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In terms of style, the lecture was a mix of humorous bits, teaching key concepts through particularly powerful exemplars, and some self promotion. I couldn’t miss out on the irony of the experience though. A great deal of what he was saying boiled down to the notion that paper is a much better communication mechanism than… presentations. In other words: “you are all personifying false laziness by wasting your day listening to me talk instead of just reading my books”. At one point he poked fun of an executive who was such a “high level muckety-muck” that he couldn’t navigate through his presentation himself, despite the fact that Mr. Tufte himself had an assistant who handled manipulation of all the A/V visuals, including transitions between pictures. He also went in to great detail about the whole Skip Intro phenomenon, and then ended the lecture with a video of his latest abstract sculpture work… which started with a long, slow motion title sequence. In fairness though, he did mostly follow his own advise, pointing people to sections of the texts for each of his topical discussions, eschewing PowerPoint slides (it is possible Mr. Tufte hates PowerPoint and similar “pitch products” as he describes them even more than Peter Norvig), providing a folded 11x17 paper with the key information he was looking to convey, reveling in the information density of text and backing up his assertions with data.

Probably the oddest part of his presentation to me was the way he lovingly talked about the iPhone, or more accurately, the whole gestures based interface. Gestures aren’t exactly a new concept, and there are a lot of issues with them that he didn’t mention. He also went over some of the instances where the iPhone does a great job (and where it does a poor one) using minimal screen space to present maximal information. What confounded me though was his praise for the way you could go through slides “on the same surface” as opposed to the PowerPoint “same damn thing after another” interface. In reality here, the innovation here is simple a slide transition mechanism that slides one slide in as another leaves. If PowerPoint (I must proudly confess to barely being able to use PowerPoint, despite having done many presentations) can’t already do this, it wouldn’t take much more than a days work getting the job done, and I suspect that Mr. Tufte would be just as disgusted as he is with all of PowerPoint’s slide transition effects. I fail to see how a horizontal virtual desktop of equal sized windows, with smart scrolling (so transitions terminate on one particular window) is materially different in terms of how it conveys information from a traditional PowerPoint slide show.

What really struck me about his whole presentation though was that it was based around altruistic notions of what meetings, and presentations specifically, are really about. Mr. Tufte’s entire thesis is based on the notion that the purpose of a presentation is to convey information, despite the open acknowledgment that there are simpler, more efficient ways to convey information. I actually tend to buy in to this line of thinking, which I’d argue is one of my weaknesses as a presenter. Unfortunately, reality does not seem to conform to my outlook.

The problem is that in a business context, presentations are primarily an opportunity for the presenter to promote themselves. This is their moment to bask in the sun of everyone’s attention, and their success is very much driven by how well they pull it off. They do this not by conveying information so much as holding an audience’s attention and focus as much as humanly possible. They do this not by inviting analysis (if they did that, someone might notice something that would make them look stupid, or someone might say something that draws attention away from the presenter) but rather by presenting support for the conclusions they have drawn. Controlling the narrative, providing only enough information to support one line of reasoning, and locking the audience’s focus through sensory deprivation are all part of the process.

Unless you foster a work environment that breaks out of this mold of thinking, I don’t know that Tufte’s techniques will really be of much use.