PowerPointless?
...(creator of PowerPoint) Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, "a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.""
I've talked about my hatred of PowerPoint abuse before, but it's the abuse of the tool, not the tool itself that pisses me off.
Actually, I'm not pissed off, just more concerned and disheartened.
A few thing I want to get off my chest (and finish with a pitch :-):
1) PowerPoint isn't evil.
Ok, PowerPoint as a visual tool is ok, but it's visual elements (drive by text animations, anyone?) are really shitty.
But used to present an outlined set of ideas, with visual display functions, PowerPoint works just fine. In fact, highly visual presentations are great. Show me a great set of ideas, displayed against nice, relevant (or metaphorical) images and I'm a happy presentee.
I spent 30 minutes yesterday in a queue, using my mobile, absorbing a wonderful, 50 slide presentation by Matt Webb ( The Sound of Interaction Design ). That was a fantastic way to kill time in a queue. 50 slides sounds like a lot, but it's perfect - it's a big idea, essentially broken into 50 stanzas and pictures.
Ideas and pictures. It's pretty simple really.
And therein lies the problem - great ideas and simplicity are really hard.
If you've not got ideas that are that great, or maybe it's just a small idea or proposal, you've got a problem - big business culture seems to expect BIG meaty documents ("look how hard I've worked - I've got a biiiiig presentation").
It's actually easier, of course, to let an idea spew over zillions of slides than to refine and reduce an idea into it's core element "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." (variously attributed to Pascal, Twain and even Cicero!).
Which brings me neatly into my second point.
2) Micropresentations would really, really work in businesses.
Micropresentations, inspired by Pecha Kucha, are 15 slides for 20 seconds each, forcing a creative constraint on presenters. I curated the micropresentations slot at Reboot this year, and they were fabulous - we got a blast of 7 different concentrated ideas in a wonderfully metronomic format, over a normal single speaking slot.
They're the perfect format for business meeting presentations - 5 minutes of careful ideas, honed, by necessity of the time/format constraints to key ideas. A 30 minute meeting would be turned into a 5 minute idea review with 25 minutes of actual conversation. Imagine!
3) Intellectual Content locked away in PowerPoint.
Any company I've ever been in has hundreds, if not thousands of ideas locked away into PowerPoint slidesets.
These ideas were created, shared, refined and ultimately presented through PowerPoint. And now these ideas are siting on shared drives, hard disks, and if the company is really switched on, in SharePoint drives, or a Google Search Appliance's index.
That's a lot of intellectual capital sitting there, as structured slides, but without much context, and certainly not being re-used in any meaningful way.
Imagine a different way of building, sharing and re-using these ideas.
People would outline their presentation ideas before moving into the constraint of PowerPoint. The ideas would be shared and developed with co-workers in a single idea workspace, without sending PowerPoint files back and forth.
Then, when the ideas are ready, the core ideas go into a micropresentation formatted slideset.
The micropresentation takes 5 minutes, and the ensuing 25 minutes takes place as a conversation where reactions and ideas are entered into a shared outline during the meeting - the same outline that the micropresentation was built from.
Everyone, as soon as they're in the meeting, has access to the presentation, the structured outline, and the notes and ideas from the meeting.
Suddenly, that core 5 minute micropresentation has acted as the catalyst and hub for a structured set of communal ideas.
There's the pitch - it's one of the core use-cases for ThinkFold, the realtime outliner for groups that I'm a founder of.
