Why Whiteboard Presentations Save Headaches, Time and Money

Ever wonder why whiteboard presentations are so popular with creative teams? If you want to start saving headaches, time and money…whiteboard presenting is the way to go.

More and more teams use whiteboards to collaborate, design and share ideas. Game designers. Creative marketing teams. App designers. Innovation groups. Product teams. Engineers. Sales teams. Strategists. Writers. Oops…did I forget someone? It’s a growing list and more than likely your team is part of the wave.

What’s so great about whiteboard presenting? Let me count the top 7 reasons why people prefer to head to the whiteboard to share ideas.

1. Fast Flow Of Ideas
A whiteboard spells speed. Grab a marker and whip out an idea. You don’t have to struggle with slides. You don’t have to struggle over the perfect script. You don’t have to create a perfect rendering of a design. Just sketch and go.

2. Easy To Change
In addition to flow of ideas, there’s something wonderfully liberating about being able to erase, change, add and delete. Immediately. Whiteboard sketches are fast to do…and even faster to change.

If you don’t like what you’ve drawn, erase it. If you get stuck, add an arrow, line or shape. If you aren’t certain about flow, step back. Often, a moment of reflection is all that’s needed. You’ll spot a new revision that puts everything in the right place.

3. Instant Improvement
When collaborating with your teammates, it’s easy to stay open to different perspectives. Sketch in several colors. Show options side-by-side. Stay open to instant improvement on your ideas…no matter where you start.

4. All Green
Instead of wasting reams of paper, working at a whiteboard is all green. Respecting and caring for the environment is a smart choice—and if you’re presenting at the whiteboard you’re sending an all-green message to your team, clients and audience.

5. Rapid Translation
Many app designers, product designers and developers agree: working at a whiteboard is a very smart and fast way to build a prototype. Instead of struggling through functional details and tons of code, you can translate your image-based ideas into reality.

In addition, visual thinking is rapid. Many designers and creative people think in images. If you are a visual thinker, working with a marker in your hand unlocks rapid creative thinking.

6. Painless Revisions
Recently I worked with a director who was on his 37th revision of a document. It was pretty painful just hearing about it. But imagine how many revisions he could have sorted through if he’d worked through all the details at a whiteboard. Guaranteed, it would have been a much less stressful process.

Keep this in mind for any type of communication, prototype or product development. Stay in whiteboard zone until everyone agrees you are ready to go ahead. This will saves tons of money, headaches and stress in the long run.

7. Democratic Input
Sometimes on teams, one person dominates. Oops. No, I haven’t been a fly-on-the-wall in your department meeting. It’s just human nature. But in whiteboard collaborative brainstorming, everyone is an equal contributor.

Share the markers. Stay open to input. Track the development of ideas.

If working collaboratively is part of your business (and let’s hope you are nodding your head and saying, ‘you bet it is!’) then working at the whiteboard is central to your success.

Many teams use whiteboards…but have not received training on how to whiteboard effectively. Once people learn the simple step-by-step method, communication increases and collaboration skyrockets. If you’ve got whiteboards on the wall but aren’t using them with your team…take the next step. Get the whiteboard training you need to run creative brainstorming sessions and give high impact presentations.