Stop using Slides!

Well, not generally. It's perfectly fine to use them for presentations -- remember, a presentation is when somebody tells other people something, and uses slides to emphasise or illustrate their words. However, in many businesses, presentations are used as a means of capturing things, they are essentially documents. They are sent to other people for them to read on their own. They are not an enhancement of what someone says, they are "the thing". People have to understand what you intend to communicate just from the slides.

The main problem with slides is that they entice the author into using single words, noun-phrases and buzzwords instead of writing full sentences. I have observed the the following situation lots of times:

• A group of two or three people has an idea what they want to communicate.
• Because they are working on slides, they try to make express things as concisely as possible, often by using some noun phrase they just made up or read elsewhere.
• The originally relatively clear intent is shoehorned into a bunch of buzzwords, losing 50% of its meaning.
• Later, the reader reads this slide deck, and (mis)understands something slightly different from these buzzwordy nouns.

Overall, there is very little actual communication going on. It's just shallow buzzword bingo. You can easily verify this lack of communication by asking readers of these slides what these noun phrases mean in their own words. Very often they don't know, or can only answer in generalities.

It gets worse though. As the slides move through the org, people modify the noun phrases. It this modified phrase supposed to mean something different? Add some kind of emphasis? Or was this a cosmetic/stylistic change? Who knows. The range of (mis)understandings grows.

So what should you do instead of using slides? Well, quite obviously, create documents (Word, Wiki, Markdown, whatever). Write complete sentences. Say what you actually mean. Ideally, also say explicitly what you don't mean. The result is much better communication.

There's a related issue. The typical Powerpoint bullet-point style also entices authors to state facts. Each bullet point a fact. However, in many cases, the interesting part of the overall story is "between" the bullet points. How do they connect? How does one lead to the next? What are the rationales? Again, when you write an few paragraphs, the between-the-point-stuff is much easier to express.

Slides also tend to make people use diagrams. Diagrams are great to illustrate things, and they are wonderful for actual presentations. But diagrams also have lots of disadvantages:

• They are a lot of work to create (often more than just writing words); they tend to get outdated even faster than words.
• They can get messy (remember the 7 box/line rule?)
• It's easy to gloss over what exactly the various shapes, boxes, colors and arrow styles mean, leaving it open for interpretation by the readers.
• And diagrams usually don't make a point. They don't state what is important, what the author wants the reader to take away. They don't justify, the don't contain rationales.

The last point is really important. It is so easy to stare at a diagram, thinking you kinda get what it expresses, but yet miss the point completely. At the very least, every diagram be accompanied by a paragraph that summarizes the point the diagram is supposed to illustrate. But then, maybe it's better to just write text in the first place.

Note that I am not at all arguing against using diagrams to illustrate a point you're trying to make. I argue against using them standalone.

Similarly, I am not technically arguing against slides. You should use them for actual presentations. But to create standalone reading material, you should write actual prose -- and then there's no point in putting it into a Powerpoint.

There's a final, more technical issue. If your organisation -- from a certain level upwards -- lives in Powerpoint, then it's very likely that people send these presentations around via Email. Other people create derived versions with their own perspective and then send these around as well. In no time you have 10 different versions traveling through your organisation, and nobody knows which is current and/or agreed on (the lack of capturing and then acting on decisions is a whole 'nother topic.). Sure, these days you can use Powerpoint online and edit/evolve jointly, but it's still much too easy to create a copy and the chaos that comes with it. Really, it is soooo much better to write actual documents in a shared place, a Wiki, or a bunch of Markdown in git.

So, to summarize. Write prose. Explain the reasoning. Add rationales. Say what you mean, don't hide it behind fancy sounding nouns. Take the reader on a journey. Tell stories. Don't just drop a bunch of buzzwords, meaningless noun-phrases or bullet points.

If you want a few more tips on how to write good technical texts, you can check out the respective section in new book, How to Understand Almost Anything.