Last night I attended the second Ignite Sydney event as a guest of the organiser Stephen Lead and discovered the future world of business presentations.
The new environments for business presentations are cabaret venues in the gay areas of a city where the audience stands and sips cocktails and hard liquor as live twittering about who is attending and who is not screens on the audio visual-screen, usually reserved for video clips or karaoke. There is male on male, male on female, female on female action but instead of music and bands, the entertainment is innovative business presentations. Work and play is the new singles dance!!
The evening opens when a beat box performer jumps on stage and delivers the Ignite Sydney music theme complete with scratching and explosion affects to rapturous applause.
What follows is 12 business presentations constructed around a very strict format - 20 slides in 5 minutes ie 15 secs per slide that change automatically. You stop speaking when your slides finish or you get the old fashion vaudevillian hook - in this instance, a blank screen showing the credits of your presentation!!
The presenters, average age approximately 30, included an Anglo Saxon IBMer exhorting us to volunteer in some capacity - we spend 87 hours per annum watching porno - set aside two hours of that habit each year and volunteer and think of the change humanity could bring to the world he epically concludes; a Vietnamese games designer from Dolby developing real voice interaction for video games; a Chinese designer YinYang (translated happy creativity) shows us how her "fail whale" a design for a friend's birthday was picked up by Twitter from iStockPhoto and used as their 404 error message (someone suggested the name Fail Whale in a twitter post) and how this acted unexpectedly as a huge boost for her career; an Eastern European computer programme who made no sense whatsoever to me because he spoke in programme acronyms for 5 minutes; a young Indian Malay lawyer who travels the world setting up micro financing systems in developing economies; an Australian, the only suit wearing presenter, instantly turned effective business diagrams into an art form; an Irish email design expert dressed as a pirate who made sense of bounced and bouncing emails and showed why html email design was still steeped in last century methodology (last century being 1996) and - the headlining act...and here we must have a drum roll.. young Australian (late 20's) Adam Drever of Snatch Digital gave a startling presentation on brainstorming.
The session opened by placing Alex Osborne and the Creative Skills Training Council Global Mentor Dr Sid Parnes in correct historical context with the US Creative Education Foundation and then in 3 minutes showed the importance of brainstorming in all our worldly activities. In all my years attendance at the Creative Problem Solving Institute Conferences and other creativity conferences around the globe, I have never seen such a succinct, articulate and visual presentation on brainstorming.
Finish to rapturous applause..more alcohol, discussion, intellectual exploration and mating, perhaps...at a later stage!! The subconscious activities of our everyday workplace manifest!!
In the space of 60 minutes, I learnt more about video gaming, business diagrams, the evolution of mobile phones, volunteering, micro financing and the hidden hours of creativity (10.00pm - 2.00am according to the presenter) than any amount of researching and googling on these topics.
Only two presentations failed and they failed because the presenters misread the audience, the context and the intent of the presentations.
In a topic with the pretensious heading"T-shirts with logos are like corporate fellatio" the presenter attempted to be an entertainer and comedian and he distinctly was neither. He lacked the skill of a comedian and read his presentation. Well written as it was; it lacked the authenticity and personal passion of the other presenters. His presentation was about a cause, not about the transference of information and knowledge that had been passionately gained and experienced.
"Eclipse RCP development", well, the title of the presentation says it all and over 5 minutes, the introverted and passionate computer programmer didn’t make it any clearer, at least not for me. "What in the f... is this all about" was the mumbling around me as his PowerPoint slides offered wire frame with words after wire frame with words. At least, the wire frame slides towards the end appeared less complex and cluttered. The group I stood with began to see this as a comedy piece in its own right, albeit performed with passion and incomprehensibility. Our Eastern European coder received a rousing ovation at the end but I suspect it was in empathy. As an introvert he had conquered his fears, strode the cabaret stage and completed a presentation about his passion - computer coding and design - in public!! Information transference - nil!!
Every presentation was outstandingly visual - not all the visuals worked but these business cabaret presenters have been expertly coached the Sydney Ignite presenters, know the format of the video clip and have designed and edited their presentations accordingly. At last, the full power of PowerPoint as an aesthetic and multi-media tool is being realized and explored.
Like indie rock bands who merge into the mainstream, this coming generation of business presenters merge the visual with live performance to finally make the 70's and 80's Warholian multi-media performance and cabaret art, the popular form of business communication it always promised to be!!
Thank Gates for PowerPoint!!
See my article The Ill Informed Death of PowerPoint