It really doesn’t mean to be but Powerpoint (and its siblings) IS the problem. There’s a fair amount of debate on Twitter , in the blogsphere and amongst those sorry souls who get me started on the topic but I’m coming firmly to the opinion that the medium has become the problem.
People, it appears, can no longer think of a presentation without the ubiquitous software either as audience or speaker. They can’t consider constructing a talk without the programme open to drop text into and even the structure they consider reflects the templates of The Beast. How have we come to this that even a child at Show and Tell will fire up the laptop?
The reason the vast majority of presentations fail is of course down to poor planning, lack of care and insight, lack of story and poor delivery but all those factors are overshadowed and dwarfed by the evil that is presentation software. Its very existence is what forces, by conformity and simplicity and ubiquity, the overwhelming majority of users to strangle their communication at birth. The media has become the medium. That is wrong.
Effective human communication started before the geeks at Redmond released the monster on May 22, 1990 and remains a possibility for all. Just open your mind, step away from the computer and think, “What do I want to say?”
