Slides
There's no shortage of people out there offering presentation advice --
especially about using slides -- and some of it is really quite good.
I'm starting to present a little now, and I can see the challenges.
But the real goal for me is to never use slides under any circumstances. If slides are required for a talk, oh well, no talk. Move on. Not my crowd. Now, that's the goal, but I'm obviously years away from that. So for now I use slides like everyone else. One note here: when I say "no slides" what I mean is a complete deck of slides illustrating every point with bulleted lists of text and some occasional graphics and corporate branding on each slide so you don't forget where the speaker works. Slides as speaker notes and marketing message delivery systems, basically. Many times a visual is good to have such as a demo or video or some audio or something live to make a point the way only something live can. But the main speech shouldn't be obfuscated with slides, and it shouldn't even take place on stage, either. It should live in the imaginations of the audience where the speaker is carefully and trustfully walking. That's personal. Slides can't go there. That's why I hate slides. I generally feel that slides detract from presentations even from highly skilled speakers, and I can only think of a few exceptions.
When I see a potentially great speaker messing around with computers and connections and slides and projectors and clickers and pointers on stage, I always wonder why. What a waste. And that's where it all starts for me. With the speaker. Not the content. Very few of those offering presentation advice start with the speaker, but I think it's the most important thing. When I look at a conference schedule, I immediately look for the names of the people presenting, then I look at the content. If I find people I want to see or whose work I'm following, I'm there. If I don't recognize anyone, I look at the content and hope I can meet a great new presenter. Both strategies work out well. I can read the content from multiple sources or get it from conversation in the hallways or at dinner or on some website, but great speakers grab you in the moment and suck you directly into the content with personal stories of their experience with the content. A great speaker generates a physical reaction in your body as your mind expands with possibilities. If there's no direct experience with the content, then why is there a speaker on stage at all? As a former speech writer a few years ago, I felt that this was the most important reason most corporate speeches failed. In most instances, it's obvious.
So, it was nice to see Simon Phipps dumping his (very good) slides for his OSCON keynote recently. I'm sorry I missed it. Simon is one of those guys who is a great speaker. He designs his own slides with significant effort and care. And he uses those slides as effectively as any of the A-list talkers out there. He's got it all, right? No. I've seen Simon present many times over the last six years, and I always walk away thinking how this or that talk would have worked with no slides at all? So, he finally does it, and I'm about six thousand miles away. Oh, well. Next time. My point is that I'm willing to bet that Simon's talk took on an entirely new dimension only possibly by excluding slides and benefiting from the simplicity of one human talking directly to another with nothing distracting either person. Just a hunch ...
But the real goal for me is to never use slides under any circumstances. If slides are required for a talk, oh well, no talk. Move on. Not my crowd. Now, that's the goal, but I'm obviously years away from that. So for now I use slides like everyone else. One note here: when I say "no slides" what I mean is a complete deck of slides illustrating every point with bulleted lists of text and some occasional graphics and corporate branding on each slide so you don't forget where the speaker works. Slides as speaker notes and marketing message delivery systems, basically. Many times a visual is good to have such as a demo or video or some audio or something live to make a point the way only something live can. But the main speech shouldn't be obfuscated with slides, and it shouldn't even take place on stage, either. It should live in the imaginations of the audience where the speaker is carefully and trustfully walking. That's personal. Slides can't go there. That's why I hate slides. I generally feel that slides detract from presentations even from highly skilled speakers, and I can only think of a few exceptions.
When I see a potentially great speaker messing around with computers and connections and slides and projectors and clickers and pointers on stage, I always wonder why. What a waste. And that's where it all starts for me. With the speaker. Not the content. Very few of those offering presentation advice start with the speaker, but I think it's the most important thing. When I look at a conference schedule, I immediately look for the names of the people presenting, then I look at the content. If I find people I want to see or whose work I'm following, I'm there. If I don't recognize anyone, I look at the content and hope I can meet a great new presenter. Both strategies work out well. I can read the content from multiple sources or get it from conversation in the hallways or at dinner or on some website, but great speakers grab you in the moment and suck you directly into the content with personal stories of their experience with the content. A great speaker generates a physical reaction in your body as your mind expands with possibilities. If there's no direct experience with the content, then why is there a speaker on stage at all? As a former speech writer a few years ago, I felt that this was the most important reason most corporate speeches failed. In most instances, it's obvious.
So, it was nice to see Simon Phipps dumping his (very good) slides for his OSCON keynote recently. I'm sorry I missed it. Simon is one of those guys who is a great speaker. He designs his own slides with significant effort and care. And he uses those slides as effectively as any of the A-list talkers out there. He's got it all, right? No. I've seen Simon present many times over the last six years, and I always walk away thinking how this or that talk would have worked with no slides at all? So, he finally does it, and I'm about six thousand miles away. Oh, well. Next time. My point is that I'm willing to bet that Simon's talk took on an entirely new dimension only possibly by excluding slides and benefiting from the simplicity of one human talking directly to another with nothing distracting either person. Just a hunch ...
Storytelling is about firing up the imagination. Like all things, it takes both the speaker and the listener participating.
When the audience is bored and negative, you don't go and try to tell them a story. When the audience is interested and receptive, you can.
As far as the speaker? To speak out a good story, one must be able to tell a good story to begin with. That's a very difficult skill to master. That's what journalism degrees are all about: telling a good story. (true hopefully).
The key is that storytelling is not the same as doing a presentation speech. The presentation speech goes like this: You tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. Also, it goes like this: You stick to one thing, and you tell them that, and you support your "thing" with a few, FEW, supporting points. That is what speeches are.
Now, a long speech, kind of like the state of the union address, is a chain of small speeches. One deals with Medicare, one deals with the war, one deals with jobs, one deals with crime, one deals with trade, and so on ad nauseam.
You want to tell a story. You want to develop your characters, build suspense, bring in the imagination of the listeners. You want to be close enough to reality that they can "feel" the story in their gut. You want to be far enough from reality that you don't bring in reality in a painful way (like you don't go into details about the surgery on the left foot that fixed the bone sticking out of the flesh). You want the "point" to the story to be something they will realize by themselves. That point is known as the "moral to the story". If the speaker has to actually say: the moral to my story is... then the speaker has failed to tell the story well.
They say geeks aren't good at speeches. That's generally true. But geeks are generally good at storytelling. This is why open source documentation is generally so much more fun to read than something out of MSFT or SUNW: there is a story, there is humor, and there is connection with the reader.
Slides don't fit a story. They fit a speech well, but not a spory. Imagine reading a great book and having a 40 slide powerpoint presentation to go along with it. Arggh!
I think I'm starting to rant... I'll stop now.
Posted by Christopher Mahan on August 01, 2006 at 02:23 AM JST #
Posted by Webdesign Germany by A2D on October 09, 2006 at 04:37 AM JST #