As I heard the news about falling share prices and failure to pass a $70 Billion bail out plan in the US, I was reminded of this clip in Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff. It involves the US Government ‘shining the shoes’ of the Corporation. The Corporation is the fat guy in the top hat here … Watch this clip and you’ll see how Annie’s message is right on the money. If the American public watched this right now they being singing Annie’s songbook. So … what’s the solution? Is the financial meltdown ‘fixable’, or is this so complex that …

I am currently writing a report for a 3 year behaviour change project. In applying 2 pieces of advice … “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” philosopher William James & “Before you design your presentation (or report story), you need to see the big picture and identify your core messages – or the single core message. I call for preparing the presentation (or report) away from the computer ‘going analog’, as opposed to ‘going digital’ at the computer.” Presentation Zen guru Garr Reynolds This is what my office looks like as the story …

When I heard that Dave Pollard (Authour of the “Sweet Spot”) was chatting with Dave Snowden (Mr Complexity) … a metaphor jumped to mind that brings the 2 together. Forgive the simplicity of this metaphor. Some background and context … In the real world of ‘behaviour change’ projects, project coordinators are often funded by government agencies. These agencies are usually hierarchical and therefor demand a degree of certainty … a plan thought out in advance that delivers on milestones and performance targets. It’s tax payer’s money, so you need to show (ahead of time) how you ‘think’ you might achieve …

Here’s a nice post by Viv McWaters that sums up my experience as a facilitator of group workshops where Powerpoint presentations are delivered. I’ll add to Viv’s commentary and say … I agree that bullet points on slides should be banned 🙂 and … In my recent experience, the best presentations happen when the technology fails and presenters have to go back to their ‘story’ and forget the script that emerges from text-dense slides. They often gravitate to the nearest whiteboard and start to draw pictures to help explain their key points. Why don’t their slides contain the same pictures? …

Here is another example of using Slideshare to communicate. This slideshow is designed to bring specific aspects of a proposal to life with images and pictures. Each figure supports text in the proposal. I used Comic Life to create the images & captions and then inserted them into Powerpoint and then uploaded to slideshare. Tip = View in Full Screen mode. View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: open space) I’ll update you on how this was received by my client. Cheers Geoff