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Ebusiness in the Enterprise – May 06, 2003
Why are slide presentations boring?
By Sean Mc Grath
I'm very, very tired. The sort of tiredness that is impervious to treatment by a mere 'good nights sleep'. I have a deep tiredness that is mostly mental. It manifests itself as a dull thudding noise between my ears which accompanies any attempt at straight thinking.
I have just spent an entire week giving and receiving presentations of the bullet-points-with-cute-graphic-interludes variety. Do I suspect a causal connection between this activity and my mental stupor? I sure do. There seems to me to be something mind-numbingly boring about modern day, computerized presentation techniques. Why is that I wonder?
My guess is that it is to do with the relentlessly linear, one-way nature of the medium. Slide follows slide in a relentless procession.A sort of visual Chinese water torture. It brings to mind W. B. Yeat's put-down of the blind accumulation of money:
"What need you being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the very marrow from the bone?" [1]
That stanza works particularly well when you are sitting through one of those grinding financial projection presentations.
My belief, that the problem lies in the relentless linearity of the slideshow medium, was struck a blow when I came across a piece in the Guardian newspaper recently entitled 'PowerPoint of View'. The author suggests that the root cause of the problem is that we do not naturally think in outlines:
"We just don't think in outlines. What's worse, outliners force us into a way of thinking that is actively inimical to creativity."[2]
I found this statement odd because from my vantage point, the problem with presentation packages is that they do not actually provide an outline facility at all!
My interpretation of 'outline' is the ability to nest concepts within concepts. Presentation packages suffer from the problem that the only nesting possible is within a slide - the classic bullet within bullet technique. However, it is not possible (at least in the packages I have used) to nest slides within slides. This, I think, is what is necessary to have a true outlining facility in a presentation package.
Being an XML person, it is perhaps not a surprise that I would value the ability to nest concepts inside each other. XML aside, I suspect the concept would lead to better presentations - both from the presentation and reception sides of the overhead projector.
Nested slides, would facilitate a mode of presentation in which concepts could be drilled into, or skipped over, depending on the flow of the presentation. No need to plow through the slides one after another in the expository equivalent of pure monotone.
So, my take on things is that presentations are not turgid because they are outlines. On the contrary they are turgid because they are *not* outlines. My standard procedure for creating a presentation is to create the outline - to arbitrary depth - in the outline mode of a word processor and then copy the material into the flat structure of the presentation package at the last possible minute. In doing so, I lose all the intermediate hierarchical levels, levels that could be used to make my presentation more modular, more flexible with greater depth on each topic, waiting to be called upon if needed.
If you know of a presentation package that supports true outlining, I'd be grateful if you would let me know.
[1] http://www.ulst.ac.uk/thisisland/modules/poetry/september1913.html
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,891336,00.html