Life After PowerPoint!

In an earlier posting I wrote about the erroneous assumption that “the facts speak for themselves.” Many people — especially technical experts — operate out of a somewhat related erroneous assumption: “Knowledge is power.”

Knowledge is certainly superior to the alternatives — ignorance, prejudice, and error. But in and by itself, knowledge isn’t power, because power is all about action and the ability to accomplish something. (The New American Heritage Dictionary defines power as the “ability or capacity to perform or act effectively.”)

If you don’t do anything with what you know, what good is it?

Knowledge isn’t power. Using knowledge to do something worthwhile is.

And there’s even something more powerful than using knowledge: it’s communicating knowledge so that others can use it.

Here’s my hierarchy of the power of knowledge:

1. Knowing something without acting on it is like having a candle without lighting it.
2. Acting on what you know is like lighting the candle.
3. Communicating what you know so others can use it is like using your lit candle to light other people’s candles.

That’s why “presentation and communication” skills are so highly rated, even for technical experts. The better able you are to share what you know so that other people can understand and use it, the more valuable you are.

Photo courtesy of PeWu at Flickr.

Tags: Chris Witt, erroneous assumption, Technical presentation

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Presentation Tips, Technical Presentations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.