An Engaging Presentation Style
Friday, April 14th, 2006 | Justin Bugajski
How do you give a 15-minute presentation on a technical subject, and keep the audience engaged and interested? I came across this presentation by Dick Hardt, the CEO of “Sxip, a software security company headquartered in Vancouver. Sxip stands for “Simple, eXtensible Identity Protocol”, and is pronounced “Skip” in case you were wondering.
What is really interesting to see is that Dick uses hundreds of slides in a 15 minute presentation, leaving each slide on the screen for no more than a couple of seconds. The slides don’t contain flashy diagrams or reams of 10pt bulleted lists; rather, with a refined simplicity, only contain a few words or a simple picture. Investigating further, I learned that this presentation style originated first with Stanford law professor, Lawrence Lessig, and is known fondly as the “Lessig Method”.
While this unique approach may not be appropriate for all situations, it certainly gives us a sense of how PowerPoint can be used to effectively complement a talk, rather than replacing the talk with words that are read off the screen.
Why not give it a try, even if just for a part of your presentation next time? See if you can grab the audience the way Dick was able to!
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