The end of boring presentations

O'Reilly Insights
The End Of Boring Presentations
Scott Berkun, 
Keep your business presentations short. You'll get your point across more clearly.
 Scott Berk: 



Meetings, and the presentations that drive them, are boring, slow and rarely effective. Walk the halls of any Fortune 500 corporation right now and you'll find many rooms occupied by people with six-figure salaries, fighting to stay awake. Their supposedly precious time is wasted as they struggle to figure out, through jargon-filled phrases and long, bulleted lists, what on earth the person speaking is trying to say.

But now there's an escape from the oratorical hell of the business world. Presentation innovations are on the move and they're taking over the world. The core idea? Force people to use less time.


In 2000, software developer Mark Jason Dominus realized most speakers were far from concise. They go on too long and rarely make their points clearly no matter how much time they have. His solution? Instead of giving them 60, 30 or even 20 minutes, just give them five. The time limit was the only rule, and he called this format the lightening talk. Dominus explained that he "invented the format in a desperate attempt to help people get to the point or at least to shut up quickly." At four minutes he'd ring a small bell as a warning, and then at the five-minute mark he'd bang a large gong and kick them off the stage. This is a sentiment millions around the world wish they could share with the people they have to listen to every day.

In similar spirit, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham from the architecture firm Klein-Dytham wanted to inspire creative people to express themselves clearly. They invented a new format for presentations called Pecha Kucha (pronounced pe-chak-cha), with the goal of making presentations fun and interesting, and increasing the number of speakers that can present in a few hours.

There are two simple rules that Klein and Dytham enforce: each speaker only gets 20 slides and each slide is displayed for 20 seconds. No more rambling. No more endless piles of bulleted lists or whizzy animations, since every second is precious.

Each presentation in Pecha Kucha is exactly six minutes and 40 seconds long, about as much as the average adult human being can stand being lectured to by your average presenter. Speakers can show pictures and images that support their points, or simply allow their slides to act as an attractive backdrop for the words the speaker improvises over them. The length makes it easy to practice and rehearse, a rarely followed piece of advice for good speech making even Aristotle and Dale Carnegie approved of.

 


These how-to presentation people are all alike, they must hang around management types too much. Yes, I know that I want my surgeon to hear a briefing on technique for my forthcoming operation which



But most professionals, when they learn of these short formats, think it's a joke. How can executives possibly prune down their 60 minutes of carefully constructed diagrams and stratagems, into 20 minutes, much less six? The answer is easy. The Gettysburg address can be read in two minutes. If you think clearly enough, you need less time. Speakers must make only their strongest points, and work hard to refine them down to their most concise and eloquent essence. It becomes impossible to waste hours making complex diagrams, and wander into empty rhetoric, since the talk isn't long enough to allow it.

Pecha Kucha forces speakers to refine, and refine, and refine again, using each slide for its maximum value. Just as poets may write haikus and rock bands pick the three- to four-minute sweet spot of time for music, speakers often find there is magic in increments of five to 10 minutes in time. Certainly not all presentations in the world should be limited to five minutes, but anyone who attempts it is certain to learn lessons on communication that will improve all of their interactions with others, regardless of how much time they have.

Brain science is also on the side of lightening-fast talks and Pecha Kucha. With fewer slides to work with, presenters are forced to think visually, using images to help convey points instead of bulleted lists. Our brains are designed to understand some concepts faster through pictures than text descriptions alone. According to John Medina's bestselling book "Brain Rules," eight to 12 minutes is a good rule of thumb for human attention. Anything that takes more time to consume runs the risk of leaving your audience comatose, and Pecha Kucha runs well underneath that mark.

In 2006 Brady Forest and Bre Petis from O'Reilly Media created an event called Ignite, an evening of short talks and socializing, which uses a simpler format of 20 slides, with 15 seconds per slide, for a total of five minutes. Much like Pecha Kucha, these events have had growing popularity around the world, especially among creatives, progressive managers and entrepreneurs.

To celebrate the success of this new wave of public speaking, March 1-4 has been designated as Global Ignite week, and nearly 50 Ignite events will be held around the world. This is your chance to see for yourself what the future of public speaking might be like. The events are inexpensive or free and anyone can apply to speak or start their own event in their home town. If you want to spend less of your working life bored, or boring others, you owe it to yourself to check Ignite. And of course, also check out Pecha Kucha for its calendar of events.

Scott Berkun is the best-selling author of the booksConfessions of a Public SpeakerandThe Myths of Innovation. He has also worked at Microsoft, taught creative thinking at the University of Washington and runs a popular blog at www.scottberkun.com.