Accenture's Director of Cloud Services Jimmy Harris talked with me recently for an article in TechRepublic about his ideas on cloud technology. Part of our discussion also covered his best recommendations for making more effective presentations. His first thought: cut down on the bullets.
"This is my first rule of presentations: the density of the data presented is inversely proportional to understanding. If I put up a slide with 25 bullet points on it, I'm just distracting people. No one can remember 25 things anyway.
Another mistake I hear presenters make is saying, 'I know you probably can't see this, but...'
One variation on this I've seen is the presenter who put up a detailed, hyper-convoluted chart, pointed to an indistinguishable spot, and said, 'There it is!' Not a single person had any idea what he was talking about.
To the expert making a presentation, that kind of data represents a command of information and demonstrates their credibility. To the audience, the fact that your the epidemiologist, or whatever other kind of expert you may be, already demonstrates that you know more about it than I do.
Another thing I can tell you about my own presentation approach is that it's about extending understanding through storytelling and symbols. We're brought up to remember things that way. For example, in describing the cloud, I imagine I'm trying to tell people in Asia about banking. There are two billion people there with no experience in personal banking. The question is how to create an environment in which you can economically deliver banking services to these people who have none of the infrastructure, who have never even seen a bank. So in my presentation I talk about the components of the cloud in terms of deploying bank services across multiple devices at a lower cost."
For the rest of the conversation with Jimmy on the way cloud computing changes things, see the article published this week by CBS Interactive.
