Is it Generative Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Image Generation

Ever since I saw the AI-generated movie The Heist (and wrote about it a few weeks ago) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Partly because I think it’s a pivotal moment for art and film. And partly because the algorithmic gods of Threads and LinkedIn have discovered that I’m hungry for this Heist discussion and have been serving it up to me daily. 


Today, another creative unveiled their AI creation: A short film called Lynx that was created entirely using Veo 2. 

The debate surrounding both videos - and all of these new AI videos is fascinating. And it comes down to a question of how we describe things, but also a question of morals.

How we describe things - and name things - is important. It shapes the conversation we’re having about these tools.

Traditional creatives, editors, and filmmakers see the term Generative Artificial Intelligence and put the emphasis on the “Artificial Intelligence” rather than “Generative.” They are giving agency to the tool itself, and judging both it and the output as they would judge a creator. 


All of the criticism they are throwing at films like The Heist is totally valid: there is no real story. The pacing is terrible. It’s just a collection of shots thrown together. There is no consistency between scenes or even within scenes. 

If someone were to create this film by hand and say “hurrah! I’ve made a short - what do you think?” they would likely receive similar, though less scathing criticism. In fact, a short film I made more than 20 years ago would probably be worthy of that same feedback: There is no story, the pacing is bad, the shots seem...cobbled together.


The people actively using and exploring and playing with these tools would agree. In a lot of cases, they likely know that what they are creating isn’t good enough yet. But that it will be soon. As the saying goes, “this is the worst it will ever be.” 

CGI changed filmmaking. Digital video changed filmmaking. And in both cases, the quality of the film isn’t dependent on either technology. It’s dependent on the skill of the creator to tell the story they want using that technology. 

Last week there was a great post on Reddit about someone using Stable Diffusion to create a scene. The end product was “meh,” but you can see how much work it took to get there. How much finessing and finetuning. And a lot of that is only possible (for now) with the support of a talented artist: someone who knows how to create and how to bring their vision to the screen. It’s not just prompt-engineer.


or these types of creators, the emphasis on Generative Artificial Intelligence is on the Generative. They’re relying on their own intelligence to come up with a story and an idea.  

A better term for the various tools, from Midjourney to ChatGPT to Stable Diffusion to Google’s VEO is probably Artificial Image Generation: it still requires imagination, artistic ability, creativity, storytelling, and the understanding of story and creativity.

I sit on the fence between the old guard and the new wave: My career was built on exploring new technology, unpacking it, and helping other people bring it to life (this blog, started in 2006, is a testament to that). 

Because of that, I’m excited about the promise of Artificial Image Generation tools. It represents a new of way of creating, and giving the tools of creation to more people. 

But I also stand with the traditional crowd of creatives : A film isn’t just a collection of shots thrown together. A film is a story, an idea,  emotion, and cuts at the right moment to dial-up or release tension. It’s pacing. And for it to be art, it needs human effort to create it. These tools cut a lot of that out of it. 

The question of morality is more important than the question of semantics, though. These AI films wouldn’t be possible if they hadn’t ingested all of the good, human creative work of the last few decades. The corporations that control them stand to profit immensely from this wholesale ripping of art and plan to give nothing back. 

Generative AI (and the Pandora’s Box of misinformation, dead internet, and general decline of human culture and creativity that comes with it) is bad. 

New tools to facilitate the creation of art in ways that continue to support artists and make new and original artefacts are good. 

The line between the two is blurry and wide. The good artistic intentions that have been buried in that in-between space will be feasted on by monolithic organizations creating profit instead of art.

Art & Artificial Intelligence & Animal Carcasses



Almost any butcher shop will have huge cuts of meat in the window, often with the bone visible. 

Depending on the culture, they’ll show more than just the larger cut of the meat: Skinned animal caracasses, with the head intact. Sometimes still with hooves, feathers, or teeth visible. 

Similarly, sushi restaurants are known for seating guests at a bar that overlooks a glass case with the fresh fish on ice. 

