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Do you overprepare the wrong thing?

Most people spend 90% of their time designing slides and only 10% figuring out what they’re actually saying.

Flip that, and your talks will never be the same.

If I had a month to prepare a talk, I’d spend three weeks getting to the point – and only the last few days on slides, if at all.

Because once you know where it all leads to, the rest tends to take care of itself. After all, you know your stuff. The challenge isn’t to make it elaborate. The challenge is to make it clear.

Here’s another way to think about it:
If you had the choice between a talk with elaborate slides but a somewhat confusing message and another talk with a crystal clear message but no slides, which one would you rather listen to?

Me too.

When the message is clear, the rest isn’t hard. And that’s something you can control.

Here’s how I allocate my time (roughly):

70% – What’s the point?

  • What’s the shift? → How do they see the world before your talk? How will they see it after?
  • Why does it matter? → Why should they care right now? What’s at stake if they don’t?
  • How do you say it simply? → If I had only one sentence, what would it be? What do I want them to pass along?

20% – How do I make it stick?

  • Make it visual → Can they see what I’m saying? Can I find a story, contrast, or example that paints the picture?
  • Make it personal → Can they find themselves in what I’m saying? Do I speak to their struggles, fears, or ambitions?
  • Use rhythm and pause → Where do I slow down to let them embrace the idea? What words need space so they can connect the dots?

10% – How do I support it?

  • Do I even need slides? Or is a different prop better?
  • If yes, how can they reinforce the message rather than distract from my words?
  • Can I delegate the creation?

Most people present slides. The best speakers deliver a message.

Try this breakdown the next time you prepare a talk, and see how much more confidence you’ll have in your delivery.

Keep lighting the path!

Connection failed

Why do most presentations fail to connect with the audience?

Because presentation = slides.
People mistake slides for the presentation.

But connection is between humans.

Slides don’t connect.
→ You do.

Keep lighting the path!

Do slides waste your time?

Think of the great presentations you’ve seen?
How many of them were great because of the slides?
And how many were great because of the story (and how the speaker told it)?

Personally, I don’t recall a single great talk that resonated thanks to the slides.

To be fair, great slides can amplify a great story.
But I’ve never seen them save a bad one.
In fact, beautiful slides have often sent me to sleep when the story was boring.

Compare this to the opposite:
A great story will survive bad slides.
A captivating speaker makes me forget the awful slides.

→ The crucial work is on the story.
If you find words that strongly resonate, that’s what sticks.
Slides are best thought of as an amplifier – not the presentation’s core.

What’s your experience with slides vs. story? (Hit reply, I would love to hear your anecdotes.)

Keep lighting the path!

PS: Plus, once you’ve nailed the story, it’s so much easier to create great slides that amplify the story (or have someone create them for you).

The PowerPoint fail

A simple reason why 90+ percent of all PowerPoint presentations are crap: The presenter thinks that PowerPoint exists to make the presenter’s life easier.

It doesn’t. It exists to make your audience’s life easier.

For example …

  • To make a point that’s quicker to see than to hear.
  • To make concrete what would remain abstract using words only.
  • To give depth to an argument that would be hard to follow using words only.
  • To illustrate subtleties that would be hard to spot using words only.
  • To visualize complexities that would be hard – sometimes even impossible – to visualize in our minds.

Or, in short: to make life easier for your audience.

There’s not much more to know about PowerPoint. It’s a tool to serve your audience. Everything else follows from here.

An excellent tool

PowerPoint is an excellent tool to turn great ideas into confusing presentations.

Sure, it can be used to turn a great story into a great presentation. But mostly it does the opposite.

We’ve all seen it happen a little too often.

In PowerPoint, it’s easy to prioritize fluff over substance,
and cram slides with detail just because the space is there.

It’s easy to focus on aesthetics – fonts, colors, images, animations – while neglecting the foundational work of crafting a compelling, relevant story.

PowerPoint as a tool doesn’t particularly care for clarity or relevance, nor does it encourage that.

Essentially, PowerPoint is about filling slides, not telling stories.

It helps to keep that in mind when using the tool. The more we allow it to pull our attention away from the story we want to tell and direct it to filling slides, the more we risk wasting time on creating flashy but empty presentations.

Audiences don’t care nearly as much about fancy slides as you might think; they crave clear and engaging stories. If that’s with a beautifully designed slide … great, we’ll take it.

But if it’s fancy slides with a lame story, we’ll pass.
(Let alone ugly slides!)

