The Butt Ugly Weblog

Learning to be more human

I had a bit of a revelation the other day: I was listening on a presentation by someone eminently qualified. They had made their slides with Claude – like you do these days – which made them a bit dull. The room was a bit dark, and the slide projector pretty bright, so the presenter was hard to see, all you could hear was his voice. A disembodied voice explaining slides not crafted by a human hand.

And I realized there was so, so much left on the table. His topic was interesting, his presentation style was engaging, and yet he chose to fade the interesting part to the background: the human.

So I decided to run a bit of an experiment: I have been practicing improvisation theatre for the past two years. It's been absolutely wonderful engaging with people, shedding insecurities, making mistakes, and just playing and having fun. It has given me confidence about myself and how I engage with people, both in person and when on stage. And one thing I've learned is that humans are interesting. It's absolutely fascinating to just concentrate and watch a person do stuff. (If you like to go on Twitch and watch people play a game instead of playing it yourself you know what I mean.)

Oh yeah, the experiment! I was asked to run a five-hour workshop on the use of Artificial Intelligence for some of SOK Retail Technology folks, and I went in with a slide deck filled with blanks. Yes, there were some in-between illustrative slides, as well as some "additional information" -class slides, but I tried to make sure they were at the absolute minimum.

So, I flashed a blank, black slide on the screen, took a deep breath to quell my nerves, and started talking. And as I watched each person in the audience, letting my gaze wander from eye to eye, seeing them staring at me intently, I could feel a connection unlike in most presentations, where you can see their eyes darting between you and the screen behind you. It was glorious. It was fucking terrifying. It was very... human.

After lunch, I even did a small group mentalism exercise; something that most of them had never seen before, and I had never tried with a big crowd before. I tried to reach into their brains with my words and... try to let them experience something wonderful about themselves as humans. It was not a test, it was just a small gift that was in my power to give. Some accepted it, some did not. Anything and everything was all absolutely fine.

Afterwards, 19 out of 20 rated the presentation 5/5.

I'm so going to do this again.