There are likely cultural explanations for both. 

But the real reason is to show the freshness and authenticity of the meat: a display of a full, headed carcass says “this is what you’re getting when you order here.” 

Chicken Nuggets (Mc- or otherwise) as well as the McRib live at the first stage of the simulacram: they still attempt to reflect reality.

Artificial meats, like beyond beef take this one step further: they mimic the format (burger patties and sausages) of meat products, aim to be placed in stores next to meat products, and even attempt to replicate the taste and texture. 

Restaurants lure us in by telling us their products are handmade. Good booze is small batch. 

Local breweries, and their experimental IPAs, thrive. 

We’re happy to pay $6 for a flat white from our local cafe because we respect the work and the craft that went into making it. The art on top, imperfections and all, is a testament to the hand-made treatment. 


Generative AI is here, getting very good, and rapidly replacing that same level of effort that goes into art. As my friend reminded me this morning, “this is the worst it’s ever going to be.” 


Just look at the the video The Heist that Jason Zada created and posted this week: For the most part, it’s visually consistent. It has a defined story. It almost looks “real.” Almost. 


And it’s getting mixed reviews. Not because of the product, but because of the process. 

The creator, Jason Zada said it took thousands of iterations.  And I have no doubt that it took him hours of prompting, editing, re-prompting, editing, and more to get the final output. The people celebrating it know just how much effort it took to produce. 

The people criticising are doing so for the same reason: Because they know how little effort it took to produce compared to a proper shoot with actors, camera operators, sound engineers, and more. 

Both sides are right. 

But we are very quickly moving to a place where films like The Heist (or the skateboarding squirrel) will be easier than ever to create, and in ways that don’t have doubled wheels on the skateboard or inconsistencies in facial features across scenes. 

When everything is slick, easily-produced AI, nothing will stand out. We’ll know how easy it is to create, and we’ll stop caring.

That’s because we place value in something based on the effort required to produce it. Generative AI can replicate the look and feel of something handmade, but it can’t replicate the human effort it took to make it. 

As the models themselves begin to collapse by only referencing themselves, we’ll see a degradation of quality.


In this world, a world with a grim future for art, creative products crafted by human hands will stand out and be valued.

But when everything can be copied, how will we leave the head on our creative animal carcasses to show that it was created by human hands? What are the feathers to indicate that the source of this art was a person and not a machine?


PS: Last April I wrote a little more about this topic in a post titled “Ryan Gosling Is The Antidote to Our AI Hellscape.” I still stand by a lot of what I wrote then. 


PPS: We criticize AI for brazen intellectual property theft….but I don’t think bloggers are much better. Apologies and SEO juice to everyone I’ve ever snagged photos from to use in a blog post. In this case: Thanks, The Guardian.

PPS: We’ve come along way from the nightmare-fuel-from-another-dimension that was the earlier iteration of Generative AI.

Strategy Resources

My bookshelf at work.


A few weeks months ago, a former colleague of mine reached out to ask if I had any advice on how to get her team to think more strategically. 

It’s a good question—and one I wish I had a better answer to, seeing as a large part of my role is doing that for my team. 

But it’s also a tough question with no easy answers. Since she reached out, I’ve been noodling on a longer blog post to summarize more accurately what I’ve done with my team, what I can do better, and advice I might have for my former colleague. 

In the meantime, I promised to share with her a few resources that have helped my work, that I’ve enjoyed reading, or that I think other people in the strategy world might enjoy. 

First of all, I love reading. I think that books are one of the most incredible things ever invented. With the magic of a few symbols recreated electronically or mechanically, someone can transport their innermost thoughts through space and time and have them appear within my own head. Absolute magic. 

And so some of my first recommendations are for books. I’ve only recently started reading books about strategy, and about my career, and about my industry, but here are a few that I’ve really liked: 

Strategy Books

  1. Mark Pollard’s Strategy Is Your Words is “a 400-page journey into the words that help and hurt strategists.”

  2. Bullet Proof Problem Solving isn’t specifically about communications strategy. What it does is provide readers with some tools they need to start to make recommendations that are based on real choices and sacrifice. 

