Using presentations as a source of truth is a business risk to be identified and dealt with. People get creative with the narrative and leave essential facts out. It is just too tempting for some.
The goal of a presenter is typically to glow and be brief in front of a decision maker to, hopefully please them, not antagonize them, and influence some action.
Some leaders speak of: Be Brief, Be Bright, Be Gone, as their motto to deal with presenters on their daily parade of meetings with PowerPoint slides. Be Brief, Be Bright, Be Gone happens to be the title of a sales book for pharmaceuticals. We think it reinforces the idea that presentation slides are great for sales, not great for business decision makers!
PowerPoint decks take way too long to develop, and they are used for only a few minutes, if they are not creating sales, why transfer information from its source to a presentation slide? Transferring information without doing anything to it is transportation waste. Overprocessing if it can be directly consumed at the source, and for the information consumer waiting while the slides are developed.
Slides provide incomplete and inaccurate information, not to mention late, confounding the issues. Having wrong input is an example of a systemic issue. In other words: Trash in = Trash out.
What would happen if we collectively invested the time on working on problems instead of crafting a presentation narrative around them?
