Question: What is the purpose of the presentation?

The overt purpose is to educate and inform

The covert purpose is to reinforce the status of the expert and remind the audience that they are not competent to solve their own problems.

I submit that in the information age the traditional presentation model needs to change from

presenter>audience to

host<>guests.

Ideas don’t evolve in a vacuum and they don’t generally flow in one direction.

Our current paradigm is based on a preacher model. An authority figure stands at the front of the room and lectures the class for forty minutes and then takes questions from the audience. Presentation styles vary but more or less they all follow this model.

Nearly every one of XPLANE’s customers already has the expertise they need to solve their problems. They don’t need more experts in the traditional sense — they need people who can help them find, develop and share the best practices and experts within their own organizations. They don’t need more wizards and consultants; they need to improve their communication flows.

We need fewer presentations and more conversations.

We need to develop new approaches that allow the group to take on a greater role in the knowledge-sharing experience. Approaches that turn the traditional presenter into the host of a knowledge-sharing event, rather than an expert spouting wisdom.

Comedian, speaker and performing artist Heather Gold provides a great comparison of presentations vs. conversations in pdf form, which you can find here.

At XPLANE, we are working on some experiments in conversation, in an attempt to flesh out some new mechanisms for unleashing the knowledge and creativity of groups. We have already identified some interesting patterns and structures that have lead to powerful results. If your organization would like to host one, please let me know and we can try to design one together.

Please share your thoughts.

Here’s what the experts say:

The case for evil:
Edward Tufte, information design expert and author of several books on the subject, recently wrote an article excoriating PowerPoint in Wired magazine, entitled PowerPoint is Evil. In it, Tufte compared PowerPoint to tools of propaganda and control:

“PowerPoint’s pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?”

He goes on to make the argument that statistical data should be presented in one slide as opposed to several:

“When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.”

The case for good:
Donald A. Norman, former Apple Fellow and author of The Design of Everyday Things, responds in defense of PowerPoint:

“Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic.”

PowerPoint, true to its name, is a powerful tool. It can be used for good or evil and it can certainly be misused. Abuse of the tool is so common that it has become synonymous with the tool itself: Peter Norvig’s excellent satire, The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint Presentation, makes the case especially well.

But who’s to blame?
Should we condemn the tool because people misuse it? We can’t in good conscience blame the tool or the well-intentioned people who try to use it. They are simply following the guidelines, templates and wizards within PowerPoint.

“Wait a second!” you say. If PowerPoint is neither good nor evil, and the people who use it have good intentions and are trying their best, why are there so many terrible PowerPoints out there? Who’s fault is it?

It’s the wizards.

The wizards and templates within PowerPoint lead us astray. PowerPoint is a visual tool, yet the default setup is text with bullet points. Most of the “design” templates are cluttered or badly designed. The content wizards serve up bland, bullet-point-ridden generic outlines and seem to “autochoose” the ugliest design templates available.

They coach us towards bullet points, chartjunk, “meeting by template” and a thousand other “deaths by PowerPoint.” Microsoft makes great tools but when they try to deliver content they seem to fail. A more successful strategy seems to be partnering with content providers as they did with MSNBC.

Wizards, like consultants, come in all flavors, and the ones that dwell in PowerPoint are particularly capricious and not to be trusted. Follow their advice at your peril.

How do you feel about PowerPoint? How do you feel about the wizards? Please share your thoughts.