  3. APG’s How Not To Plan is a book that I wish I’d read earlier in my career. Every chapter breaks down a concept in communications planning in simple terms, from research through to briefing and measurement and media planning, dispels myths or misconceptions, and provides a great little case study. 

  4. Everything I Know I Learned From Powerpoint is the book I regularly recommend to people as the single book that will make you better at your (office) job. It’s not so much about Powerpoint or slides as it is about being a better communicator, and nearly all strategy work is made better with stronger, more persuasive communication. 

  5. Richard Shotton’s Choice Factory is a great primer on how people make choices, and how we can start to use some of that in communications work. 



What else? 

Roger Martin’s “A Plan Is Not A Strategy” video is a really good primer on the distinction between the two and about how a good strategy will lead to a competitive advantage. His weekly email on strategy and choices is also excellent. 

From The Account Planning Group:

Other Strategy Writing: 

  • John Crowley has been writing some really well-considered blog posts about strategy, and they’re worth checking out. Specifically: 

    • Towards A Unified Theory of Strategy is a really elegant summary of the different types of strategy and the mindsets and skills needed for different aspects of strategy.

    • Stop Doing Strategy Backwards is a reminder that frameworks aren’t strategy. They’re useful tools for explaining the strategy, but strategy is more than just filling out slides and boxes. 

  • The Undercurrent’s Skills Maturity Matrix isn’t necessarily about strategy. However, many of the skills outlined there are immediately applicable to strategy roles. It’s a great way for someone junior to evaluate (with their manager) where they can improve or where they need support to grow. 

  • Alex Morris’ Strat Scraps is one of my favourite newsletters out there. It’s casual and scrappy and esoteric and a real look inside the mind of someone truly doing strategy for a living. 

  • Salmon Theory is also worth reading for Rob’s insightful look at the meaning of being a strategist  “A newsletter about compassion, clarity, and creativity.” 

  • The Chop Shop Theory Of Strategy & Planning is a beautiful scrapbook about what strategy is, how to to it, how to discover your own path…as well as a great collection of templates, images, quotes, and miscellany.

  • The JWT Planning Guide from 1974. A classic of the genre, and still incredibly relevant.

More on BlogCampaigning about Strategy: 

Simply consuming all of the above won’t make someone more strategic or a better strategist (if it did, I would be significantly better at my job). I think, though, that they are a good starting point for thinking about how to get better.

The Best Science Fiction To Read In 2024

I’m obsessed with Science Fiction. It’s almost all I read. I used to run a Sci-Fi Book Club here in Vancouver (you can see a few posts from it like our short story contest and some of our reviews). And I’ve previously covered my love for the genre here about cyberpunk and here about why we should read more Sci-fi to understand AI.

About every six years or so (it seems) I put together a list of what I think the best science fiction books are. You can see 2017’s list here and 2011’s list here.

The criteria for being on this list is that I have to absolutely love the book. Most of the books on this list I’ve re-read many times. I’ve gifted most of these books to people (“You HAVE to read this!”). 

Most of the books on this list also aren’t for everyone. I like slow-moving books. I like subtle world-building. I like “big concept” sci-fi. I like big, depressing spaceships. I like stories about robots and Artificial Intelligence that make us question what it means to be human. I like series, as opposed to short stories, because they let me spend more time diving deeply into a new world. 

I like sci-fi that asks “What if…?” and then lays out a thoughtful answer complete with implications, considerations, and complications over the span of a few hundred or more pages. 

There are also always exceptions. The first book on my list below is a collection of three short stories and doesn’t have any robots. Wasp, also below, isn’t slow moving at all and doesn’t really have any spaceships. 

