When NOT to Finish

Perfectly Imperfect: When Not to Professionalize your Presentation - and When You Should

By now, you’ve likely seen your share of thousands of presentations—from the hastily assembled and rough-around-the-edges hack job to the meticulously polished and rigorously on-brand corporate art shows. A recent TED Talk prompted me to reconsider this spectrum. It highlighted a concept that may initially feel counterintuitive: an unfinished, sketched look can actually drive greater collaboration. A sketch or whiteboard scribble (my speciality) invites conversation, new ideas, and joint problem-solving. The flip side is that a polished, fully realized look instills confidence, signifying that a concept is well-formed and ready for buy-in.

Sketching invites people into the conversation, perfection drives belief.

This tension—between leaving some edges rough to foster engagement and refining other edges to gain trust—isn’t just aesthetic nitpicking. It’s strategic communication. By understanding when to leave something intentionally “in progress” and when to present it as finely tuned, leaders can shape not only how their ideas are received, but also how their audiences emotionally invest.

The Collaborative Power of the Unfinished

Think of an unfinished sketch or a quick, scrappy prototype. These forms don’t shout “Done and dusted!” Instead, they whisper, “Care to weigh in?” For emerging concepts, especially those in fast-moving fields like AI, inviting others to co-create can be invaluable. When I speak about AI - an area evolving in real time and genuinely requiring me changing my slides every day - I often use slides that signal flexibility and adaptiveness by throwing them together. This approach says to the audience: “Your feedback matters, and this is urgent and changing, because the story is still being written.” In effect, you’re turning onlookers into collaborators, encouraging them to roll up their sleeves and shape the direction forward. They'll jump in and ask questions.

Presenting with a sketch or with a clipboard pulls people into the collaboration, making them feel part of the process. Like it's a new, fascinating idea that no one has seen before. If you present a perfectly polished presentation to a group of startups wanting to talk about growth, you'll only make them fall asleep.

Instilling Confidence Through Polish

Yet not every idea benefits from this “work-in-progress” veneer. Some messages need to resonate with certainty. Culture shifts, strategic initiatives, sales pitches - these require trust and credibility. A polished, branded, and thoroughly vetted presentation doesn’t beg for input; it declares, “We’ve done our homework, these are established facts.” When you showcase a refined approach, complete with consistent branding and cohesive visual elements, the unspoken message is that this idea is tested and ready to stand on its own. It stands on its own merits. Your audience can focus less on how they might fix it and more on how to implement it.

For example - if you are pitching a client, and your presentation is haphazardly thrown together - it feels like a poorly formed draft of an idea, no matter how much work goes into the process. If you were to hire a designer to clean up your sales presentation, you'll be much more likely to get the deal. (Full disclosure: my company, Treefrog, does this for clients, so if you read this far I may have just tried to sell you something).

Similarly, if you are presenting a key strategic idea on how someone should execute a project, and you present it on a napkin - you aren't gonna get the job.

You get the idea.

But More Importantly, The Brand

It's not just about polish, however. It's also about the emotional connection that you build on with people through your presentations. If your presentation is a solo act that you put together yourself with a PowerPoint template, and it doesn't fit into the rest of your company's aesthetic, you don't look like you have the whole team behind you. You look like you're standing your own in your own field, exclusively representing your own ideas.

But if your presentation is aesthetically consistent with everything else from your company - it adds to the overall experience any person who has seen your brand puts away in their emotional bank account. Then every single time someone sees something else from your company, it adds more to the emotional bank account. And your brand value grows.

Even further, your brand as a whole—website, marketing collateral, customer touchpoints—starts to grow when you know when to appear unfinished and when to be polished. Want to foster internal innovation or workshop new product features? Show sketches, invite participation. Need to reassure a major client or announce a pivotal initiative? Present a well-crafted narrative, complete with visuals that say, “We’re here to stay.”

For smaller organizations, this strategy can help build credibility and close the perceived gap between you and your larger competitors. When it’s time to impress, ensure that brand consistency, color palettes, and design standards are impeccable. You’ll signal maturity, stability, and preparedness—qualities that help secure trust in uncertain times. If you want to go from 1M in revenue to 100M, you have to get serious about this emotional connection you create through brand. If you are smaller then this - start now (just don't overdo it, you'll change it five times before you figure it out). You'll thank me later.

Striking the Right Balance

As leaders, our goal is not simply to make pretty slides—it’s to influence outcomes. Presentations that appear unfinished can cultivate a sense of partnership and joint ownership, urging stakeholders to lean in and give you input. Meticulously refined presentations, on the other hand, convey the gravitas of a concept that’s ready for prime time, ready to be signed.

By thoughtfully choosing which approach fits the occasion, you’re controlling more than the look and feel of your communications. You’re guiding how your audience feels: more open and engaged in one scenario, more reassured and confident in another. And in a business environment where emotions drive decisions just as much as data, mastering that subtle psychological interplay is what separates effective communicators from the merely good.

In a world where attention is a scarce commodity, knowing when to let the rough edges show—and when to polish them away—can be a strategic differentiator. The ultimate takeaway: treat “unfinished” and “finished” not as states of readiness, but as intentional strategic choices that shape the future you’re working to create.