It's Time to Leave the 90's

How are you running your meetings?

How are your leaders running their meetings?

Unfortunately, for many, your meetings are probably run the same they were for the past couple of decades…yes decades.

Although it was available under other names earlier, Powerpoint was officially launched in 1990. I won’t go as far as to say that Powerpoint has had the same impact on the world as say Lotus 1-2-3, but it has certainly dominated the corporate meeting room!

Having grown up in the corporate world during the 1990’s I have been bombarded with “slide deck” after “slide deck”. While some have been far better than others, the vast majority of these presentations have failed to do one thing: They do not allow the audience to dive deeper.

Traditionally, a presenter builds slides with static images and text. Hopefully, these slides are authored in a way that attempts to tell a story about the content.

That’s great…BUT…what if your audience wants more detail about the content you are discussing?

Consider this scenario. At year-end, your entire leadership team travels to it’s annual business review. The most important slide shows that Customer Satisfaction is down 30% year –over-year. As expected, this creates a stir.

Now…if all the presenter can show is that the CSAT score is down 30%, this leaves a LOT of questions. Arguments will be made but answers will not be given. Questions will go unanswered and left as an “action item” for someone to later share with the team.

This is an opportunity lost!

What if the data were presented “live” or “interactively”? What if, with a single click, the presenter could drill down into Region? And then spot a single region where CSAT was down? And then drill into that and see where a particular pillar was accountable?

Then you could have a real conversation. One that not only answers questions, but one that generates new questions along the way.

The tools are available now! Advances in visualization technology have changed the landscape. They’ve actually been for a while. This type of “Minority Reports” style of  meeting is changing how we communicate in business. It’s high time that we move our meetings in this direction.

Cheers,

Kevin Taylor