With that, and in no particular order, my current favorite Science Fiction Books: 

Worlds of Exile & Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin: Technically not a singular book but three novellas: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exiles, and City of Illusions. You can read them in any order, and they’re linked mostly by being part of the Hainish Cycle. But they’re also linked by being haunting stories of being isolated across time, space and knowledge. And Le Guin’s Hainish civilization is a a beautiful example of minimalist world-building, the kind that forces you to fill in the edges with your imagination.

Everything Ursula K Le Guin writes is absolute poetry. It can be hard to pick up a book by a lesser author after spending time in her pages. I’ve also been diving into a lot of her writing on writing, which has made me want to be a better writer myself. 

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: Kinda the opposite of the previous entry: rather than being three books in one this pick is one book across three. The story follows the first generation of colonists on Mars from when they landed all the way through to a hundred or so years later. It can be slow moving, and there are long chapters devoted to loving and detailed explanations of the Martian landscape. This is balanced with a few great action pieces and a truly human-centred view of exploring of space exploration.

I just recently re-read this entire series over the last year and it holds up on the 10th read through as much as it does the first. Every time I fall in love with the characters and the planet all over again, and every time I find another detail to make me think about what it means to be human. If you liked this, I’d also recommend the Three Californias trilogy by Robinson. Each one imagines a slightly different future (or asks a slightly different “what if…”?) About what might happen. Fun fact: Ursula K. Le Guin led some of the writing workshops where KSR honed his craft. You can sometimes feel her rhythm come alive in his work. 

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson: I read somewhere that KSR wrote Aurora as a way of recanting for his Mars trilogy, and a way of letting us know that there is no real escape from Earth. No plan B, no planet B. 

It’s the story of a generation ship, halfway through a multi-hundred year journey to another star with the hopes of finding a hospitable place to live. It’s a story of science, of orbital mechanics, entropy, and a coming of age story of an Artificial Intelligence. 

If this sounds interesting to you then you might also like Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. I’m obsessed with the fact that it was published just a few months apart from Aurora, and that both books have such similar themes: how hard it is to leave Earth, entropy, orbital mechanisms, and group behaviour in a closed system.  

Blindsight, The Colonel & Echopraxia by Peter Watts: If Kim Stanley Robinson’s books are about understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos where we are most definitely alone, then Blindsight is about understanding what it means to be sentient in a place where we’re most definitely (and terrifyingly) not alone. It’s science and jargon HEAVY. And grim. I love it, and the follow-ups. 

Wasp by Eric Frank Russell: Probably one of the most criminally underrated sci-fi books of all time. Wasp takes its name from the idea that a small insect can make a car crash, despite the massive size difference, by distracting the driver or passengers. The Wasp in this case is a special agent sent to infiltrate and disrupt an enemy planet. With a few minor changes this could very easily be the story of an Allied spy disrupting enemy supply lines and avoiding capture during the Cold War in an un-named Soviet Bloc country and all of the action that goes along with a story like that. What I love about it is that. sci-fi or not, the story keeps up an incredible pace and delivers on the feeling of the protagonist getting closed in on by enemy forces. 

Neuromancer by William Gibson: If the Mars Trilogy was my entry point into loving sci-fi then Neuromancer was the gateway drug to an obsession with cyberpunk specifically. In fact, it was likely that for a lot of people. As my friend pointed out, it feels derivative if you read it now. But that’s only because so much of our popular conception of “high tech, low life” stems directly from Neuromancer. 

For more cyberpunk, read When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. It takes some of the familiar genre tropes (inserting chips directly into brains, hackers in bars) but sets them in an unnamed country in the Middle East. The result feels super modern and is a blend of culture, high tech and low life that you won’t find elsewhere. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkway brings us a few great variations on the cyberpunk detective story, as does The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. 

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein will always have a soft spot in my heart. But it’s good to balance it out with the Old Man’s War by Scalzi and The Forever War by Joe Halderman for a few different view points on what military action in our future probably won’t look like. All of them touch on the idea of fighting far from home, and how coming back will be difficult if not impossible. 

