I’m always on the lookout for different methods to help people design better presentations. Different situations call for different types of presentations and it never hurts to try different techniques and then incorporate aspects that work for you. There’s no one right answer.
My latest find was Seth Godin’s atomic method:
The typical person speaks 10 or 12 sentences a minute.
The atomic method requires you to create a slide for each sentence. For a five minute talk, that’s 50 slides.
Each slide must have either a single word, a single image or a single idea.
Make all 50 slides. Force yourself to break each concept into the smallest possible atom. If it’s not worthy of a slide, don’t say it.
Once you have 50 slides, do the talk in practice. Remove slides and sentences that add no value or don’t move you forward.
Now (and only now), start consolidating slides. If two or three or four slides work together as one, then go ahead and make them one. You’ve got molecules now, not atoms.
At this point, you can either get rid of slides altogether, keep them as is or lump them one more time into bigger ideas. But no (!) bullets please. What a waste those are.
The part of this I like best is the fact that it builds more practice time into the process than many speakers schedule for themselves. Each time you make a cut and more precisely focus your message you are more deeply developing your core message and practicing how you want the presentation to come together. I haven’t tried constructing a presentation this way yet but, again, I like the idea of continuing to try new ways to hone skills and make presentations more powerful and interesting.
