Whenever I give a talk on effective presentations, I repeat this phrase over and over again, like a mantra:
Your slides are NOT your presentation
My point is that YOU are your presentation: your experience, your anecdotes, your expertise, your opinions, your research, your enthusiasm, your passion. Your slides (if they are decent) are nothing more than visual representations of your key points. Your slides only exist because sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and they illustrate your point in a graphic manner more effectively than your rambling on for five minutes does.
If a participant ever asks for my PowerPoint "presentation," I am always happy to oblige, but with a caveat: it won't help much. Why? Because I am my presentation; the slides only occasionally help to support my points. Half my "presentation" is blank slides that I put up when speaking so that the focus will be on interaction with me, the speaker, instead of passively focused on the screen. What I recommend providing is an outline with links and bullet points in pdf format, usually available for download from the blog within 10 minutes of the presentation's conclusion.
Garr Reynolds in the excellent Presentation Zen blog recently posted about the CEO of Toyota banning the printouts of PowerPoint slides as handouts or "slideuments." He reports: The problem is that in Japan—like
other places in the world—there is often no distinction made between
documents (slideuments made in PowerPoint) and presentation slides
prepared for projection. They are often interchangeable. Sounds
efficient, right? And it would be funny if it was not so inefficient,
wasteful, and unproductive. The slideuments produced in Japan make
understanding and precision harder when printed, and when used for
projected slides in a darkened conference room, they are the country's
number one cure for insomnia.
Why on earth anyone would want a printed version of a PowerPoint presentation is beyond me to begin with, but I can't begin to imagine the waste involved here. Printing out 20 or 30 slides that, let's be honest, it's unlikely anyone will ever really look at again, is pointless and vastly wasteful. So I have to wonder, why is it that presenters are printing these decks out? Why is anyone even asking for the printouts?
An excellent question. What is the motivation behind the demand for printed PowerPoint decks? I suspect the reason is a very simple and human one: audiences expect to sit passively during a presentation and have reference material available later for concepts that they didn't pay much attention to in the first place. Folks believe that the information is valuable and therefore must be present somewhere in a tangible form for later reference in a file cabinet. However, if you can't walk away from a presentation being able to summarize the presenter's three main points, is it likely that you'll be able to recall them six months from now, know where the slideuments were filed and pull them out for easy reference?
It seems unlikely. Personally, I can only remember one main point and perhaps three other pertinent bits of information from any presentation that I go to; it's a casualty of Social Media Stupor Syndrome. Or perhaps it's just my own mind starting to go. At any rate, the expectation that every bit of information I hear during a presentation simply doesn't exist. I'm happy to go home with a few links or websites I can save to del.icio.us and tag for reference the next time I need to write an article. But expecting to absorb every bit of supporting evidence the speaker throws at the audience just isn't within my realm of reality. I was a teacher for too long to expect that even the best of students can hear something once and recall it the next day; I was happy for them to walk away from each class with one or two discrete bits of knowledge that we could build on the next time.
What do you think? What do you provide to participants when they ask for a copy of your presentation?
The problem is that in Japan—like other places in the world—there is often no distinction made between documents (slideuments made in PowerPoint) and presentation slides prepared for projection. They are often interchangeable. Sounds efficient, right? And it would be funny if it was not so inefficient, wasteful, and unproductive. The slideuments produced in Japan make understanding and precision harder when printed, and when used for projected slides in a darkened conference room, they are the country's number one cure for insomnia.