Matter by Iain Banks: All of the books in The Culture Series are good. Matter is particularly good. It's good enough that it almost makes me want to add another category to the type of books I like: Medieval worlds and characters existing in futuristic universes.  

If you like the idea of the medieval/future combo I’d recommend: Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (not THAT Michael Flynn), which asks the question of “What if an alien ship crashed in Germany during the black plague?”) and Hard To Be A God by the Strugatsky Brothers, which is about a group of scientists from futuristic Earth who visit a medieval planet that is profoundly anti-intellectual. Although I’m sure the Strugaksys were making a commentary about Russia in 1964, their message feels even more clear today.

Also in this category is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson: Imagine a group of monks who are devoted to the study of science, physics and mathematics inside the walls of their monastery, while the outside world is obsessed with religion. When something incredible happens the monks are called to make sense of it. What follows results in the most amount of profound “whoahs” I’ve muttered while reading a book, even on multiple re-reads. 

Ilium & Olympos by Dan Simmons might also fit into this category and is an absolute treat every time I read it. It’s the Trojan War reenacted by super-advanced humans playing the role of Gods & Goddesses. There are plucky robots, Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban, and an incredible Odysseus. Nothing should really fit together, and yet it does. The Hyperion series, also by Simmons, deserves an honourable mention here. It might be bolder in scope but not quite as imaginative. 


And finally, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. An incredible journey across time and space with some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever read. The story imagines 1,000 clones who spend hundreds of thousands of years exploring the galaxy. When they reunite, they spend 1,000 nights together, each night sharing one of their memories with the others, as a way of living forever. There are some incredible locations the characters visit, and the book features Hesperus, who is maybe my favourite character of all time. 

The book is as much a mystery as it is a space opera, and in that respect is a bit like the slightly less epic 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. More of a tour of the solar system as it might look in 2312 (complete with hollowed-out asteroids and most of the moons occupied) it also has a confusing mystery plot to keep you interested. 

For something MORE epic and sprawling than House of Suns, read The Marrow Series by Robert Reed, which follows a planet-sized spaceship as it navigates around the universe of the span of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years. I’m also 90% sure that Robert Reed’s book Sister Alice as a bit source of inspiration for House of Suns (there are a lot of plot similarities). 

After writing this out I want to pick up every single one of those books and read them for the first time again. I know that I already have copies of each of them, and that I’ll still seek out old copies hidden in the dusty, musty shelves of used bookstores or old copies with beautiful new covers in new bookstores. I’ll get some to keep, but most to give away, to push into someone’s hands and say “here, read this: it’s so rad: It’s got space vampires” or “you gotta read this, man - it’s so epic.” 

But it also makes me want to keep exploring what else is out there in science-fiction. There is still so much great stuff being written and I can’t wait to read it.

Ryan Gosling Is The Antidote To An Artificial Intelligence Hellscape

Last week a Saturday Night Live skit broke the internet. I’ve seen it referred to as viral, and also “generational.” I cracked up watching it and asked my partner to rewind it so I could watch it again. And again. One news article referred to it as “the Best SNL skit ever.”

The skit doesn’t hold up to deeper analysis, though: Kenan Thompson is good in the way he’s always the perfect straight-man foil, but it’s not his best performance. There are no catchphrases or one-liners to take away from this. The joke itself - that there are two guys who are unaware that they look like Beavis and Butt-Head - isn’t even that clever. The “King of the Hill” closer to the scene was weak, and felt tacked on. 

What I think we all collectively connected with was the absolute humanity of the cast: Ryan Gosling was barely able to contain himself. Heidi Gardner was not able to contain herself. 

It was bizarre and surreal, and unpolished and perfect for all of those reasons, in the face of the machine-generated nonsense that is slickly taking over the web.


