I confess. In the mid-1980s, I really liked Powerpoint. I was a Systems Engineer for the Amdahl Corporation who gave hundreds of presentations each year. Up until PowerPoint, my choices for media was either a slide projector or overhead projector.
So, I could use the corporate slide set or hand draw my own overheads. The corporate slide set, even with deletion and reordering, just seemed so boring that I couldn’t do it. If that weren’t enough, when the lights were turned low, I couldn’t see the audience’s reaction to the material. Hand drawing my own overheads created a more customized presentation than the corporate slide set, but it was a time consuming task.
Enter Powerpoint on the Mac. For you history buffs, it ran on the Mac years before it ran on the PCs. I thought Powerpoint would help me build customized overheads quickly. I succeeded at the customization, but I didn’t succeed at making them quickly. Creating a good overhead with PowerPoint — I’m talking about illustrations rather than just bullets — takes even more time than hand drawing.
My mistake was trading-off practice on presentation delivery for quality slides.
I loved being “on stage” with my great PowerPoint presentation material. Filling the audience with important concepts and leaving them with those wonderful Powerpoint handouts excited me. Unfortunately, the concepts were only what I thought was important and the handouts were probably thrown or filed away after the presentation. And the viewpoint of the people as an audience rather than as participants led me in the wrong direction.
Today, I rarely use PowerPoint so my presentation material is no longer a series of trapezoidal projections. I know that a speaker can connect with his or her audience better with stories, whiteboard drawings, and experiential exercises. That connection requires joining the energy of the participants. and spontaneity on my part. My presentation plan must change to fit the energy in the room. I believe connecting is a clear differentiator between a speaker and a leader.
So, what’s wrong with Powerpoint? The technology gets in the way of the connection between the leader and the participants. Study the typical presentation: The focus is on the trapezoidal projection. The projection is often bigger than the speaker. If you are giving a presentation, there is no law that says that participants can’t be given key handouts and told to refer to them. You can put a lot more information on a page using a 600dpi laser/inkjet rather than a projecting a 72dpi PowerPoint slides.
Powerpoint slides with just bullet points seem to me as crutches for the speaker. The speaker looks at them rather than the audience. There is no law that says you can’t use note cards or an outline.
I believe that an audience only become participants when they are engaged. No one needs Powerpoint to engage the participants. Any presentation that I have given that has had experiential exercises has had more connection and feedback. Thus, learning happens for all the participants, including me.
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