Sunday 2 December 2012

Simon on: Interactive presentations

Over recent years there has been a marked growth in the number of people claiming that presentations need more interaction. The latest voice in the clamour is Meeting Professionals International (MPI) which has published a series of papers looking at the future of meetings. One deals with content. Among other things it says ‘Shorten content and add lots of interaction…’.
A few days before reading this, I sat through several presentations. Some were good but some were delivered by incompetent presenters with appallingly bad PowerPoint material. The idea that those sessions could be made compelling by adding ‘lots of interaction’ is obviously misguided. All we would have would be sessions delivered by incompetent presenters with appallingly bad PowerPoint material and badly executed interaction.

No technology in the world will make a poor presenter look good and their sessions won’t suddenly become riveting by the inclusion of interaction. They have to be shown how to do the job properly. Only when they have become competent presenters should anybody even think about teaching them how to incorporate interaction.
Originally published in Conference News

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