These are often the best meetings. The audience has prepared, read the material, and is ready for a discussion. What presentation slides can help you run a meeting that is mostly free discussion?
Bring your entire deck, but select from it those slides that create a mental framework around the things you want to discuss. Often, they are very simple slides, but relatively dense with content. Examples:
- A 2x2 matrix with all the competitors listed
- A matrix of market segments (growth, and size on the axes)
- A simple ranking of sales and profits by brand
- A product development timeline
- Two market share pies: last year and this year
- A software architecture diagram
All these can be projected onto a whiteboard (use a white slide brackground), on top of which participants in the meeting can scribble. After the meeting is over, snap a picture of the remaining group art.
Changes are that if you look at that picture 3 weeks later, you can pretty much replicate the entire discussion. Not because the scribbles are so clear, but because your mind has allocated a physical space on the white board to store the entire debate in your memory. Similar to stories, a physical location makes it much easier for people to remember things.
1 comment