Are Slides an accompaniment — or the main course?
It’s time to focus on substance instead of slides.
I’m optimistic that the era of relying solely on flashy presentations to convey complex updates, plans or narratives is over. While it’s true that presentation and pizazz is important, it feels like we’ve overcorrected (a reaction from the reductive “scientific management” era of the 2000s perhaps?). Now “substance” is making a comeback.
In exploring this topic I recently had conversations with three early-stage investors who made it clear that they wanted to see the numbers from startup pitches before the slides. Established company executives have echoed this sentiment. And Amazon’s widespread adoption of long-form copy to develop new ideas seems to have served them well.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that slides are useless. They can certainly help tell a story and articulate a vision or strategy. However, the idea that everything can be distilled into a ten-page deck with a logo in the corner is absurd. Even if it were possible (with some copy-and-pasting), why bother? When running a business unit I’d rather my team focus on running the business and solving problems than wasting time creating fancy slides for regular monthly updates.
We’ve all witnessed the power of a good presentation. Who could forget Steve Jobs’ launch of the iPhone? But to email someone the slide deck that Jobs used would be a tragedy of reductionism. Presentations, yes. Oratory, yes. Just send me your slides, no.
So the iPhone launch was a triumph, but let’s not forget it was also a marketing launch. It wasn’t a project plan, a product roadmap, or a pitch for investment. The urge to reduce all business information to a slide deck is to drop to the lowest common denominator. Distillation of this sort is dangerous.
Flattening your content may lead to failure. And Simplification is, well, simplistic. But it’s also a waste of time.
I recently spoke to senior executives at an Australian tech company who admitted to spending several days a month preparing slide decks. And most of the information already existed — which means, there wasn’t actually anything new in the material. Horrifying, but not at all unusual. Like email and endless meetings, we’ve just gotten used to it.
Fortunately, we have access to some incredible tools to help us develop our ideas, reveal ideas and explain what’s going on. When it comes to tool choice, the message determines the medium. Your options are plentiful — so much in fact that in many areas there are close alternatives. The tools at your disposal include platforms for content creation and organisation such as Miro (or Whimsical), ProductBoard (or Roadmunk), Asana (or Monday), and Notion (or Slite). I have a list of another twenty 😉. And if you work with software you’ve almost certainly got Jira in there. Ideally these are accompanied by data visualisation tools like Tableau and Looker Studio; not forgetting dashboards on top of Xero, Myob, Hubspot or Affinity. There are yet more tools offering alternatives to meetings, ranging from TeamFlow to the coming-soon Hoop. The virtual toolbox is literally overflowing with good stuff.
Don’t deny yourself these powers by wasting time pixel-pushing in a slide deck. Did somebody say “copy-and-paste”?! Anything that risks tilting the discussion/doing ratio in the wrong direction should be minimised.
Ideally, we could connect information from the best tools for the job into a cohesive narrative. Imagine starting a story in Excel, transitioning to Data Studio to present key insights, and then wrapping it up in a Miro board. And, if necessary, we could still tack on a PowerPoint appendix.
With my long-term collaborator Richard, we’ve been looking at new ways to assemble information from multiple sources for dissemination. Please jump into our survey and give us your thoughts. www.satchel.so. You’ll be automatically added to our list to receive updates on the product that we are developing. And we’d love to hear from you — please comment below.
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