The popularity of Nanalan clips on Instagram and TikTok was an earlier sign of this (you’ve probably heard the “Most Beautiful Girl” song). After so much sameness, so much artificial voiceover content, I think we craved something more real. And the show’s creator says it perfectly, in an interview they did with the New York Times a few months ago:

“The world is so, so difficult and scary right now, and the show’s very comforting. Everything looks soft. There’s no special effects. It heralds to what I think people want to see, which is just something that’s real and authentic in the, you know, fake, fake, fake world. Everything’s A.I., and people don’t know what’s real.”

Similarly, Harold Halibut is being heralded as the the next big game, partially due to it’s bizarre but touching story, but also because the entire game was created using stop-motion puppets. That’s an artistic choice, and it’s one that matters when all AAA game titles look the same. The top comment on that nailed it when they said that the world’s main gaming studios have become “too big to innovate.” They’re the same sum of average that AI is. 

It’s not that I don’t think Generative AI can write comedy scripts today or in the future. Or design shoes or video games. Or that the pursuit of better Generative AI (and the General AI to follow it) is a useless or dangerous path to follow.

It’s not a giant leap to say that over the next several years almost everything we interact with will be part of AI, will be AI-generated, or will have AI baked into it in some way. Immersive worlds virtual worlds, meetings, and generated experiences will be commonplace.  We’re on the verge of being absolutely overrun by garbage content produced at scale. 

And it’s not just content: Casey Newton suggests that if the first wave of social media was about interacting with people you knew and that the second wave was about interacting with celebrities and influencers (people you didn’t know), the third wave was going to be people who don’t exist: Virtual avatars, Chatbot replicas of celebrities. Virtual Snoop Dogg.

He writes, terrifyingly: 

And my guess is that what happens next is that the more we’re pushed, pulled, and dragged into a machine-generated world, the more parts of us will reject it. As the saying goes, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” 

The AI conclusion we’re racing to is soulless and lonely. 

And the antidote to all of those things is to embrace the handmade. The improv-ed. The in-person and imperfect. 

We’ll see a return to theatre (Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival has seen growing crowds, and I expect them to be even bigger this year) , and we’ll see live music become even more in-demand. After more days of Zoom and headsets and artificiality, we’ll spend more time craving an afternoon on a picnic blanket on the grass or on the beach.  

It was fitting that the setting for the Beavis and Butt-Head SNL skit was a news program talking, in as dry of terms as possible, about the future of AI. 

A Reminder To Notice More Things (Like The Age Of The Planet).

A few weeks ago I finished reading “Notice. Collect. Share” by Russell Davies. It’s a reminder that in order to get better at the work of strategy (which is sense-making by another name) you need to get better at noticing the interesting things that are out there, collecting what you notice, and sharing the best of that.

Today on my morning walk I came across this plack on a rock:

“12,000 to 15,000 years ago retreating glaciers deposited this stone. In 1997 Vancouver Works Department dug a hole on 6th Avenue & Larch to lay storm drains and came across this huge rock.

Rather than blow it up they were able to put it down where it now sits, one third in the ground but above the ground it is 145cm tall and 480cm around at the base.

This stone is to remind us all of how recently come here. All too soon we forget the age of the planet that is home to us all.

A century is 100 years, and 15,000 years is 150 centuries”

A huge glacial stone.

There is a lot to love - and question - about this plaque:

1.) Is it a rock or a stone? They mix the terms up, but a bit of research tells us it is certainly a rock (stones are smaller, often hand-sized)

2.) The simplicity of language here is beautiful: It doesn’t say something like” Rather than deconstruct the obstruction using an explosive device…”. The plaque writers are clear and concise.

3.). Yet…they don’t actually tell us the age of the Earth: About 4.5 billion years.

Winnie for scale.

*If you’ve been following here for a while you might remember me talking about Russell Davies as the author of Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Powerpoint, the singular book that will make you a better strategist and communicator.

Narrative & Pitch Decks

A few weeks ago my friends at Method & Metric (Vancouver’s best SEO agency) invited me to speak at one of their SEO Conversations evening events about “How To Create A More Effective Pitch Deck.”

