Thesis 1. Slides replace content
Recently I was at a conference in Bulgaria. One expert at the master class showed slides about adapters for computers for an hour and a half in all seriousness. The second one methodically, overcoming 11 shootouts, talked about the qualities of an event manager. I had nothing to say to them, because they had slides, they were preparing.
We're doing so many slides that we've forgotten why it all started in the first place. You can sleep 90% at a conference while people are showing shootouts. But it wasn't always that way. And it doesn't have to be that way.
Why are slides so popular? Slides are easy to count, so it's so easy to become addicted to them. Slides quickly turn into an independent goal. The speaker's task is not to convey something to the audience, not to change their opinion, not to form it, but to make 50 slides by a certain number. Slides are easy to count, easy to send, it is easier for you to focus on slides than on the real content.
A slide creates the illusion of content — "slide = content." You have bullet slides and you feel like you have something to say. So people create slides, not content, in the hope that the slide will "do the work itself" for you. Slides were supposed to help us, but in reality, we help them.
Slides create another problem: you say more information than a person can perceive. You have a slide that needs to be filled. You personally cannot remember all this, but slides will endure everything. You say so many facts/figures, show as many graphs as a person is not able to perceive. A person has a speed of perceiving information. And slides do not correspond to this speed.
There is slow food. Slow talk should appear .
Thesis 2. Philosophy of speech
Let's go back to the beginning. With what began.
When there are no slides, you have a clear understanding that what you say should be truly valuable, worthwhile, structured, and with a bright ending. You have nothing to hide behind. The lack of content cannot be hidden. When you have slides, you feel like you don't need an end or structure. It's not.
When you don't have slides, you need a story. Screenwriters know that the hardest thing is to come up with an ending. You have to come up with it at the beginning. So, if you have a goal, you know who killed whom, you don't need slides. If you have an end, you need structure. Structuring is difficult for one simple reason. You need to throw out something superfluous. And throwing it away, giving it up is the hardest part. It's like giving up buying something you don't need in the supermarket.
The main task of events is to convey emotions. If you want to convey information, you just need to send an article/facts by mail. Events are about conveying emotions, not information. Events work because they allow you to broadcast emotions. Not information.
Among the top 100 speeches (on the site American Rhetoric dot com) there is not a single speech with slides.
Thesis 3. What to do if you decide to speak without slides. How to speak without slides.
What you can use if you decide to abandon slides.
Tell a story. In the form of a story, you can present both the results of the year and the appearance of a new product. In Europe, there are individual specialists in creating a story from your speech. I am sure that our copywriter or agency will cope with this task.
Show a product, use an unexpected object that makes your facts emotionally charged. Watch, for example, Al Gore's already legendary speech on warming. In it, he uses a lift to show rising emissions.
Use other media. At a conference with the participation of women, we put the numbers we needed on the T-shirts of male models and staged a fashion show.
Use the audience. If you want to demonstrate, say, the 30% number, ask every third person in the audience to stand up. Then the abstract number will turn into a visual, understandable and emotionally significant one.
Fewer slides and more stories.
Specially for the Event Forum
