[Updated August 1, 2019]
This is the second most common question I receive, second only to “What do you think of ___ transit technology?” but a little ahead of “How do I become a transit planner?”
While it’s usually the client’s decision, my preferred answer is a compassionate no.
In my presentations, most of the content and tone arises from what I say, not what’s on the slides, so releasing the slide deck without my voice attached carries a high risk of misunderstanding. Slides by their nature do not convey nuance, tone, or feel. If I prepared slides that were easy to understand without the benefit of what I’m saying, they might be fine for professional contexts but they’d be way too boring to use in a public event.
For example, I will sometimes just put up a picture and a few words that prompt me to tell a story, but I’m not going to put the three-paragraph story on a slide, and even if I wrote out the story in the notes (and even if, more implausibly, the people reviewing the slide read the notes) it wouldn’t convey the effect of me telling the story.
This may be one of those few moments when my past life as a theater director affects me. I’m very attuned to the difference between a performance and a script or score. If scripts accurately reflected what happens in a live performance, we wouldn’t need live theatre or live music. PowerPoint slides are part of the script; they are not the show.
In resisting releasing my slides, I am also cognizant of Edward Tufte’s groundbreaking work on visual presentation, notably The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which, among other things, he blames the lazy thinking encouraged by PowerPoint for the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
The other obvious reason, which is that my slides are our intellectual property, is the least important to me, though I obviously dislike seeing my work show up without acknowledgment in things that other people produce.
So when I get this request, my response is:
- If you are interested in a particular thing I said, there’s probably a quotable article here about that.
- There may also be a video of my presentation. You may be able to find it on the event sponsor’s website, and the best of my presentations are also collected here. While it has its own limitations, a good video can capture most of what actually happens in an event.
I hope that helps.