Death of the Powerpoint
In the initial days of obsession with Office technologies, people swore by the Powerpoint...it was a matter of honor to make the 'best' slides - balancing information in the given real estate and of course, producing the amazing aesthetics with all the fly-in/out twirl/swirl slides and projecting the best pictures. The obsession grew into a passion to compete on the art of Powerpoint-making! But, thankfully the science prevailed - people started reviewing the slides seeking clarity in the story-line. Possibly, the CXOs got bored of sitting through the march of ppts and worse still, trying to decrypt the actual messages. And this search for story-line lead to the inflection point: The Death of the Powerpoint.
At this very juncture, the traditional tool of story-telling was revived. Boardrooms were redesigned with the CXO facing the presenter, rather than the drop-down projector screen. After all, isn't the person presenting more important than the pictures projected?
Unfortunately, many of us are yet to make this inflection happen. Various things have held us back - fear of story-telling, fear of letting go of our nearly perfected art of ppt-making, fear of being in the limelight rather than letting our art take the place, fear of getting away from a structured format, ....
Possibly, some tips could help us revive our confidence to move beyond life banking on a powerpoint! Stories too come in a structure - a useful framework of corporate stories is CAR, i.e., Context, Action and Result. The amount of time invested in preparing the ppt could be used in rehearsing our stories, which would also help us improve upon our own leadership styles. And if the structured art is imperative, we could still have the bullet points stay on, but as our aid.
A sincere appeal to all presenters: Let the Powerpoint be our aid, but let it NOT REPLACE US!
Client Relationship Manager
7yGood one. Before the death of powerpoint came death "BY" powerpoint :)
Managing Director l Strategy l Software Engineering l Startup Mentor GINSEP
7yGood thought Nilanjana. ..
System Architect at Robert Bosch GmbH
7yi agree with you to an extent but in the process we should make sure that after presentation it is an offline document viewed by many. so in the absence of the presenter the information should be still be available to the reader. So a presentation should not be detailed but still be readable
HR/ Learning consultant & Facilitator at Niche Learning Services
7yNice crisp post with an interesting prediction. Nothing is good or bad.It is about how we use it. If as indicated in the cartoon, you use 397 slides, perhaps death may be near.It is not one over the other but what you would like to use to effectively get across your message, So I would rather go with your appeal at the end rather than the title of the post :)
Leadership, Head of Software Engineering, Project Direction & Management, Strategic Development and Execution
7yPls holding stocks from Microsoft will not let it happen :)