Anyone who has spent time with Intel employees knows that Andy Grove’s influence on the culture there was deep and long-lasting. From conversations during my time with them as an agency person, I picked up two presentation edicts that traced back to Grove: 1) no laser pointers (apparently Grove can’t stand the sparkly diffusion when they hit a projector screen); and 2) ‘only show 4 “foils” per hour’ during presentations (”foils” refers to slides and the techniques for making them when the Grove culture was at its peak).
I love the 4 foils per hour rule. It’s Presentation Zen’s rule of “go broad or go deep” gone crazy wild Xtreme. It’s like turning it into go broad, go deep, or go metamega-deep. Imagine having a concept and/or graphic rich enough to warrant 15 minutes of conversation? What kind of mind-changing and engagement happens then? I realize that Intel is an engineering culture, so opportunities for these kinds of slides are more frequent there than in other environments. But consider Tim OReilly’s Web 2.0 slides from a few years ago:


They’re ugly and contestable to be sure. But these slides are deep and systemic and still useful. Whether you disagree or agree with some or all of it, you’re going to be smarter for wrestling with or, better yet, trying to improve them. Another slide from NextD describes different types of innovators:

Look at all the nifty things going on here: four types of people, who can be grouped in to two higher-level types, and who reach out into different areas in different proportions and who may or may not map to a company’s process. By arguing about the accuracy, relationship, edges and arrow directions for 15 minutes, you get much deeper into innovative cultures, management styles, and process than you might with a dozen slides. (Also, by discussing something for 15 minutes and digging into its richness, you have something more memorable, better internalized, more grokked by your audience. That is, of course, assuming you and your slide are able to command attention for that long.)
And you don’t necessarily have to do info-graphics, either. Take a look at a screenshot from Flickr this morning:

This is a sampling of Holga groups, people dedicated to photography with a cheap camera whose artistically flawed lens creates sometimes eerie, sometimes sentimental, always distinctive effects. From looking at this slide, you can talk about long tail, community, community-bulding and marketing, the redefinition of amateur and professional, co-creation of brands (Holga effects found their way into Photoshop filters), and help your audience go beyond the lame, puddle deep Business Week understanding of the photo-sharing, community, 2.0 phenomena within it.
So what would happen if we had a rule in design and marketing presentations: don’t show any slide that doesn’t warrant at least 5, 10, or 15(gasp!) minutes of explication and conversation. (Or, as a compromise or improvement: Don’t do a presentation that doesn’t contain at least one over-arching slide that warrants 10 minutes of explication and conversation.)
What it might do is force us to think deeply about our models, concepts or ideas and make sure that they are rich enough to warrant a conversation. It might move us beyond some of the label-making and phrase-coining that seems to drive so many presentations. By looking at a rich slide in detail and for an extended period of time, we’re forcing ourselves into systemic thinking which may, at the end of the day, be more persuasive.
That said, I also enjoy big pictures with three words in a brightly colored band as a way of grabbing attention and registering something emotionally. They’re appropriate for motivational and sales talks, talks in which you’re trying to reinvigorate principles or ideas which are familiar, telling a story, or for very short (especially funny) presentations.
Designers in the interactive space are caught in between two powerful forces when it comes to presentations. One the one hand, we adore Tufte, who in addition to teaching us to loathe chartjunk also teaches us appreciate and promote information density and richness of thought. On the other hand, we’re moving towards a narrative-driven, flip-book style of presentation that illustrates nearly every sentence with a visual. We need both, but might be forgetting how to do the richer, deeper slide.