Steve Prentice's Blog, page 10

PowerPoint: 5 Reasons to Not Kill it

Dilbert (c) Scott Adams

For twenty years now, I have been an avid PowerPoint user. When I started as a standup speaker and presenter in 1994, most people were still using clear acetate foils, hand-positioned on an overhead projector. The adventurous few – those who could afford a luggable laptop and projector, used Harvard Graphics. Microsoft Office quickly swallowed the desktops of the world, and along with Word and Excel, we were sort of forced to start making presentations using PowerPoint.

Since then people have loved to hate it. “It stops presenters from connecting with the audience,” they say. “Meaningless bullet points remove the learning opportunity,” they say. “The screen takes center stage and the presenter disappears,” they say, “So let’s ban it.”

This article, by professor Bent Meier Sørensen, published in the academics’ newsmagazine The Conversation, summarizes the common complaints:

students read ahead in the handouts and get quickly bored with the visuals
professors or other speakers who have lost the attention of the audience hide behind the act of reading bullet points
the presentation is locked into a sequence that is designed by the presenter in advance, and offers no opportunity to move with the dynamic of the group.

All of this is true, but that’s not PowerPoint’s fault. That’s the fault of the presenter for not knowing the tool well enough.

Sørensen’s complaints, and those of the thousands of others can be easily rectified with just a little knowledge. So here are my five suggestions, based on two decades of standup speaking.

1. Ditch the bullet points and the text. Use PowerPoint for title cards and visuals only. In this instance, I agree with the detractors. No-one wants to hear the presenter read what they can all see up there, and besides, reading all your points at once becomes overload. Builds (revealing one bullet point at a time) quickly become tiring – they lost their appeal long ago. Instead, stash the bullet points in the speaker’s notes section where only you can see them. The Presenter View described below is an excellent dashboard visible only on the presenter’s laptop screen, and includes your speaker’s notes. This is like your own personal teleprompter. The audience sees a title card or a visual. You improvise off the bullet points in your speaker’s notes.

2. Ditch the handouts. Handouts are lousy because they give everything away. The audience gets to read ahead. A bored audience uses them to count down towards the end.  They look awful, and worst of all, they constrain you, the speaker, into a pre-set sequence, which as  Sørensen correctly identifies, robs both you and the audience of the creative dynamic that comes from conversation. So don’t give them handouts. Let them take their own notes. That’s a better learning tool anyway. If you don’t give them handouts, the audience will not know how many or how few slides you have, and they won’t feel cheated if you skip a few. If the slides are just title cards then they can write down the title and take their notes accordingly. For visuals, invite the audience to take photos of any great visuals with their own phone.

3. Get Interactive. No-one ever said you had to run your PowerPoint deck in a sequence from first to last. A great presentation should move with the comments or questions from the audience. If the conversation moves towards a point that is best illustrated by an image on slide no.19, and you are currently still on slide no. 2, you should be able to get to slide 19 effortlessly, without slogging quickly through the intervening seventeen. Can you do that? Of course you can. When you use Presenter View, your entire slide collection is laid out in a grid format. It is easy to click on the thumbnail of slide no. 19 and bring it up on screen without anyone knowing that it lives seventeen slides away. If you have a great memory and you know that the slide in question is no.19, you can also call it up by typing the digits 1 and 9 on your keyboard and hitting enter. Basically, this allows you to play your PowerPoint presentation like a piano, calling up slides on command rather than passively cycling through them.

4. Let the visuals help you. People need to look at something other than you. Sorry. Staring at a boring professor is what made students stupid long before PowerPoint took over that task. Today’s learners are used to seeing many visual stimuli. We all live with cellphones attached to our arms. We have to look at something. Besides, an image of a ship is a whole lot more effective than a presenter, with arms stretched out wide, saying, “Imagine this is a ship.” Sorry, that doesn’t work anymore. Visuals are there to enhance your presentation, not eclipse it. Obviously, product illustrations, charts and photographs cannot be done justice with mere words, even by the most erudite of speakers.

But concepts, too, do better with imagery. I use this image, a piece of excellent artwork by the chalk artist Julian Beever as an illustration in support of managing change. This is not a giant Coke bottle; it is a 3D illustration. Your eyes’ unwillingness to accept it as something other than what they think it is serves as my teaching aid to discuss change resistance. That’s what I mean by visuals helping out.

