Beyond bullets
Chris Atkinson has written a book on how to make better presentations using a narrative approach. His blog and website (beyond bullets) brim with practical ideas. Well worth a look.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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My basic rule of thumb recently has been to only use text for slide titles, or within diagrams. I use pictures as a focal point for the audience, and as a memory jogg for the stories I want to tell around that particular concept.
The main reasons are so the audience looks at me rather than reading words on the screen (which makes it easier to engage them and build rapport), and so I’m forced to think well on my feet and relate anecdotes rather than reading off bullet points dense with theory.
In a recent presentation I did on fostering innovation for a research science organisation I used pictures almost exclusively, all pulled together in an hour using Google’s image search.
Great rule of thumb, Julian! My book describes how to do that, building the entire presentation on a narrative structure that distills information down to most essential. It would be great if you could share your presentations so we can see your more visual approach – the more examples the better!