Any meeting or conference these days is pretty much the same.

“Hold on, let me get my deck of slides up, I only have 25 or so, and we can go through them”. If the technology works, off they go.

And then if mercifully someone is thoughtful and capable, you are treated to an image-laden and thought-provoking presentation that in many cases doesn’t even reference directly the slides one is seeing.

Indeed, I have seen some powerful presentations over the years.

However, more likely, we are sitting there looking at a template on a white (or black, shudder) background, in 16-point (titles) and 12-point (text), with 200 – 400 words per slide that the speaker thinks we cannot read so they do so for us. And there are 50 or 75 of them. Interspersed with charts and graphs that leave 80% of the audience scanning their emails within 10 minutes.

It is both a complete crutch, and soul-destroying, especially when at a conference when you have 7 or 10 of these sessions a day.

I was once in a meeting that (due to a recent death in my family and the lack of progress on the project I was working on), for my small task group, I chose instead to put up my project notes, observations, and benchmarks, and go through them, simply hoping to foster discussion. Nothing (in terms of content, or the decisions and actions we were trying to get sign-on to) were different.

The fact they were not on PP slides caused a couple of attendees to lose their minds, as if they couldn’t process information without a consistent title block, bullets, and colouful backgrounds.

Frankly, it is absurd. It really appears that a segment of the managerial class cannot communicate anymore without the aid of a screen and a slide deck.

My philosophy has always been less text, more, bigger, images, simply speak to the slides, don’t read them. Tell a story about what your audience is seeing. Elaborate on the slide content. Assume your audience can read. People can see and hear at the same time.

Less is more. Always.