Death by PowerPoint

Recently I attended a webinar. The presenter for some reason kept hitting the key-board rhythmically. For the first few minutes, there was an uproar on the chat - someone asked someone else to mute themselves ... till they figured that it was the presenter, who, oblivious to what was happening on the chat, kept on hitting the key-board rhythmically. Slowly the chat died in the chat box and after some time, you heard no answers. The rhythmic beating of the keyboard had apparently put the 100 odd people to sleep along with his monotonous tone and the bulleted PowerPoint slides.

At one point of time in our life or another, all of us have sat through such mind-numbing, tedious, energy draining presentations.

Slow death, apathy bordering on - despair is one of the definite after-effects of such PowerPoint presentations.

As a facilitator, I hate power-point, especially the ones which have multiple bullet points with sub and sub-sub bullet points. And now 3 months into online programs - I hate the hum-drum voice of a presenter who loves reading out every point on the power-point.

And some presenters love animation - except that it jumps out from the most unexpected corners - twisting and turning and taking away the real message of the presentation.

Aside from humour, presentations like these can create real challenges especially when important decisions have to be taken or when facts have to be considered carefully before arriving at conclusions.