I’ve spent a big part of the latter half of my career pitching new business, both for agencies and for myself as a consultant.

In that time, I’ve been part of a lot of losing pitches.

But I’ve also won a few along the way.

And I’ve learned a ton about what makes for a good pitch (hint: it’s not just how slick the presentation is), but also a bit more broadly about what makes for a good deck.

Below is a bit of a summary of what I took the group through:

  • Your Job Is To Sell - You might not be selling a new service or piece of business. But every presentation means you’re selling something: your way of thinking, your research, your point of view, your opinion, or you. You’re likely hoping that someone will say “Yes!” to what you’re sharing.

  • The Best Way To Sell Is With Stories - Telling stories helps us comprehend the information better so that we can deliver it more confidently. But it also provides a framework for laying out the information so that our audience can receive it and understand it more easily. Stories also help us connect emotionally with our audience.

  • Presentations Need A Narrative - And a narrative is not just “Once Upon A Time.” A narrative means a choice in taking a point of view and choosing what pieces of information to reveal (or not to reveal) based on that.

  • Presentations - like stories - need drama. Drama is rising and falling action within a story. It’s what keeps us interested. It’s what drives the presentation forward, and makes us lean in to see what’s next (instead of leaning back to check our phones).

    • The example that I always like to use is a Detective Story: It might start with something exciting, like the discovery of a body or a clue. It slows down a bit as we are introduced:

We can take that same framework and apply it to what a strategy presentation might look like:

For more on this, I highly recommend reading David Mamet’s memo to the writers of The Unit:

  • Flow Is everything - How you transition between sections in a presentation matters, whether you’re presenting alone or with a group. Nothing kills a good presentation more than an awkward shift in topics or the dreaded “And now I’ll pass it over to…”.

    • Questions are a great way to handle flow AND continue to build in drama. End one section with a question to get your audience to try and answer it themselves. Then answer it in the next section.

    • Having an easy-to-follow structure can help with flow as well: Three acts, the Stephen King Planning Cycle, or a timeline can all help with flow and transition.

In the age of Google Slides and remote work, I feel like flow has become a bit of a lost art. In the olden days, we’d print the entire deck up and put it on the wall as we walked through it to understand the pacing and transitions.

  • Open With A Hook - The worst way to start a presentation is with a title slide. It puts people to sleep. It lets the presentation blend directly into the other presentations they’ve seen that day.

    • Movies are a great place to look for inspiration for what makes a great opening.

    • For my session, I had the group split into pairs and present their 2-minute pitch to each other, even before I introduced myself. it set the tone that this would be a collaborative event. Pushing people outside their comfort zone after a long day also helped bring the energy in the room up.

  • Finish Strong - One of the best pieces of advice I’ve had for a presentation is to bookend it with whatever your opening was. Even if the rest of the presentation was scattered, it makes it feel like you tied everything together.

    • For this presentation, one of my opening pieces was to tell the group that their job was to sell and had them present to each other. I finished this presentation by reminding them of this and having them re-present their updated slides to see how improved they were.

    • I often start presentations with a question, and resolve the question (using the same language) on the last slide).

I absolutely love presentations. I love planning them, I love writing them, I love making them (and I feel that the planning, writing and making are all truly distinct activities) and I love giving presentations. But I also don’t think they’re always the best way to communicate information or to win a pitch.


Some notes:

  • I treated my presentation as a bit of a workshop, and had the participants present 2 minute pitches to each other, then re-write those, then re-plan them, then re-write them, and finally re-present them, as we went through different ways of looking at decks. It was a bit of a test of a new way of running a session like this and I’ve got few things to iron out. Thanks to the everyone who joined!

  • As I write out this blog post and re-look at my deck I realized that I didn’t even heed my own advice: except for a strong start and some minimal structure, there was no rising or falling drama. No tension to resolve. Time to re-draft this deck for the next time!