The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk.
The best talks are those where the slides supplement the talk and provide visuals for the talk, and aren't trying to BE the talk. But these people above often ask for slides because they don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap every piece of information on them.
(I'm guilty of this too; many times I plan on attending an interesting virtual talk in my company but I get a meeting scheduled at the same time, so the best I can do is to open both the talk and the meeting at the same time, mute the audio on the talk and screenshot every slide of the talk while nodding in the meeting.)
For this reason, good slides work for motivational and TED Talk speakers where you have undivided attention, but they don't work well in real business because people plan to not listen during the talk.
This hints at the key problem, which is that there are two kinds of slide decks: those meant to accompany a live presentation, and those meant to be flipped through with no accompaniment.
When the former are used for the latter purpose, they are near useless. When the latter are used for the former purpose, they are worse than useless.
Yes. Almost every slide deck I have been asked to put together in 25 years of work has been the second kind. And they don’t always even accompany a presentation.
Stop me when you’ve heard this one: you have a detailed status doc and a spreadsheet full of data on a particular project. Your boss tells you Director X or VP Y wants to read about that project. Those docs would be perfect! They are the canonical source of truth about the project, but the big shots just won’t read them so you need to summarize everything into a slide deck instead, which apparently people high up on the food chain can read. No matter how good that deck is it’s not going to be compete, and exec will end up with questions anyway.
So much of my career has been converting information in various forms into slide decks for people with a child’s attention span. This is one thing I’d love it if AI could do effectively and reliably. I could work 10 hour weeks.
> When the latter are used for the former purpose, they are worse than useless.
I passionately disagree with this. I find it much better to focus on a talk (granted, I'm talking here about math talks primarily) if I know that all there is to know is contained in what I'm seeing, and that it's alright if I occasionally don't pay attention to the speaker. (I'm much more attuned to the written word than to the spoken word, and I imagine I'm not alone in this.)
Yeah, the more talks I attend, the more I differ with 'powerpoint minimalism orthodoxy'. I would much rather your presentation be a subset of the slides than a superset. Then I can relax and appreciate it rather than worry about transcribing you or something. If its actually important to me than I will spend much more time reviewing the material than listening to it this once, so focus on providing a comprehensive reference. And we both know you're not going to write up a whole separate document that's the exact same material in more detail, kept up to date, so just make it the slides. The preference for minimalism I think comes from a thought process that conflates entertaining with effective. (all else equal, obviously more entertaining will make you more engaged which is more effective, but the equal is carrying some heavy weight there)
> The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk.
I don’t know about the other contexts, but unfortunately it’s a fact of life in academia that half your audience is not really motivated to attend your talk a priori, and that a significant fraction of the other half will be distracted at some point and stop following for 5 to 30 seconds. You lose too much of the audience if the slides are not enough to follow. Another common case, besides the “I could not attend because of diary conflicts” is sending the slides to someone who could be interested but did not attend for whatever reason (after asking politely the author whether they were ok with it).
Now, that’s not an excuse for how dreadful most of academic presentations are, but you just cannot go too deep into the minimalism rabbit hole.
> But these people above often ask for slides because they don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap every piece of information on them.
Or they may be unable to. For many people who have English as a second or third language, reading text is much easier than listening. Without having slides, they may be unable to follow, just like they'd need captions to follow TV shows.
The best talks are those where the slides supplement the talk and provide visuals for the talk, and aren't trying to BE the talk. But these people above often ask for slides because they don't plan on listening but do still plan on judging you based on your talk that they didn't listen to, so you're forced to slap every piece of information on them.
(I'm guilty of this too; many times I plan on attending an interesting virtual talk in my company but I get a meeting scheduled at the same time, so the best I can do is to open both the talk and the meeting at the same time, mute the audio on the talk and screenshot every slide of the talk while nodding in the meeting.)
For this reason, good slides work for motivational and TED Talk speakers where you have undivided attention, but they don't work well in real business because people plan to not listen during the talk.