Comments on: Video Q&A’s with Zen-master Garr Reynolds

By: Neil Pettinger

Neil Pettinger — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:51:00 +0000

I often have to present data (on things like resource use) to doctors. I agree that there’s a demand for hard data instead of slick presentations. So I just use Excel, and use the zoom function (a lot) whenever we need to see the detail.

By: Rahul

Rahul — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:47:46 +0000

First of all great website, great video and I just ordered both your books.

I’d like to reiterate some of the comments posted here. Daan is right, most scientific presentations are horrible.

Much of the scientific (“medical” in my case) audiences are often turned off by stylistic treatments of information (whether it’s justified or not). If you are selling to potential investors, that may work, but if you’re presenting to your peers, there is a culture demanding “hard data” and lots of it.

Most of this information will end up being too “high-resolution” for projection and become an overly complex, unreadable slide. The opposite end of the spectrum is just as bad: dumbing down the data to make it pretty. There must be a happy medium.

I really liked your idea of presenting the important ideas and concepts as a formal presentation and providing a document for more in-depth review later.

Copies of slides printed on paper, to me have always seemed to be difficult to interpret if you weren’t at the presentation (or the material wasn’t covered). However this is what is most commonly distributed. I thought that Garr mentioned Sliduments in his book as something to avoid. Edward Tufte said to just skip the slide and provide a paper handout with the information which people can look at. What would you say is the best way to reconcile this to present a lot of or complicated information?

Thanks for everything you’ve shared with us. It’s all incredible stuff!

By: Zack Grossbart

Zack Grossbart — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:09:46 +0000

These videos came out really well. I’m curious what kind of camera you used. Did you have special microphones or lights?

By: Mark Gardner

Mark Gardner — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:07:35 +0000

Fascinating videos and as a fan of both books I really enjoyed them.

I am responsible for Company induction slides – how would you categorise this type of presentation and the type of slides it requires?

By: gary bass

gary bass — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:50:10 +0000

Great insights.
thanks for that, hopefully a regular ‘thing’..

What are the chances of either or both of you getting to Australia?? Melbourne …
What would it take?? I note Garr was in New Zealand recently for master classes..always a chance!

By: Mike Fladlien

Mike Fladlien — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:05:00 +0000

My comment might be lame, but I really needed to hear your content. When I present to large audiences, I have to be able to read and respect my message and adapt my presentation to meet their needs. Thanks so much.

By: gregg gullickson

gregg gullickson — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:24:31 +0000

You’re right – your humanity came through on the video and that made me interested in what you were sharing. Thanks – both of you make learning about presenting fun.

By: Julie Kertesz

Julie Kertesz — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:46:41 +0000

I was happy to look at your discussion, but I just finished today Garr’s wonderful book: it is so much more about in it, like storytelling, and design, etc!

I did learn so many different things from it!
More, a lot more from this discussion video.

By: Art Johnson

Art Johnson — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:09:16 +0000

It’s a real delight seeing two of my favorites exchangng ideas like this. Even though I’m in sales we often have the same problem that scientists have with data-laden slides. It’s a losing battle getting slides like this removed from the deck so I suggested a method of showing the eye chart for “context” and then doing a zoom-in to whatever the take-away is in the chart. This method satisfies the need that folks seem to have for dumping everything they know about a subject on a single slide, but quickly moves to the one message that needs to be extracted.

By: Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:22:23 +0000

Nice banter here folks! Here’s some feedback:

@daan Your points are well taken. We’ve been working for a while at developing best practices for the science community. The format is mostly reliant on the audience. If the audience is full of peers that work on very similar projects, the presentations can have more dense scientific content. But, if a scientist is presenting to potential investors for a company, that’s a different ball game. We just worked with a wonderful scientist at Stanford who won millions of dollars from a presentation he gave. I’m hoping to interview him on the blog (I just e-mailed him to see if he’s game). We’re hoping to provide more insights into technical, scientific and financial presentations.

@David Smith I have no idea how it was recorded (it sure is nice to be the queen). We had it hard-wired into the video camera and then ran it through a couple audio cleaners before posting it

@naveen we call it a slide summary (similar to an executive summary in a business plan). I just searched and realized that I’ve never posted that process. I’ll do so in the next couple weeks for you.

@samuli I actually work that way. I put everything I need to know on the slide and then after rehearsing, begin to pull content into the notes.

@sam niiiice link. Thanks

@christian I think you’re right. We should have clarified that if someone is sharing research with peers, they can create a slideument and distribute it as a slideument and then discuss it together. I’m going to try to interview a scientist from Stanford who did a remarkable job and got funding because he re-crafted the language in his presentation to resonate with the judges. Thanks for your enthusiasm and patience as we work as a community to establish best-practices.

Hats off to you all!

Nancy