The other day, I gave an internal talk, and I tried an experiment. Using my iPad and the GoodNotes app, I drew all of my slides while I was talking (except the first slide, which I drew in advance).
I’ve always been in awe of people who can draw, I’ve never been good at it.
Over the years, I’ve tried doodling more. I was influenced by Dan Roam’s books, Julia Evans’s zines, sketchnotes, and most recently, Christina Wodtke’s Pencil Me In.
If you’ve read my blog before, you’ve seen some of my previous doodles (e.g., Root cause of failure, root cause of success or Taming complexity: from contract to compact).
When I was asked to present to a team, I wanted to use my drawings rather than do traditional slides. I actually hate using tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides to do presentations. Typically I use Deckset, but in this case, I wanted to do them all drawn.
I started off by drawing out my slides in advance. But then I thought, “instead of showing pre-drawn slides, why don’t I draw the slides as I talk? That way, people will know where to look because they’ll look at where I’m drawing.”
I still had to prepare the presentation in advance. I drew all of the slides beforehand. And then I printed them out and had them in front of me so that I could re-draw them during the talk. Since it was done over Zoom, people couldn’t actually see that I was working from the print-outs (although they might have heard the paper rustling).
One benefit of this technique was that it made it easier to answer questions, because I could draw out my answer. When I was writing the text at the top, somebody asked, “Is that something like a root cause chain?” I drew the boxes and arrows in response, to explain how this isn’t chain-like, but instead is more like a web.
The selected images above should give you a sense of what my slides looked like. I had fun doing the presentation, and I’d try this approach again. It was certainly more enjoyable than futzing with slide layout.
