Presentation Zen [15]
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In Sum
• Preparing, designing, and delivering a presentation is a creative act, and you are a creative being.
• Creativity requires an open mind and a willingness to be wrong.
• Restrictions and limitations are not the enemy; they are a great ally.
• As you prepare a presentation, exercise restraint and keep these three words in mind always: simplicity, clarity, brevity.
Chapter 3
Planning Analog
One of the most important things you can do in the initial stage of preparing for your presentation is to get away from your computer. A fundamental mistake people make is spending almost the entire time thinking about their talk and preparing their content while sitting in front of a computer screen. Before you design your presentation, you need to see the big picture and identify your core messages—or the single core message. This can be difficult unless you create a stillness of mind for yourself, something which is hard to do while puttering around in slideware.
Right from the start, most people plan their presentations using software tools. In fact, the software makers encourage this, but I don’t recommend it. There’s just something about paper and pen and sketching out rough ideas in the “analog world” in the early stages that seems to lead to more clarity and better, more creative results when we finally get down to representing our ideas digitally. Since you will be making your presentation accompanied by PowerPoint or Keynote, you will be spending plenty of time in front of a computer later. I call preparing the presentation away from the computer “going analog,” as opposed to “going digital” at the computer.
A Bike or a Car?
Software companies have oversold us on the idea of following templates and wizards, which while sometimes useful, often take us places we do not really want to go. In this sense, Edward Tufte is right when he says there is a cognitive style to PowerPoint that leads to an oversimplification of our content and obfuscation of our message. Slideware applications like PowerPoint and Keynote are wonderful for displaying media in support of our talk, but if we are not careful these applications also point us down a road that we may not have gone otherwise.
More than 20 years ago, Steve Jobs and others in Silicon Valley were talking about the great potential of personal computers and how these tools should be designed and used in a way that enhanced the great potential that exists within each of us. Here’s what Steve Jobs said back then in a documentary called Memory and Imagination (Michael Lawrence Films):
“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
—Steve Jobs
Humans, it seems, are not such an efficient animal when it comes to locomotion compared to other animals. But a human on a bicycle is the most efficient animal on the planet. The bicycle amplifies our input in an enormously productive way. Isn’t this what a computer—the most magnificent tool of our time—should do?
During the planning stage of a presentation, does your computer function as a “bicycle for your mind,” amplifying your own capabilities and ideas, or is it more like a “car for your mind” with prepackaged formulas that make your ideas soft? Your mind benefits when you use the computer like a bike but