Sharing the Addiction

I was looking through Daniel Pink’s blog and found this technique for encouraging better presentation techniques by speakers using Powerpoint or Keynote. Having done a presentation course not so long ago and presenting myself quite frequently, I was struck by how simple the technique is and yet how effective it would be to keep a talk disciplined and to time. Bascially, the presenter has exactly 20 slides (no more, no less) and each slide is only shown for exactly 20 seconds which is a complete time of 6min and 40 seconds. The slides are set to advance automatically and the speaker does not control this during the presentation. Basically, this means that slides need to be very visual and the explanation of them concise. If this doesn’t happen, you get out of synch with the slides appearing on the screen. The video below is an example of Daniel using this technique to talk about intelligent signage (which is interesting in its own right!).