5. Use the blackout button. PowerPoint does not have to be onscreen all the time. In fact a huge dynamic shift happens when the screen goes intentionally dark. That’s when the focus of the room truly falls upon you the speaker, and it can be used to great effect. Once you need PowerPoint back, simply bring it back. The darken/undarken button is another feature on the Presenter View dashboard that is easy to access and use.

I could go on, talking about the importance of keeping design elements simple, the importance of rehearsing, and keeping to a limited amount of messages, but that has been written about elsewhere. But I have met very few presenters who are actually aware of these five powerful techniques for keeping control of a presentation and allowing to serve as an effective teaching aid.

The Presenter View that I have been referring to is an option found under the Slide Show menu of PowerPoint 2013, and in earlier versions. It only appears once you have plugged in to a projector and you have started the slideshow. It offers a collection of icon buttons for marking up the slides; revealing the full palette of slides; searching; and blacking out the projection. To the right, where it says “No Notes” is where your speaker’s notes/bullet points show up, if you have stashed them according to point no. 1, above. This Presenter View is only visible to you on your laptop. The audience only sees the currently selected slide.

The Future of Presenting

Another of Sørensen’s complaints that I agree with, is that PowerPoint does not allow any way for students to take their own notes, unless they receive the dreaded handouts in advance. I have been searching for, and even trying to invent my own solution to this problem for years. In essence: how can I send the exact slides that I am showing, across to my students in the sequence that I am presenting them? In other words a custom handout based on what they are seeing? The solution to this seems to be happening finally. A German company called SideFlight seems to offer such a solution, using Wi-Fi and the cloud as the courier. Although I have not yet had a chance to try their product out live, it promises to deposit each slide that you show, onto the screens of every participant in the room, where they can annotate and take notes to their heart’s delight. Once this type of technology takes root, we will be able to dispense with static handouts forever, and will be also able to fully capitalize on a dynamic learning environment, supported by, rather than hindered by PowerPoint.

So, I guess I agree with much of what Sørensen complains about. But I don’t agree that the entire technology should be banned solely because no-one read the manual. This would be a tragic case of killing the messenger, when in my opinion and experience, PowerPoint is actually a great messenger indeed.

Learning from Centuries of Stress, Power and Control

This post originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Time Management for iPad Magazine.

In his excellent book, The 48 Laws of Power, author Robert Greene presents an awe-inspiring collection of stories, taken from all corners of the globe and from all centuries – from history, scripture and folklore, that focus on power relationships between people. As he illustrates, power exists everywhere that two people interact. It fills the space between them, in terms of their respective abilities and influence on a situation. Consequently the awareness of one’s power in any given situation, either having power or lacking it, and the interaction that such an awareness has when it rubs up against the desire to effect change that is beneficial to oneself, becomes a source of stress.

Stress, after all, in both the physical and emotional worlds, is basically the tension exerted on an object by a force. Most people think of stress in the negative sense, since it occurs when “what is happening” does not equal “what should be happening,” in other words, a desire is exerted upon a situation but the results are not satisfactory. This negative stress is more properly called distress. Positive stress exists as well, of course. Its proper name is eustress. Positive eustress is sometimes just accepted as happiness, contentment or excitement. Great examples of this might be the exhilaration of downhill skiing, or watching a thrilling movie. Laughter, too, is a great, and very healthy positive stress.

But most people are aware only of negative stress, although they might not be aware of just how much damage it does to the human body and mind. Numerous clinical studies have suggested that stress is at the root of most major illnesses, due the impact on the immune and chemical systems of the body that instinctive defensiveness causes. Stress releases hormones that put people on guard, or make them fearful or resentful. Sleep is affected. Clear thought is affected too, as age-old reflexes revert to the fight-or-flight state that rejects intellectual thought, halts digestion and increases blood pressure, all in the name of facilitating a hasty escape.

In short, stress kills. It kills creativity, it kills opportunity, and eventually it kills people.

This is why Robert Greene’s book is so effective as a stress-management manual. Most self-help books provide recipes and regimens to follow: prescriptions for good health. But not all adults are good at following orders or techniques for more than a day or so. If they do not fit into an individual’s personality type, many good ideas stay forever locked on the outside of a person’s being.

