Last week, my good friend Matt O’Neill hosted his regular event for internal comms professionals. He’d decided to try out a new format, which has been gaining some traction in recent years (although apparently it’s been around for ages).
Called “Pecha Kucha”, the deal is: all presentations must be 20 slides long, and the speaker may only speak for 20 seconds per slide.
Being a fool, I agreed to give it a go. It’s a really tough discipline. It forces you to break up your points into clearly understandable chunks which can be explained in under 20 seconds; and for that reason alone I think it won’t quite meet the needs of neuroscientists, for example.
But for the average business meeting- where presentations can drone on with no apparent purpose, it’s a smart policy; and I think that whilst my performance was hardly bravura, I could get better at it in time. If 20 seconds is a bit too arbitrary for you, then change to whichever rules you want. Anything which imposes order and a format on presenters will nicely prevent a meeting from falling into PowerPoint hell.
Sona Hathi of Melcrum.com has written her own report on our Pecha Kucha session here.
Filed under: people skills, presentation, technology, tips | Tagged: matt o'neill, meetings, pecha kucha, powerpoint, presentations, public speaking
