PowerPoint, the Bullet Points and the Story

Posted on 22/03/2012 by Graham Chastney

Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.

Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.

Rowan Manahan at Ignite #6

I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.

(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)

I’ve put the pictures back

Posted on 28/02/2012 by Graham Chastney

As part of trying to resolve some performance problems on this site I got rid of the pictures in the header.Over the last couple of days I’ve put them back along with some new ones because some people commented that they missed them.

You might be wondering where some of them are, others are a bit more obvious:

This is San Francisco harbour.

This is Grasmere taken from a beach at the Rydal end. It was taken just before we went swimming on a lovely summer evening.

Lavender in our garden which is a favourite with the local bees.

Another garden picture.

On holiday in Italy we were at the top of the Tower of Pisa as the sun set. This is the view back towards the duomo.

A more local picture this time, taken at Cobble Hey gardens in the Through of Bowland.

From north west to north east, a lovely sunset taken from the beach at Banburgh.

One of my favourite places is Borrowdale in the Lake District.

More lake district, looking across Derwentwater towards Borrowdale.

One summer we decided to try out a Maize Maze. This was the sculpture in the middle.

More sculpture, this was on display at Chatsworth, and on sale – we decided not to ask about the price. They are contemporary terracotta warriors designed by Yue Min Jun.

Another sunset, this time at a local nature reserve called Brockhole.

More lake district and more swimming, this time it’s Buttermere, it’s late spring and the water hadn’t really warmed up yet.

From Lindisfarne looking back towards the mainland.

Finishing off with a view from the far north of Scotland at a little hamlet called Tarbet which is the place where you go to if you want to visit Handa island.

The pictures are configured so that you will get a random one for each page and post that you visit. If you want to see different ones then you need to click around a bit.

There are some others and I’m likely to update them from time to time.

Back online now

Posted on 24/01/2012 by Graham Chastney

If you tried to access this site yesterday you would have received all sorts of errors.

The reason for this was down to a problem at the organisation where this site it hosted.

I’m told that the problems are all now fixed, and everything seems to be available again.

Think About the Story

Posted on 19/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"

I regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.

Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.

They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.

We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.

Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.

(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)

Weird English #3

Posted on 12/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

I live near to a place called Fernyhalgh Lane and after more than 25 years I am still none the wiser as to the correct pronunciation for it. Even people who have been born in the vicinity pronounce it differently. One thing is certain though halgh is not pronounced halgh. This got me thinking about all of the other places that are pronounced in a different way to the way that they are spelled.

A few years ago we went on holiday to the North East of England and stayed near to Alnwick which is pronounced without the l and without the w. I’ve listened to countless America tourists struggle with the word Worcester. Then there’s Magdalene College at Cambridge University which is pronounced Maudlyn.

So I wondered how many places and things there were that required some level of local knowledge to aid you in the correct pronunciation. After a little bit of searching I came across what is possibly the longest Wikipedia entry I have ever seen:

List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations

How does anyone stand a chance of getting it right?

Writing Limits

Posted on 06/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

The other week I wrote about how I’d tried to change the balance of my writing so that I was Writing Less to Write More.

The challenge was to spend less time on Twitter and Facebook so that I wrote more consistently here.

The lesson I’ve learnt from this experiment is that there are limits to my writing output. I don’t have enough capacity to allow me to contribute in all of the places I’d like to, I have to be selective.

Over the last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to put the experiment in reverse and to deliberately get sucked back into Twitter and Facebook. This unsurprisingly precipitated a drop off in writing here, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way it was.

If you are a keen observer you will have noticed that I still wrote the occasional post, but nothing of any quality, or with any consideration. I wrote the easy stuff mainly in the Because it’s Friday category.

So I have a choice, I can contribute lots of little bits to all sorts of social media places, or I can contribute in a considered manner – I can’t do both. It’s a personal preference, but I think I’d rather be more considered, so it’s back to Writing Less to Write More.

The Talk Normal Challenge

Posted on 08/09/2011 by Graham Chastney

One of my favourite blogs is Talk Normal.

I work in a business that has a wonderful ability to use and abuse words. Tim Philips’ work is a wonderful antidote to the rubbish that assaults my ears every day.

He’s recently published a podcast which everyone who works in the IT industry should list to and take stock.

On answering a question about how this has become a problem Tim has this answer:

When the Internet came along there were all these exciting companies, run by people who really had never lived in the real world, but they were presented as the business innovators for the next generation, so we liked to copy them.

He then goes on to link this observation with the rise of email and other IT communication technology to produce the perfect setting for the plague of word abuse to spread.

Perhaps we should also be the ones to take up the challenge to talk normal?

Talk Normal Podcast 1 by Abby Coften

Update:

Episode 2 and Episode 3 are now available also.

Talk Normal Podcast 2 by Abby Coften

Talk Normal Podcast 3 by Abby Coften

Because it’s Friday: Danny Macaskill

Posted on 26/08/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’ve never had a highly developed sense of balance and have always marvelled at those that do.

What Danny Macaskill does with a bike absolutely amazes me:

Danny Macaskill – Industrial Revolutions

The videos are so well produced too.

Telling Stories

Posted on 25/08/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.

Graham Chastney

The rambling of a technologist trying to find a way through

Category Archives: Creativity