Question: Why do so many corporate presentations feel flat and lifeless?
Answer: Because they are.

There’s more to communicating than just passing on the information at hand.  The fact is most information isn’t terribly interesting on its own.  While it may be relevant or even important, how much of that urgency will you get across if the delivery method is so dull that the recipients go glassy-eyed before they get the message?  Not much.

That’s where resistance comes in.  It seems counterintuitive at first, but resistance is a key feature in action.  Every force is defined to some extent by the resistance it encounters. For instance, in order to get a 900,000 pound 747 off the ground, you need more than thrust, you need air, and wings that have a resistance to it.  Without that, 600 people just bought tickets to ride in a very big car on tiny wheels that will soon shake apart and explode.

So how do you build in resistance to information as part of a project that’s designed to communicate it?  There’s no single answer to this, but in general terms, you do it by creating context.  By placing the information in a context, a situation is generated, and that situation plays the role of positive resistance.  It’s takes on the properties of a tungsten filament that resists the flow of electricity, heats up and produces the mystical thing we call light.  If done skillfully, the situation created by your chosen context will embody all the necessary attributes to light up your message, making it interesting, and ultimately memorable.

Here’s my example:

I made this video for BeanJar Inc. to demonstrate their new gaming rewards service and iPhone app.  They needed to describe a long list of functioning details in addition to illustrating actual usage so the mechanics of the system could be understood by potential advertisers, game publishers, and consumers to boot.

The client already had two things defined: the app functions they needed to highlight, and some usage scenarios they wanted to illustrate.  I felt these two kinds of information represented different communication goals, and should therefore be handled in different ways.  While the app functions were pretty straightforward and needed to be delivered as literally as possible, the usage scenarios were a different matter, and they became the perfect means to include useful resistance in the production.

It’s easy enough to explain how someone may be using an iPhone app, but if the viewer is not already predisposed to hearing about it, they’ll blow right by like a runaway 747 taxi.  I suggested we create some distance (read: resistance) between the viewer and the app user depicted in the video by delivering her story via the auspices of someone once removed, who was watching her.  That someone would be a private detective who documents and reports the story as it unfolds.  By employing that device, layers of interesting content were added to the raw information, enhancing the meaning, personality and depth of the presentation.  The context, i.e., the resistance, I built into the project, is like air pressure under a jet wing, it’s noticeable, and ultimately provides a kind of glue that pulls the whole presentation together.

Determining how best to include useful resistance in a presentation is always a challenge.  It can be risky like any creative goal that requires you to reach beyond the expected, but “unexpected” is often synonymous with “unignored”, and if you can be bold enough to raise the bar a little higher for your next project, the rewards will be undeniable.