Is PowerPoint really the panacea for all your communication ills? Follow my checklist to discover the medium that’s right for your message

By Kim Arnold

 

There’s a worrying addiction I see across organisations of all sizes: an obsession with slide decks.

‘Is there a deck for that?’ is heard on repeat in management meetings around the world, as if slides are the solution for everything from the common coldsore to climate change. As long as we have a deck,
it seems, we are winning.

But we’re worshipping false idols. PowerPoint is not a panacea for all our communication troubles. In fact, it’s often merely a pretty disguise for fuzzy thinking: lipstick on a pig.

After all, it’s easy to make a big idea sound good with swooping graphics and vague, inspirational bullet points. But much harder to bottom it out in words so it gets done.

Amazon famously made this realisation and ditched its PowerPoints for six-page memos with a narrative structure, read in silence in the first 30 minutes of each meeting. Jeff Bezos prefers memos, he says, because they have “verbs and sentences and topic sentences and complete paragraphs.” There are fewer places to hide with a memo.

Bezos understands the key point that brevity is not the same as clarity. Sometimes a document with 500 words can be clearer and more compelling than a slide deck with 50.

Now I do acknowledge slides can be a great visual aid for presentations (which is what they were designed to do), but in most organisations they’ve been turned into Frankenstein’s monster.

PowerPoint has become the default for any instance where written information needs to be shared. And it’s not always the right choice.

Hilariously, a contact at one global financial institution told me they tried to fix their slide epidemic by limiting decks to five slides only. The result? People reduced the font size of their text so they could cram more onto each slide. Readers had to use the zoom function on their phone cameras to read them.

So how do we stem the PowerPoint compulsion? Well, the most important thing is to find the right medium for each communication challenge – whether that’s an email, phone call, Slack message, speech, slide deck or carrier pigeon.

 

Try asking these questions to help you decide which medium is right for you:

  1. What function does it need to perform? Can it deliver a lot of technical information as simply as possible; grab attention of senior stakeholders; get buy-in from multiple people?
  2. Does it need to make sense independently or will it always accompany a person talking? For example, is it just a visual aid during a presentation or also a leave behind for your audience to digest afterwards?
  3. Does your reader/audience/recipient have a preference for format? (Yes, you can ask them that!)
  4. What’s the one thing you want the reader to do next? Absorb the information and act on it? Share it with their manager? Give you the green light on a project?
  5. How can you make it easy for them to do that? (Not what’s the easiest medium for you to produce)

 

So, the next time you go on autopilot and crank open another slide deck, hit pause and wonder if there might just be a better way. Your colleagues and clients will thank you.

 

  • Kim Arnold helps individuals and companies stand out, connect with their audience and make their messages stick. She works with coaches, entrepreneurs and scale ups, as well as global organisations including Accenture, UBS Asset Management and JP Morgan. She is author of a new book, Email Attraction – Get What You Want Every Time You Hit Send (2021).