Author Archive: ffolliet

At work I'm a Consultant Paediatric Surgeon. That involves Surgical Oncology, Neonatal Surgery and Trauma. There's also a lot of teaching and mentoring. None of this actually makes me particularly clever. I'm pretty heavily into improving presentations and long for the world to lay down the weapon of bulletpoints and embrace creative and engaging presentations. I lead presentation workshops and am currently working up a book on presentations. I did a wee thing at TEDx Stuttgart in 2014 of which I'm quite proud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFza3W87eDg Outside all of that I struggle to keep fit, cycle a bit and the odd triathlon. I'm a father, singer, laugher, learner, sharer, blogger, thinker, strummer and much more.

What if…?

It is a privilege to travel the world sharing ideas on improving presentation skills. An encouragement is that many people know and understand that their presentations could be better and they recognise easy steps to improve. Yet they are resistant…
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Memes are time specific

Ideas, music and memes are time-specific in popular culture or presentations. Their use in a presentation may not convey the desired impact to the whole audience. Be aware of such limitations in the construction and delivery of presentations. American President…
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Data download complete

The perception that presentations should deliver large quantities of data downloaded by the audience is deeply ingrained in both lecturers and recipients. This is driven by institutional expectations, (perceived) academic norms, and misconceptions about learning effectiveness. It does not happen….
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JFDI. Do it!

Let’s face it: most presenters already know their approach isn’t working. They recognize the glazed-over looks, the restless shifting in seats, and the distracted scrolling through phones. Deep down, many suspect there’s a better way to deliver presentations, yet feel…
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Freytag’s Pyramid

Freytag’s Pyramid: Transform Your Presentation Into a Story How do you ensure your presentation doesn’t just inform but also engages and inspires your audience? One,effective tools for achieving this is Freytag’s Pyramid, a storytelling framework originally designed to analyze dramatic…
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Total recall

Are Your Medical Presentations Stuck in Recall Mode? Most medical presentations never move beyond the lowest level of learning. They flood audiences with facts, demand memorization, and hope something sticks. Real learning, the kind that transforms practice, happens when information…
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How to engage online audiences

How to engage online audiences is a real challenge. There are a multiplicity of distractions and the audience has learned, very quickly, that the majority of online presentations are worse than their in-person brothers. The challenge to engage the audience…
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Be the change you want to see

Be the change you want to see in the delivery of presentations. The online milieu is not the same as a live presentation. Failure to recognise this and consequently just doing the same old reading out of your slides is…
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Please don’t do this

please don't do this

Please don’t do this in presentations. It forces the audience to read the text and this will be done in preference to listening. The data is not retained. The highlighting forces the audience to read that section before getting context…
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Your powerpoint is not the presentation

hugely complex slide with diagram and data graph supported by massive amount of unreadable text

Your PowerPoint is not the presentation. If you believe that it is, then you have entirely missed the point of every single presentation you have ever “delivered” or “received”. You are not alone in this erroneous belief but you are…
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