The Privy Council Office invited me back in the spring of 2002 for a second round of PowerPoint and presentation-skills training, six months after the first engagement. Return bookings always say something — in a federal context they say more than most.
The second round leaned heavier on the presentation-craft side. The first engagement had given people the software vocabulary; the second was about putting it to work in front of an audience. We worked on opening a talk without a slide, recovering when the technology fails, and the small disciplines that make a deck disappear behind what the speaker is actually saying.
Looking back twenty-five years later, the through-line from that engagement to current work is clearer than it felt at the time. The teaching practice that grew over the next two decades started with rooms like this one.
