The Slide-Free PowerPoint

When your PowerPoint process helps you to clarify your ideas, it turns out you can make an effective presentation whether you use your slides or not.

Garr Reynolds tells a great story about someone who used the Beyond Bullet Points approach to structure a presentation. When the presenter met with his potential client, the conversation naturally transitioned to the main points he wanted to cover, and before he knew it he had won the business and the meeting was over. He left disappointed that he didn't get to use his slides, until his wife reminded him that closing the business was his objective, not showing the slides!

Where does your own center of confidence reside -- in you, or on your slides?  When you undergo a critical thinking process that clarifies your ideas in your mind, it shifts the center of confidence from your slides to you. With the center where it belongs, you will be clear no matter what tool, technology or medium you use to expand your ideas outward.

Comments

[John G Cooke]

PowerPoint as a tool has two fundamental (sometimes related) processes that are supported. One is problem-solving, the other is presentation. (they are related when you are using the distilled artifacts of the problem solving effort to communicate your results in a presentation.) It is important to remember which process you are using it for at the any given time.

[Valerie Gravley]

I often work with executives in this very way with PowerPoint. After the initial content meeting, seeing if the message will flow in PP using simple slides, is so effective. Then the message can be managed before the graphics are created or not. This is a method I use to help keep projects meaningful, consistent and on budget. I'm glad to see I am not alone.

[Cliff]

Thanks John and Valerie. Hopefully we'll be successful at introducing new methods that focus first on the clarity of ideas, and second on their graphical representations.