Presentation Zen [5]
“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched.”—John Sweller
Professor Sweller’s comment makes a provocative headline and adds to the long list of professionals and researchers deriding the PowerPoint tool. What Professor Sweller surely means is that the way PowerPoint is used should be ditched. And with that I agree. There is some truth to the idea that the templates and all the bells and whistles added to PowerPoint through the years have contributed to some of the “really bad PowerPoint.” But PowerPoint (or Keynote, etc.) is not a method; it is a tool that can be used effectively with appropriate design methods or ineffectively with inappropriate methods.
The Times They Are a-Changing
So, is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint? Hardly, but it is long past time to ditch the use of the ubiquitous bulleted-list templates found in both PowerPoint and Keynote. And it’s long past time that we realized that putting the same information on a slide in text form that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help—in fact, it hurts our message. Most of us know intuitively that when we’ve got 20 minutes to make a presentation, presenting to an audience with a screen of text-filled slides does not work. Research supports the idea that it is indeed more difficult for audiences to process information when it is being presented to them in spoken and written form at the same time. So perhaps it would be better to just remain silent and let people read the slides. But this raises the issue: Why are you there?
A good oral presentation is different than a well-written document, and attempts to merge them result in poor presentations and poor documents. The bad news is that most oral presentations accompanied by multimedia are quite mediocre today. But the good news is that this is an opportunity for you to be different. The bar is pretty low now, so even improving in small steps may make a big difference. However, as more and more people realize that the “conventional wisdom” about presenting is out of sync with reality, expectations will surely rise.
Presentations in “The Conceptual Age”
My favorite book in the summer of 2006 was Daniel Pink’s best-seller, A Whole New Mind (Riverhead Trade). Tom Peters called the book “a miracle.” There’s a reason. A Whole New Mind sets the context for the “Presentation Zen approach” to presenting in today’s world, an era that Pink and others have dubbed “the conceptual age” where “high-touch” and “high-concept” aptitudes are first among equals. “The future belongs to a different kind of person,” Pink says. “Designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers—creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.”
In A Whole New Mind, Pink paints an accurate and vivid picture of the threats and opportunities facing professionals today. Pink claims we’re living in a different era, a different age. An age in which those who “Think different” will be valued even more than ever. We’re living in an age, says Pink, that is “…animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life—one that prizes aptitudes that I call ‘high concept’ and ‘high touch.’ High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying