Posts Tagged ‘ Slides That Stick ’

The Dangers of PowerPoint

Over the last few days, there has been much comment of the slide that was featured in the New York Times newspaper regarding the slide that Gen. Stanley A McChrystal, leader of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was shown when took over the leadership in Afghanistan.

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Gen. McChrystal was heard to comment “when we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.

There are far too many problems with this slide to go in to here, but here is my take on the whole debate:

PowerPoint and Keynote are tools that can be used to enhance our presentations, and can both be useful in conveying our message in a stronger and more friendly manner than by words alone. However, over the years our presentation software has become the main focus of our presentation, and that is where we are going wrong. PowerPoint and Keynote were never developed to be the main focus of the presentation. They were developed to help the presenter.

The above slide is creating news now, but I have sat through hundreds of presentation with slides similar to this one. Presentations where the text was too small and there was far too much detail in the slides. This never enhances our message, this always confuses our message and our audience will just turn off.

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During the Battle of Britain in World War II, there was no PowerPoint or Keynote software, and so the British airforce used a table, with models for aircraft and a map to follow the war. This not only simplified a very complex battle, it also enabled the leaders of the war to fully understand what was happening in a clear and accurate way.

While today we may not have access to tables with maps and models, we do have access to white boards and flip charts. When we are faced with describing a very complex situation, the use of flip charts and white boards can make the explanation much easier for our audience. We must always remember, that when it comes to presenting, PowerPoint and Keynote are just one kind of tool from many different kinds. The key to a good presentation is simplicity, not detail.

There is a lot of comment on this article. For more insights and opinions please see:

Nancy Duarte of the Slide:ology blog

Guy Kawasaki on the Holy Kaw blog

2010
04/29
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The 10 minute rule of presenting

In his book Brain Rules, Professor John Medina writes about the how the brain works during a lecture or class. Professor Medina takes us through a typical fifty minute class and shows how our brains actually pay attention to the class.

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What is interesting about this exercise, is that our brains can only pay attention to something for around ten minutes. After that we start to lose attention and interest. This poses a problem for presenters, as a typical presentation lasts much longer than ten minutes. Most presentations are around forty to forty-five minutes long.

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So what can we do to prevent this attention deficit happening?

The first thing we can do is to prepare our presentation into ten minute segments. What this means is that we need to change the speed and type of style we are presenting every ten minutes. This can be anything from showing a short video, doing a product demonstration to asking your audience questions. In fact anything that is different from the previous ten minutes.

What is interesting here is that I have adopted this style in my classes and have found that it really does work. When I am teaching a class, I spend ten minutes going over the theory, I then change the structure by either asking students questions directly, or having them work in pairs. I also occasionally tell a funny story, or give an example directly on the white board. Over the last twelve months I have been able to teach myself to know when that ten minutes is coming to an end and I now instinctively change the pace of the class.

This not only helps my students, it also helps me to know that my students are learning in a better way than previously. Previously, I always noticed that my students were losing attention around the fifteen to twenty minute mark, I have now learned that that attention was disappearing after ten minutes.

I understand that there are a lot of considerations to think about when you are preparing a presentation, one more thing seems to be pushing the limits too far. But we must always remember, that giving a presentation is rarely, if at all, for our benefit, but rather it is for our audience’s benefit and therefore we must do everything we can to make our presentations interesting and educational.

More information on this ten minute rule can be found at that the Brain Rules website here, and below is a short video demonstrating how activity and exercise can effect the way we learn, which is taken from the Brain Rules DVD.


2010
04/20
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Weekend reading

Here’s a little list of some interesting blog posts about presentations I found during this week:

Nancy Duarte talks about CBC’s coverage of the Google Nexus 1 mobile phone’s launch. Interesting little piece about confident presenting

Over at the “slides that stick” blog Jan Schultink shows all you Powerpoint users how to create an interesting slide design – well worth a read if you want your next presentation to go from good to awesome!

This final post to read is not actually from this week, but I recently read it and found it really useful. So if you are going to speak to an audience that is made up of many different nationalities, then this is a must read post from the Business Presentation blog

Have a great weekend and talk to you all again soon

2010
01/09
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