So I was talking to a very smart, very funny friend in Denver last night and the discussion turned to the topic of tyranny.
I was anticipating subject matter like social injustice, the inherent problems of ochlochracy, the evil of avarice and the economic downturn to come up. Maybe even the social pressure to be beautiful or the compulsion to get onto your Facebook page, but no, none of this surfaced.
Instead, the conversatuon turned to PowerPoint.
Tyrannical? PowerPoint? In the grand scheme of things?
Maybe not in the grand scheme but in our industry, PowerPoint wields an unhealthy and potentially stunting influence. Hear this out.
On the one hand, it curbs our creativity because it sets the parameters for what we expect of ourselves to be able to do. Now this is an old moan - don't just stick to slides, do something more original because it will be more engaging for your audience. I, for one, have resorted to juggling, unicycling, rapping, fishing and hang-gliding just to appear more interesting on platforms and trust me, doing something different isn't enough on its own. It has to be different and good. We do PowerPoint because it is easy and it works really well. But the point my friend was making was that inside of PowerPoint, our expectations of what we can achieve are bounded by what we think it allows us to do. Discover a new slide build, get the graphics to explode, insert a clip of yodeling from The Sound of Music and suddenly you think you have created art. Fair enough inside the confines of that medium but not exactly art. It is like telling all painters they can only use the colour blue. They would all be constricted (apart from maybe Picasso). So thinking beyond the artificial limits of PowerPoint is something we should all attempt once in a while.
Now that was a minor theme. Interesting but not completely new. But then she explored a more compelling line of thought, her major theme.
PowerPoint is tyrannical not because of the limits it sets on our imagination but on the limit it imposes on our ability to make things really happen, on our productivity. Her hypothesis was that in too many industries, the objective of our toil - and the expectation of the fruits of that labour from our customers - is too often seen as the delivery of a presentation.
Too often we see this as the end of our work when in reality it should be the beginning. Just delivering a great presentation - complete with animated slides, movie clips and the odd magic trick thrown in in memory of Ali Bongo - is not enough. It is a part of the journey, and an important one, but it is not the destination. And too often we, in our industry, focus on that as our endpoint and not on what happens afterward.
So, this artificial goal of delivering the PowerPoint, getting the presentation done, getting the slides made, this gets in the way of seeing the true objective of making something useful happen.
An interesting discussion to have on a Monday evening, I thought. What do you think? How can we work through this problem (if indeed it is a problem)?
And this all goes to show that Rory is right. Everything we do has the ability to make you think better, think different and be more useful.
My conversation with my friend is an example of just such a thing happening. Blogging is fine, Facebook is OK, text is useful but none of it is as good as talking. Useful things always come up ...
Mind you, she also pointed out that in every airport you visit, anywhere in the world, in all kinds of weather, there is always a big guy with shorts on pulling a wheelie bag and going red in the face.
