Joe Schmetzer, a nice Australian fellow I finally met face-to-face at last year's XP Day in London, replied to my earlier post about the presentation style I had used with a question. To paraphrase Joe's reply, the question was "How do I prepare such presentations?" and I decided to turn my reply into a blog post in its own right.

In general, I start preparing the slides just like I've done with any other technique I've used -- by drafting an outline or a "plot" and then refining and elaborating it, getting into smaller and smaller details. When I have an outline I'm satisfied with, I start a kind of a "slide simplifying" process where I condense the slides (which up to now have had bullet lists, quotes, prose, etc.) into one-liners. Bullet lists usually expand into a sequence of one-liners while other type of content often ends up being one or two words or maybe a full sentence if it fits on a single line.

During the simplication process, I "spell out" the sequences and try to do little tweaking, choice of words, etc. At some point, usually when I've got a presentation full of simplified slides, I start rehearsing. Repetition and speaking the plot through is the key to finding a way to communicate your message in a way that's understandable and makes sense, i.e. flows smoothly.

Rehearsing is also essential for keeping yourself within the allocated time for the presentation. With 10 slides, it's easy to remember things like "oh, I've spent 30 minutes out of 45 and I'm only half-way to my slides--I better pick up my pace" but with a slide count in the 3 digits, that becomes awfully difficult to do. It can be done, of course, but I find it much more effective to simply talk your way through enough times that you learn (by doing!) the proper degree of terseness and verbosity in your speech. "It's all about the feedback loop, baby!"

In this particular presentation, I had 150 slides and it took a little over 30 minutes to get through, translating to 12 seconds per slide on average. I did stay on some "essential" slides for longer than that while some slides I just ran through one-per-second with something of a lip sync. The actual presentation duration was within 5 minutes of what I had timed during rehearsals. Leaving almost 15 minutes for Q&A instead of the 10 minutes I had estimated, I was quite satisfied.

This Lessig-Hardt-Takahashi mix of minimal presentation style is not a cure-all, of course. It's a good fit for some occasions and not so good for others. In any case, it's a lot more entertaining (in the "not boring" sense) but also likely more laborious for the presenter than the traditional corporate style bullet points galore.