Author Archive: ffolliet

p cubed presentations > Articles by: 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.

Freytag’s Pyramid

March 6, 2025 2 Comments

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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p1, story

Total recall

March 3, 2025 4 Comments

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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p1

How to engage online audiences

January 24, 2022 1 Comment

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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p1

Be the change you want to see

January 23, 2022 0 Comments

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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#htdap

Please don’t do this

November 18, 2021 0 Comments

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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p2

Your powerpoint is not the presentation

August 4, 2021 0 Comments

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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science of fail

One more time…

July 26, 2021 0 Comments

one more time...

One more time… please stop using bullet points and text in presentations. Ask any audience member what they hate most about presentations and you will receive the same answer. There is an overwhelming volume of research data on why text…
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science of fail

The audience factor

July 12, 2021 0 Comments

the audience factor

The audience factor in an online presentation significantly changes the perceived impact of that presentation. The value of any presentation is the product of the message, media and delivery. Importantly this value is in the opinion of the individual audience…
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p cubed

You’re doing it wrong(er)

July 8, 2021 0 Comments

doing it wrong(er)

You’re doing it wrong if you think a presentation is simply reading out PowerPoint. You are doing it wrong(er) (sic) if you do that online. An online presentation is much more of a challenge than a live presentation for multiple…
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#htdap

Support Riders

June 7, 2021 0 Comments

I am going to cycle from sunrise to sunset. This will be a significant personal, physical and mental challenge for me. I’m grateful to lots of folks who have already helped me get this far in training and support and…
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The Longest Day