But The 48 Laws of Power tells stories, and most people are very good at listening to stories. We learned it as children, and it remains a welcome medium for learning, as all major religions will attest. The stories in Greene’s book reveal the magic that happens when people allow stress to pass them by, replacing it with calm and clear thinking. The book does this not by telling the reader what to do, but instead telling the reader what others did.

For example, the story of a Chinese military general who was suspected of disloyalty to his emperor. He was given the ultimatum of creating ten thousand arrows by sunrise or being executed. Instead of hurriedly carving one arrow at a time, he sent a contingent of his soldiers downstream on a raft covered in hay and tethered by a long rope. The raft floated close to an enemy encampment in the dead of night, at which point the soldiers on the raft made a great deal of noise, prompting the camp’s guards to fire arrows towards the source of the disturbance. These arrows embedded themselves harmlessly in the raft’s hay bales. After some time, the raft was pulled back upstream and the arrows, ten thousand of them, were extracted, and presented to the emperor.

These types of stories demonstrate the significant gains that can be made by taking time to step back and think things through before either acting or merely reacting. Grace under pressure, leadership, confidence, charisma, clear decision-making – all of these admirable traits come from not allowing the heat and stress of the moment to overcome one’s higher thinking powers.

This is why the 80/20 rule is so important in managing time, tasks, and most importantly, stress. This rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, has many uses, an illustration of something small impacting something much larger. In the context of time management, this refers to taking the time to plan; to anticipate the future and its possible permutations, and to influence them in your favour.

The antidote to the sense of negative stress is the sense of control. Knowing and feeling that you are in control of a situation changes you physically and chemically. Stress hormones such as cortisol are called off. Blood and oxygen are redirected to the thinking areas of the brain. Blood vessels dilate and circulation improves. Vocal tone deepens (for men and women alike), and most importantly, thoughts, ideas and concerns can be prioritized.

It is well-known that panic is contagious, but so is calm. A person who takes the time to de-stress a situation does everyone a favour. People will flock to, and follow, the calm, confident leader who knows the way. They will do the tasks required, with confidence and faith.

This principle need not apply only to large-scale emergencies; a text message will do. Many tasks and relationships are damaged because people feel compelled to answer their text messages, emails or phone-calls the moment they arrive. This is stress dominating the moment. There is a fear that by not answering, the sender/caller will be offended. This “answering stress” is the medium of the immediate. It was designed originally to help keep humans alive in environments where large creatures dwelled, but now asserts itself in the false urgency of a caller’s expectations.

By contrast, the person who applies a small amount of their time to influence the future, by informing callers and clients as to when, where and how they will return calls, such as “always within two hours,” manages the expectations of the callers and as such controls the stress levels of all involved, including themselves.

Negative stress kills. But control, derived from planning according to the 80/20 rule, turns every situation into something that can be anticipated, handled, and transformed into a win.

Time Management: Clearing the Backlog

This is an excerpt from the second edition of Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time, To order, please visit www.bristall.com/cooltime.htm.

Clearing the Backlog: Blitz, Erode and Plan

A backlog, by its very definition represents a doubling of workload, in that today’s tasks must be taken care of in addition to those tasks that still remain uncompleted from previous days.

It feels most desirable for anyone taking on new time management skills to clear the backlog and start from a clean slate. Perhaps this is the right way for you, but perhaps not.

Very often people take the blitz approach by committing to a wholesale clean-up. Perhaps they come in to the office on a Saturday to work a few hours and get all the outstanding stuff out of the way – basically an extended version of focus time, held outside of work hours. Other examples of this activity can include a tidying blitz of a house, room or yard. Basically do it all, and do it all now.

The key benefit of a blitz is that the backlog is quickly cleared. The drawback, though, is that a habit has not yet been established, which means that a new backlog might start almost immediately.

An alternative to the blitz technique is the erosion technique, in which a backlog is eliminated one piece at a time in parallel with current tasks. This of course depends on the urgency of the tasks in the backlog, but it helps develop a habit that will eliminate the development of further back logs. Some examples:

A backlog of already-read emails that need to be filed: each email that is read and processed from this point on is filed away, and at the same time, one email from the pile is also filed.
A messy office or room: each item that is used is put away immediately when finished with, and at the same time, one item from the pile is also put away.
A backlog of tasks: with each new task that is performed, a task from the pile is also performed.

