Visualization

Lately I've been reading and thinking about the whole trend toward "whole brain" effectiveness. Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind is a great place to get started if you're interested. I work in an environment that is exceedingly biased toward left brain talent. As such, I've been exploring ways to vitalize my creative energy. The neurological consensus is that visual thinking is a hallmark of the right brain. While my self image is not creative, I believe the authorities when they say it's a function of practice (to an extent, I'm sure.) David Gray is endeavoring to codify and disseminate a simple visual vocabulary and language. In the same way we have building blocks for speaking/writing (letters, words, grammar) and mathematics (numbers, symbols, operations), we can develop the same for visualization (forms, shapes, fields). His website has some short videos introducing the idea -- I'm definitely attending the next workshop he holds in San Francisco.

A logical application for visual thinking in a business environment is presentation. We live with an intentionally sub-optimal QWERTY keyboard as an artifact of a technological era where typewriter arms would jam when pressed in too quick sequence. In the same vein, we live with text-focused PowerPoint which was initially developed when computing audiovisual capabilities were nascent at best. With advances in digital photography and multimedia production tools, the barrier to developing compelling visual presentation materials no longer exists yet Death by PowerPoint endures. Moving forward, I pledge to personally start developing more visual presentations and advancing my firm's audiovisual capabilities. Not just better graphics, videos, and use of stock photography in presentations, but more utilization of the right brain.

I am a big believer in making a choice when developing presentation materials: they either support a presentation or substitute for it, but not both. As such, your slides should not stand on their own without you presenting them. Or they can serve quite well as a leave-behind that don't require you to deliver them. When you present slides that are designed to do both, you will come up short on both. What about the people who don't show up and want to catch up on what they missed? Create a separate deck. Or better yet, create a document - a word processor is a far more appropriate publishing tool than a slide creator for the readers. Even better, create a recording of the presentation and deliver/distribute electronically.

I'm most of the way through Garr Reynolds' book Presentation Zen which is an excellent roadmap for improving presentations. I also recommend his blog.