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The Future of Story Telling or ‘Why I may need to go to PowerPoint rehab’

13 April 2010

In the last two weeks I have found myself in Norway, Turkey and Switzerland trying to bring alive complicated insurance products and insights about emotional decision making. My tool kit is 65 finely honed charts, 8 photo essays and lots of verbatim.

All three workshops have been a success – people left the meetings excited and ready to tackle product innovation and customer upsell. But how much of that was the in room conversation and the energy of the people involved? I left each one wondering about the longevity of the message the data created. Do the outputs themselves have enough power to keep telling a story once the in room conversation is over?

In the past story telling was a verbal tradition but we are fast moving to an age where the visual is all important and that does not mean 200 beautifully constructed graphs and some meaningful commentary. It means getting your point across the first time and consistently to everyone regardless of background, education or language.

While looking for inspiration around data visualization I came across this video which, without a single word, makes a very strong argument for the death of PowerPoint. I took it as a salutary lesson. Hello, my name is Liz and I am addicted to PowerPoint. Only 11 steps to go.

Turn the sound off (not that it matters unless you can speak Japanese) and you will be amazed what you can learn about Japan without the use of words. Is this the future of story telling in our industry?

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