IF SYDNEY’S FOOD SUPPLY was of the same quality as last Friday’s talk and Powerpoint presentations on the sustainability of the city’s food supply and food security, then we would all be severely malnourished.
The talk, held in the seminar room of DLA Phillip Fox on level 38 of a CBD office building, was one of a series put on by the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO). In retrospect, it was a worthwhile offering but it could have been done better.
Lynn Saville from the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance was first off. Lynn played a leading role in creating the Hawkesbury Food System some years ago and presently serves as a councillor on Willoughby Council over on the northside. She presented the case for maintaining Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens in the face of a growing urbanisation being doggedly pursued by the development industry and its fellow travelers, the NSW Labor government.
Predictable in a way, Aaron Gadriel from the development industry lobby, the Urban Taskforce, played down the value of Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens although he said that he could not foresee the complete disappearance of farming from the region. His talk, however, failed to address potential future challenges such as the peaking of the global oil supply and its price-inflating impact on food costs and availability, or climate change and the increased potential of the eastern coastal plain in food production and the relation of urban growth to that.
Nor did he mention the economic value of the regional food industry to the city economy or the potential for this to be increased through maintaining city fringe farmland for agriculture in perpetuity. The idea of viable local economies was absent as Aaron promoted the value of big farms, claiming that small market gardens were unviable. His was very much a business as usual formula.
What was disappointing was that NSW Agriculture speaker, David Mason, who has been the department’s urban agriculture officer, did not discard his Powerpoint and address Aaron’s points. Instead, we got a far-too-hurried series of word and number-laden Powerpoint images flashed momentarily on the screen, far too rapidly for comprehension. Opportunity lost.
Can do better
The author and educator, Edward de Bono, says that the best criticism includes suggestions as to what could have been done better. So as someone who has been influenced by de Bono’s work, let me have a go. I’ll put my ideas together in three packages. Here goes…
Package #1 — bettering a bad format
What we, the audience, got from what could have been an engaging discussion was a sequence of three largely disconnected presentations in which Powerpoint-based information, not the ideas of the presenters, was the driver. It was as if the presenters had to get out what they planned to say rather than improvise by responding to what previous speakers had said.
These were content-driven presentations and they suffered as such presentations must. When Angela Garber coined the popular term, “death by Powerpoint”, what she was getting at was this type of presentation. Powerpoint, after all, was coded to be an aid, not the main way to convey information. That is done through the speakers’ brain and mouth working together.
This was the type of seminar in which the presenters could have been instructed not to present, in which Powerpoint could have been discarded entirely. That is to say, in some situations having a series of speakers get up there one after another and do their scheduled presentation is an idea that is now… how do I say this?… suboptimal? …tired?.
Instead, this was the type of seminar in which a hosted conversation would have allowed something to have been done which was not done — the exploration of the speakers’ ideas and values. Rather than a Powerpoint-driven infodump of far-too-many facts and figures, a conversation guided by a leader to keep it to topic and on time would have been a far more engaging format. The audience would have walked away with more.
Why is this conventional approach all-far-too-often found in seminars tired? Because it is based on the old paradigm that says there are givers of presentations and there are recipients and they are separate species. This is one-way communication, a product of the industrial age, of the old university, the old media, of the superseded business model… so last century, as they say. It is, as US academic, communications and intellectual property commentator and author, Lawrence Lessig puts it, “read only” communication that requires a receptive and passive audience that… well, just sits there and opens its mouth only in the allocated time slot, which is usually far too short.
I’m not saying that the conventional seminar does not have a place anymore, just that we need more diversity in information delivery. The old approach ignores the reality that digital communications has made ours a read-write culture, that this is now the cultural reality that organisations of all kinds often lag far behind. Those formerly known as ‘the audience’ can be co-creators in a conversation that offers a collective wisdom.
Package #2 — the images
How do I sum up kindly and inoffensively, trying not to upset them, the visual style of the presenters’ Powerpoint images? Let me just say that their images were crammed full of sometimes superfluous information that was off-topic. The only exception to this, on occasion, was Aaron Gadriel’s images.
Here’s what I am trying to say on a kindly way — the presenters presented:
- no road map or lead image to encapsulate and summarise the main points they were about to make
- no end image to reiterate their main points and tie the presentation together
- far, far too many words per image
- more than one idea per image
- no photographic, video or sound bites — just words words words — no diversity
- irrelevant image content more to do with organisational history and background rather than sticking to the topic of the day — food security; this resulted in a squandering of time that would have been better used to make the speakers’ points
- too many, far too many bulleted lists, like this one.
These things are educationally unsound as well as displaying ignorance of the visual presentation of information and the cognitive processes related to the use of Powerpoint. That is, making information available in a form that people can easily use.
What I am saying is that the presenters ignored Golden Rule #1 of information design when using Powerpoint and similar software. And Golden Rule #2 it is this — less is more. Don’t write a dissertation when a couple words or an image will do. This has been more than adequately explored in Garr Reynolds well-regarded books on the visual design of information delivery and on making presentations.
Powerpoint images do not convey knowledge and ideas — the presenter does. It comes forth from his or her mouth, which, for the occasion, should be firmly plugged into his or her brain. In other words, the presenter should know their stuff and not rely on the poor prop of Powerpoint, which was designed as an aid to presenting, not as a substitute for the presenter.
Package #3 — the presentations
In their book, Making It Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath offer ideas of what makes messages stick in the brain, ideas derived from research carried out as part of their work (see Amazon review). This should be essential reading for all who get up and make public presentations, as should the books of Garr Reynolds, mentioned above, for those using Powerpoint.
Had the Heath brothers been read, then the speakers would have insinuated something completely missing from their presentations: emotion. Emotion as an initial reaction is hardwired into the human psyche and irrespective of the intellectual twaddle peddled by those who would see humans as mere molecular machines, it trumps objectivity. Emotion can be one of the most effective means of emphasising important points.
A speaker who shows passion for their topic via emotion is a speaker who enthuses. One who stands and reads or who just churns out verbiage without any body movement, without any change of tone and pitch and volume or any other display of evident enthusiasm is behaving like a verbal tranquiliser. Their information will come across as such.
Facts and figures populated the seminar’s Powerpoint images so plentifully that their effect was lost, as was the effect of creating a sense of credibility for the information that is so important to gaining audience confidence in making presentations. It was a case of fact and figure overdose, and like and drug overdose it disrupted the normal capacity of the brain to make sense of the world. All of that important quantitive information was lost in the dense verbiage of text that occupied the slides corner-to-corner.
The future
The EDO offers a valuable service in their public seminar series and my critical comments are offered merely as suggestions to improve this. Likewise, food security, the topic of the seminar, is something that is going to be very important in our and our childrens’ future.
The seminar brought together different interests, opposing interests, and could have been the forum in which these differences and the ideas and values they are based upon could have been explored in a calm and enlightening manner free of the polarisation they engender as discussions in the political or media sphere. What we got was, in effect, a series of position statements that, interesting and clarifying that might have been, did not dig into the issues to any depth as could have a conversation.
Nonetheless, thanks to the EDO for taking the initiative to organise these talks.
