
I'll be interested to see what the conference program committee thought was relevant. Perhaps mine was not clinically relevant (although it would cover a very broad range of psychological practices including academic).
Hey, maybe they didn't like my description of my workshop wherein I suggested a lot of the presentations presented at the conference would likely not be very good?
Never to mind. I'm heading to a conference for physiotherapists next month to see what they're up to, and to watch their slideshows. I'm guessing I'll see more of the same, but hopefully, given the profession, I'll see many more illustrations than words. But I've been wrong before in estimating how people use Powerpoint.
|
|
|
|
