How I Gave a 20 Minute Talk with Only 1 Slide (and no speaker notes)
This morning I was looking through some of my "liked" tweets and came across a photo of myself giving a talk with a slide of my former Dirt co-host, Mark Grambau giving a thumbs up on the TV behind me.
https://twitter.com/csskarma/status/758287866212519936
It was a lightning talk event from August 2013 that Steve Hickey organized in the Fresh Tilled Soil office. The event stands out in my mind, not because of the weird slide, but because it was my only slide during the 15-20 minute talk, and I let the audience choose it.
The presentation was titled, "How John Wayne Redefined Experience Design," but that's not really important. I had the title slide (which I have since lost) as a photo in my camera roll and I was going to airplay it to the TV during my talk (knowing it was the only slide I was planning to use). However I realized that I didn't need it, so I let the audience choose another photo to serve as the backdrop.
And then I spoke for a while.
Here's how I did it without any notes
At the time I had been giving a lot of talks and reading up on how to be a good story teller. A lot of the research suggested that slides were more of a distraction to the story that anything, because a person really can't pay attention to what you're saying while consuming information on a slide. This is why you see a lot of speakers using photos or very few words to hammer home the point of a slide during a presentation. Generally speaking, that's fine, but I wanted to experiment with getting the audience to hyper-focus on my words.
I came across an article on 99u (3 years ago now, so that article link is MIA) about storytelling and how to do it without notes of any kind. This was really appealing to me.
The basic premise is that during the story, you leave clues to yourself about the next part of the story. Then, you write down the clues, burn them into your memory, and while you're speaking you move from section to section stringing together a seamless story.
It was weird, but awesome
In August of 2013 I tried it out on a short talk, and it was great. I actually really liked the format even though as I was telling my story I was secretly thinking, "Oh crap, I'm about to hit a wall here, when's my next clue coming?!?!" Overall it was pretty nerve racking, but I got a lot of good feedback from the audience that they felt very engaged the whole time.
I think this format works really well for talks under 20 minutes, but beyond that you need some other catalyst to maintain everyone's attention. Maybe a new slide every 15-20 mins or so.
Anyway, I completely forgot about this presentation format, but I'm going to try and bring it back when I speak at Revolve Conference in October. So... wish me luck.