Communication — The Point of PowerPoint

A few weeks back I was asked by fel­low LUCRUM employee and friend Andy Erick­son to speak to the Agile Round Table, a tech­nol­ogy focused group that meets monthly here in Cincin­nati. The topic — Pow­er­Point. It was sup­posed to be done 20 sec­onds per slide, and 20 slides, but once I got going I com­pletely lost all track of time. Inspired by Seth Godin and Garr Reynolds, I ended up speak­ing for about 15 min­utes on the topic. In the end, Pow­er­Point is all about com­mu­ni­ca­tion and deliv­er­ing a com­pelling mes­sage. Whether that infor­ma­tion is right brain — big pic­ture, syn­the­sis– or left brain — tech­ni­cal, detaileded analy­sis — pre­sen­ta­tions should be more than just read­ing. Show up. Enter­tain. Add some­thing by being there, and for God sakes, Have some fun.

Some­one said to me recently, “What if I need to present code?” “How can I do that with­out using bul­lets and read­ing it?” I thought long and hard about it, and came to this con­clu­sion. You can absolutely do it. Sim­plify the code down to its essence, and elab­o­rate on it in your pre­sen­ta­tion. If you need to use doc­u­men­ta­tion, deliver it as a leave behind doc­u­ment — prob­a­bly done in Word or Google Docs. After all if Einstein’s The­ory of Rel­a­tiv­ity can be boiled down to a few char­ac­ters, can’t pretty much any­thing? If you insist on putting all that code up there in the pre­sen­ta­tion, why not just show it in a live envi­ron­ment? Or dress it up with color, or imagery, or illus­trate the con­cept that it rep­re­sents — effi­ciency, capa­bil­ity, per­for­mance.  Engage me.  Make some­thing mem­o­rable.  Some­thing remark­able.   Just my 2 cents. Any­way, thanks to Andy Erick­son who taped the pre­sen­ta­tion which you can watch below. For YOUTUBE sake Andy broke these into 2 clips. Again, sorry for run­ning long. My Pecha Kucha skills need some work.

Thanks to the Agile Round table and Andy for let­ting me speak. It was a lot of fun.