Slide decks suck

Seriously.

Everything you think slide decks do, they don’t do.

And yet, decks have somehow become the norm for how information is disseminated within organizations.

Most of us with send-emails-for-a-living jobs have joined a meeting on Zoom or Google Meet for an hour only to see a deck and get talked to. The presenter runs through slides, occasionally stumbling over their speakers notes, while the audience tries to process what’s being said and what’s on the screen. It sucks because decks are a suboptimal way to receive information, make choices, and move projects forward. 

Most of us with send-emails-for-a-living jobs have built decks, too. I know coal miners and deep sea fishermen have it tough, but I’d put deck building up there. All the fiddling with formatting, futzing with this text block and that drop shadow and moving text from the slide to the speaker’s notes back to the slide and on and on we go. It’s terrible because decks are a suboptimal way to share information; we focus on design when we should be focusing on the content. You know, the actual information.

But we don’t have to live this way. Kill the deck. Embrace the written memo. 

Slide decks aren’t short form content

A common reason for using decks is that they’re viewed as “short form” content — the business equivalent of TikTok. And brevity is undeniably important. Most of us have internalized habits from social media networks and digital platforms that optimize for short bits of information, so concision is the default. 

Be short. Be brief. Be punchy. It’s good advice. It’s especially important for my world, working with startups, where founders are moving fast and succinct communication is vital. 

Spoiler alert: Decks aren’t actually short form content. Most slide decks require a voice over in order to fully understand. It’s an old adage by this point: Make slides less text dense and then give a deeper voiceover when presenting the deck. Definitionally, that means a meeting is necessary to fully understand the information being presented. Even if the deck itself is brief, the time required to digest the content is anything but, ultimately defeating the purpose of ostensibly short form content. 

True brevity cannot be captured in a deck. Write a tight memo instead. Make sure it can stand alone, no voiceover required. Mission accomplished.

Slide decks don't facilitate meaningful conversations and decisions

Most of us with send-emails-for-a-living jobs have thought, “this meeting definitely could have been an email.” Many deck-centric meetings leave you with a feeling of stasis because decks inherently do not provide the audience all the information up front. When we’re listening to a speaker and trying to review information on our screens, it isn’t easy to understand, internalize, and think deeply about what we’re hearing and seeing. 

Decks are too hard for the audience, which makes them a poor mechanism for decision-making. 

Jeff Bezos explained why Amazon uses memos (h/t to Joshua Steinman, a man on the internet I do not know, for sharing this clip from Lex Fridman’s pod):

“My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document,” he explains. “I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.”

Bezos continues:

“A typical meeting will start with a six page, narratively structured memo. And we do study hall. For 30 minutes we sit there silently together and read, make notes in the margins. Then we discuss. You could say read these memos in advance, but people don’t have time to do that and they come to the meeting having skimmed the memo or not read it at all . . . Now we’ve all read the memo and have an elevated discussion. This is better than a slide show, where one of the problems, PowerPoint is designed to persuade, it’s a sales tool.”

“Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You are truth seeking.”

Information should be communicated in a manner that’s easy for the audience to understand so the project/initiative/strategy/whatever-you’re-working-on-and-talking-about can be accurately assessed, thoughtfully considered, and moved forward. 

Decks do not do this well. Memos do.

Slide decks give the illusion of momentum

As Eleanor Roosevelt, according to the seminal film Talladega Nights, once said, "America is all about speed, hot nasty bad-ass speed.”

Speed is one of the reasons why I love working with startups. You can just do things. You can try, and fail, and fail more, and learn, and then succeed. Bureaucracy can be such a buzzkill (I know process is important. I’ve implemented many a process in my life. I love many lawyers and compliance folks I’ve worked with. But still). 

Slide deck-centric communications ultimately slow organizations down.

While spinning up a deck may be, on balance, easier or faster for the presenter than writing and editing a crisp, clear memo, deck-centric communications almost always require a shitty meeting. Because deck-centric meetings are hard on the audience and do not afford the opportunity for deep thinking and truth seeking, next steps are opaque at best and non-existent at worst. 

You think you’ve moved quickly — you made a deck! You had a meeting! You did stuff! — but you haven’t moved forward. You have the illusion of momentum, when really, you’re all but standing still. 

The Navy Seals have a saying: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The emperor Augustus (how often do you think about the Roman Empire?) made a similar phrase popular: Festina lente. It translates to, roughly, “make haste slowly.” 

Both address the same concept: When doing something, if you take your time and do it deliberately and right the first time, you’ll reach your destination or achieve your goal more quickly than if you just go without intention, making little or no progress forward.

So while a written memo might require more up-front investment than a deck, you’ll be faster on the aggregate. Memos afford opportunity for a valuable discussion. New questions are asked and answered. Input is received. Direction is clear. Next steps are actionable. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. 

Kill the deck. Long live the written word.