“For those of you who like pictures,” Bob said, “I’m sorry to say that this is the only one in my presentation. This subject doesn’t lend itself to images.”
And with that he went to his next slide.
It was black and white with word-packed bullets at various levels of indentation. Dense. Impossible to grasp. The kind of slide that makes you sit back and ignore what’s going on in front of you, because the speaker is saying one thing but the words seem to say something else, and it would be too hard to parse all that text, and you’d miss what the guy was saying, so what the heck, you lean back in your chair, and your mind begins to wander.
Then Jim raised his hand.
“Could you go back to your previous slide?”
Jim asked some question about something that caught his attention. And Bob answered. Then someone else asked a question. ?And there were others. And suggestions about unexplored issues. And what-ifs. And discussions about hidden assumptions. And…
And then time was up. All Bob’s time had been taken up by that one slide—by that one slide that had that one picture.
Yet the subject didn’t lend itself to images.