In Tell Me a Story: Q&A with Steve Denning, Cliff Atkinson asks Steve Denning a series of questions on story telling in a business setting. Cliff specifically steers the questioning to PowerPoint as a help and/or hindrance in facilitating presentational story-telling.
Here is one of the nine questions posed to Steve Denning:
CA: What do you make of the criticism of PowerPoint lately that has been fueled by Edward Tufte's essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint?
SD: Tufte's essay is a cranky piece and I can understand the crankiness of anyone having to sit through the average PowerPoint presentation in a business context. But it's a bit like writing an essay on The Cognitive Style of the English Language and arguing that because most written English these days is flaccid, poorly written and ill-thought-through prose, therefore we should abandon the English language. PowerPoint is a tool and a very flexible tool. The problem is not the tool but rather how it's used.
Images are an important mode of communication, and for some people the main way in which they learn things. PowerPoint is tool that can be used to reinforce oral communication with visual images. For some people, words along are fine. But why not use both words and images? The problem isn't PowerPoint. The problem is how it's used.
K-Collector Topics: Edward Tufte Knowledge Management PowerPoint WritingPowerPoint has become a substitute for well crafted talks. There is nothing wrong to having good visuals, but most people tend to throw things together.
One conference I participate in has several very strong speakers. We experimented with banning PP several years ago and have been tweaking the rules ever since. What seems to work is you can use a viewgraph and/or chalkboard (the venue has chalkboards rather than whiteboards) and are permitted 1 computer generated viewgraph per 10 minutes of talk.
The best talks in this group are given without notes using the blackboard for illustration. People spend serious time working on their speaking style/.
Posted by: steve at May 6, 2004 02:13 PMi recently spoke at a conference where, due to technical difficulties, i had to speak for about an hour without the benefit of any traditional visual tools--i was encouraged by one of the other speakers who told me that he once was a part of a group where he did not learn what topic he was going to have to speak about until he stepped up to the podium.
i was inspired, and the talk went well.
Posted by: judith at May 9, 2004 11:33 PM