Don’t let PowerPoint lead your process. Start with clarity, understand your audience, and build your story first. Then, use PowerPoint to amplify your message in ways that words alone can’t.

That’s how you transform a well-thought-out narrative into a powerful presentation.

Resist the urge to start with slides.

Start with the story.

Bad presentation jokes

It’s a beloved coffee break activity at conferences and in between meetings: Making fun of bad presentations.

The funniest aspect of this, though, is that the people who love to make those jokes are usually the same people who are guilty of the exact same things they are joking about.

What’s your favorite joke?

Everybody is interesting

“We believe that everybody has a story and is creative in their own way.” – Astrid Klein

Long-time reader Thomas Maile nominated Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein as leaders who light the path.

The two founders of the PechaKucha movement have changed the rules for presenting forever. In a world that was used to death by PowerPoint with presentations that seemed to run forever while leading nowhere, they established a format that has made quite an impact.

PechaKucha Nights are held everywhere across the globe giving everyone a stage and the chance to tell their story and let us in into their world.

Thomas made his nomination with these words:

“German news magazine DER SPIEGEL once called PechaKucha speakers ‘pop stars of PowerPoint’. While that’s a cute description it’s also one that doesn’t quite do justice to what PechaKucha is really about.

First (and obviously), PechaKucha is a strict presentation format: exactly 20 slides each advancing automatically to the next after exactly 20 seconds, adding to a total of 400 seconds, i.e. 6 minutes and 40 minutes. Every presentation is the same length and has the same format.

But underneath, PechaKucha is way more. By spreading across 1200 cities around the world, PechaKucha gives a stage to the unheard voices. It allows people like you and me to talk about what matters to them. That to me is the power of “EVERYBODY HAS A STORY”. PechaKucha gives the opportunity to tell it. It’s also why the Spiegel headline is not quite true. It’s not for pop stars. It’s for everyone.

Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham have done an amazing job of fostering that movement. To me, they serve as a role model for leaders who light the path.”

I couldn’t agree more to Thomas’ words. Recently, I’ve had the pleasure to chat with Astrid and Mark and they deserve every word that Thomas has said about them.

What struck me most was their deep belief that everybody is equal. In their own words: “PechaKucha is about democratizing the stage”.

It gives everyone an opportunity to speak up. It surfaces those voices that don’t consider themselves pop stars but have stories to share that are just as interesting – often even more so – than the ones that the pop stars, influencers, and gurus share.

On their freshly remade website there are a lot of gems to discover. Head over to discover some.

And then, when you come back, read the “Leaders Light the Path” manifesto and nominate someone yourself. It’s really easy.

Thoughts on outlines

In the corporate world, outlines are still pretty much mandatory at the start of a presentation. Also, they are pretty much wasted time.

Outlines have a very simple purpose: to provide peace of mind. That’s what any audience is looking for at the start of a presentation. They want to be sure that it’s safe to follow you on your journey. Or at least that it’s worthwhile. That their time is invested well listening to you.

“What is it exactly that she is going to tell us?”, i.e. an outline, is one way of providing that peace of mind. But not the only one. Another way would be to have a strong opening that makes it totally obvious: “Where is she going with this?”.

But there are others.

What’s actually more important than how you provide that peace of mind is to make sure that i) your audience trusts you that you know where you’re going with this and ii) you’ve made it obvious to them that it’s ok to trust you, i.e. that you’re leading them to some place they actually want to arrive at.

Whether that actual place is obvious from the start is secondary. Whether you mark it using an outline or other means is secondary.

What’s primary is that you need the trust that it’s worthwhile to follow you there.

Do I need slides?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: If it helps to make a stronger case than without slides, then go ahead, make slides. If not, don’t. Make it specific and repeat this question for every single slide you think about creating. Is your story stronger with that slide, then make it. If not, don’t.

What’s the ideal number of slides for a presentation?

Martin Luther King didn’t need a slide at all. Dick Hardt used 50 slides – per minute! Both used the ideal number of slides – for the story they wanted to tell on that day to that audience.

Rather than with a number of slides it’s much more useful to start with a story and then add slides as we need them. A slide is needed when it allows us to communicate something better with that slide than without it. Sometimes, we need a lot of slides, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes a slide needs a lot of time to explain, sometimes it doesn’t.

In essence, the simple (though, admittedly, not necessarily easy) answer to the question about the ideal number of slides is this: You need as many slides as you need.

Spread the Word

Picture of Dr. Michael Gerharz

Dr. Michael Gerharz