Any way you look at it, clearing a backlog takes time, whether it is done as a blitz or an erosion. The two primary objectives are to eliminate the backlog and to prevent it growing again. If it threatens to do so, despite your best efforts, then it means there is simply too much work to be handled, and that is when delegation or negotiation of workload must take over.

Comments? Please share below.

The Internet of Everything and Africa

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. Cloudtweaks is currently working with Cisco, who have released and exciting new thought leadership platform called InnovateThink. I have been asked to contribute some material to this project, and it is an honor to do so.

My most recent article looks at the way that the connected technologies of the Internet of Everything are making changes in the lives and economiesof Africans, who have long struggled to keep pace amid war, poverty and difficult weather. I hope it is appropriate. I would love feedback (positive or negative) from people who lived in, or have lived in an African nation, and who perhaps have experienced change through technology.  Here is an excerpt:

Digital banking, for example, has freed workers in places such as Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Soweto, from the dangers of carrying cash through lawless areas, as well as allowing them easier and safer transfer of funds to relatives with lower remittance fees and the elimination of the need for physical travel. Cellphone-based banking has also cut down on corruption and illegal “dipping” made by employers. The dual benefit of cloud-based money transfer not only assists individuals in keeping their cash safe, but stands also to coax wary Africans from storing their savings under their mattresses – an amount estimated to be the equivalent of two billion dollars in South Africa alone. Additional funds feeding the banking sector hold the promise to trickle through to the establishment of stronger commercial sectors and social programs.

With the agricultural sector currently accounting for seventy percent of Africa’s total employment and thirty percent percent of its GDP, technological innovations in areas such as drought prediction, low-cost machinery for quickly draining flooded fields, smartphone apps that assist with the health of herd cattle, or point-of-sale transactions and supply chain management are the first steps towards growing the economies of African countries, moving them towards stability and greater competitiveness on the world stage.

To read the full article, please visit CloudTweaks here.

IDG-DELL Article on Choose Your Own Device (CYOD)

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. I was asked by Cloudtweaks clients IDG and DELL  to write a quick blog which will become part of their End-To-End Solutions group on LinkedIn.  My topic is the shift from BYOD to CYOD in the corporate, cloud-based workspace. Here is an excerpt:

This dilemma – how to satisfy and engage employees while still protecting corporate assets is being answered by a new trend – a hybrid in and of itself – between the open market of BYOD and the more rigid, traditional world of company-issued laptops and phones. In this new approach, employers make available a range of devices that vary in terms of brand and functionality, and which have been fully loaded and prepared, in terms of virus/malware protection, network access and secure compatibility with the company’s network and cloud management structure. These devices are offered as a selection from which the employees are allowed to make a selection. This concept is called choose your own device (CYOD), and many industry watchers are confident that this will soon eclipse BYOD as a milestone in smart mobility management.

To read the full article, click here.

 

Making Time for Reviews

August 20, 2014

In addition to my own posts, I also contribute to Time Management Magazine. My post for September 2014 has to do with the importance of making time for reviews, including self-assessment. Here is an excerpt:

Back in the 1980’s New York City had a mayor by the name of Ed Koch. He was generally well-liked, and was instrumental in helping clean up the city, and was a very public figure. His trademark greeting was to walk up to average people on the street and say “How am I doing?” This obvious flip-around on the normal way of greeting people symbolized his ongoing desire for feedback from constituents, tourists and anyone who happened to be in the city. It was a request for an impromptu performance review, and it had the double benefit of both an informal poll of his performance as well as a savvy piece of marketing as the mayor that cares.

Mayor Koch, and other political figures like him, take a risk, realizing that the answer will not always be positive. But knowing where dissatisfaction exists represents the first step towards fixing what needs to be fixed, and building what needs to be built. This is doubly important in situations where the source of dissatisfaction – the thing needing to be improved – is currently a total unknown.

Reviews, then, form part of the project management required to get things done. They are an essential component that appear at first glance to take time, but in the long run save much more.

To read the full article for IOS (Apple), itunes…. or for Android bit.ly/….

