Remembering my first KISS

You never forget the first time, do you? The impression lives with you forever. Certainly that's the way it was with me.

It was twenty five years ago that I attended my first Toastmasters meeting. My manager had suggested that I should work on my presentation skills and a good friend was a Toastmaster.

And so at that first meeting I heard about Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). The rules were unbending: when presenting, you should have no more than three points per slide, no more than five words per point. It really made you think carefully about how to communicate effectively and it clearly works because Toastmasters continue to be a successful organisation.

And I remember this especially today because I'm reading through a presentation sent to me by a keen business partner. After the first two introductory slides, no slide has less than 100 words and at least two complex diagrams. And jargon by the bucketload.

It's not just this one organisation that does this. I see it more and more: "presentations" that are more like engineering theses. At least two prominent IT vendors are guilty.

In a world where information overload is a fact of life, why don't we insist that people learn how to present before setting them free on PowerPoint? It seems sometimes that people are writing a thesis using PowerPoint. That's the wrong tool, people. Use Word (or your favourite non-MS word processor).

I think it was Oscar Wilde who wrote "I am sorry this is a long letter. I don't have time to write a short one." When you're preparing presentations you can save a few hours by just throwing everything into that screen show. But you waste ten or twenty times that for your audience. (And if you keep doing this, you'll find your audiences getting sparser.)

So please: let's KISS again.