PowerPointless?
I just wrote a long post on Participo about the (a)buse of PowerPoint in organisations.
The last section was on the intellectual content locked away in PowerPoint, and I've re-posted it here, as it describes one of the primary use cases for ThinkFold in companies - enhancing presentations through collaborative outlining.
Any company I've ever been in creates hundreds, if not thousands of ideas. These ideas were invariably created and shared using PowerPoint. And now those same ideas, the result of hours of hard work and intellectual output are locked away into PowerPoint slidesets, sitting on shared drives, hard disks, and (if the company is really switched on) on SharePoint drives, or a Google Search Appliance's index.
But it's just the PowerPoint file - that's a lot of intellectual capital sitting there, as structured slides, but without any context, and certainly not being re-used in any meaningful way.
Imagine a different way of building, sharing and re-using these ideas. The ThinkFold way.
People would outline their presentation ideas before moving into the constraint of PowerPoint. The ideas would be shared and developed with co-workers in a single idea workspace, without sending PowerPoint files back and forth.
When the ideas are ready, the core ideas go into a micropresentation - 15 slides, 20 seconds each format (more on micropresentations in my Participo post.)-> Take a typical 30 minute meeting (What? Your meetings take longer than that?). Kick off with the micropresentation. That takes just 5 minutes .
The remaining 25 minutes is a conversation where reactions and ideas are captured into a shared outline during the meeting - the same outline that the micropresentation was built from.
Everyone in the meeting is given access to the shared outline, which contains the presentation, the ideas that created the presentation, and the notes and ideas from the meeting itself.
The outline gets refined a bit over the next few days, as ideas settle down, and actions are made, and then the whole thing gets published as a 'public' outline to the company network.
The core 5 minute micropresentation has acted as the catalyst and hub for a structured set of communal ideas, shared and stored in a meaningful way through a shared outline.
Jump forward six months. An employee, accesses the public outline. They fire up the micropresentation (a self playing pps file), getting a five minute overview.
Moving into the rest of the outline, they can quickly review the ideas and notes from the meeting, and to get more insight, review the full outline used to create the micropresentation itself.Organisations get to keep meetings and the presentations (they love 'em!), but by opening up and connecting the thinking process before during and after the event of a presentation, a huge amount of extra value is released from the 'intellectual capital' of the presentation's lifecycle .
If this sounds like something you'd like to see in your organisation, I'd love to hear from you.