Time Management and Willpower

July 25, 2014

In addition to my own posts, I also contribute to Time Management Magazine. My post for August 2014 has to do with willpower. Here is an excerpt:

People who seek advice on time management often tend to lust after the concept of winning back more hours in the day in order to get things done. “If only there was a way to freeze time,” they say, or “If I could just squeeze another hour or two out of the day, I could get caught up.”

Well, maybe, but consider the following non-time-related issue:

A friend comes to you and says, “I have a problem with credit cards. I am maxed out, I am paying hundreds of dollars per month in payments and I feel I am getting nowhere. What should I do?”

Many people, in seeking to answer such a question might reply, “cut up your credit card,” or get a loan or a line of credit and pay off the balance right now.” These are two highly practical suggestions, but they will not solve the problem. They will not achieve the desired result.

To read the full article for IOS (Apple), click here or for Android click here.

July 25, 2014In addition to my own posts, I also contrib...

July 25, 2014

In addition to my own posts, I also contribute to Time Management Magazine. My post for August 2014 has to do with willpower. Here is an excerpt:

People who seek advice on time management often tend to lust after the concept of winning back more hours in the day in order to get things done. “If only there was a way to freeze time,” they say, or “If I could just squeeze another hour or two out of the day, I could get caught up.”

Well, maybe, but consider the following non-time-related issue:

A friend comes to you and says, “I have a problem with credit cards. I am maxed out, I am paying hundreds of dollars per month in payments and I feel I am getting nowhere. What should I do?”

Many people, in seeking to answer such a question might reply, “cut up your credit card,” or get a loan or a line of credit and pay off the balance right now.” These are two highly practical suggestions, but they will not solve the problem. They will not achieve the desired result.

To read the full article for IOS (Apple), click here or for Android click here.

The Internet of Everything and Corporate Life

July 17, 2014

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. Cloudtweaks is currently working with Cisco, who have released and exciting new thought leadership platform called InnovateThink. I have been asked to contribute some material to this project, and it is an honor to do so.

My seventh article looks at the way that corporations – business of any size – can leverage the technologies and processes within the Internet of Everything to learn more about employees’ hidden talents, and to tailor jobs and tasks more closely to their abilities.  Here is an excerpt:

How, for example, could a regional manager identify a great candidate who is both willing and able to take on a new and risky project? How might the skills required – leadership, comfort with risk, diligence, delegation, discipline – be truly demonstrated? Social media sites such as Facebook are natural places to discover such abilities, not through overt verbal job titles, but through actual real-life proof. For example, consider an employee who reveals on her Facebook site that she loves to scuba dive and is certified to teach scuba to others. The connection between the ability to lead people through risky behavior in this way might not show up on a traditional personality assessment or performance review, but it is evident in her real life activities.

How about those individuals who are natural communicators? The ones who, for whatever reason, everyone turns to in order to get things done? Not because they are workaholics, but because they have a natural ability to network, to put people in touch with other people, to move, shake and make things happen? Technology that identify these types of people as well as fostering the same types of connective behavior in others will strongly assist in breaking down silos and enhancing the productivity and profitability potential of a company or department.

To read the full article, please visit CloudTweaks here.

The Internet of Everything and the Public Sector

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. Cloudtweaks is currently working with Cisco, who have released and exciting new thought leadership platform called InnovateThink. I have been asked to contribute some material to this project, and it is an honor to do so.

My sixth article looks at the way governments, or more precisely the public sector are taking advantage of the The Internet of Everything to deliver new services to its citizens. Here is an excerpt:

If you live in Chicago and you want to know when the street sweeper is coming around so you can move your car and avoid getting a ticket, well, there’s an app for that. It’s a simple yet elegant solution produced by one of an army of app developers that the city’s public service has engaged to capitalize on the ever-growing usefulness of the Internet of Everything, defined by Cisco as the juncture of people, process, data and things.

Traditionally the public sector has been maligned as a place and mindset that is far from the cutting edge, with bureaucracy and partisan politics dominating. But increasingly an opposite perspective can be seen. Given the enormity and variety of the responsibilities held by government, the constant scarcity of funds, combined with increased calls for transparency and accountability, the opportunities offered by the connected technologies of the Internet of Everything are both appealing and fiscally prudent.

To read the full article, please visit CloudTweaks here.