Slide decks are TikTok for business
Slide decks are just TikTok for businesses, and they suck.
TikTok, for those who don’t know (though it has 140+ million users in the U.S. alone, a problem to discuss for another day, so I’d be shocked if you didn’t know what it was) is a short-form video platform.
Attention spans are shrinking. There is much ado on the internet about this re: Gen Z (the kids are always the punching bag!).
A 2015 study by “Microsoft found that the average human attention span had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just eight seconds in 2013 – less than that of a goldfish. This is directly related to how we consume information — social media networks and digital platforms optimize for short, short, short bits of information.”
To wit, on TikTok, “viewers engage significantly with videos between 21 and 34 seconds” long.
Notably, that’s longer than 8 seconds from the decade-old Microsoft study, but it’s not exactly a long time.
C-suite executives’ consumption of information is following the same trend — slide decks are the method through which staff relay materially strategic information to leadership for decision-making.
Slide decks are the business equivalent of “short form” content. Attention spans are shrinking for everyone, including CEOs — not just Gen Z.
That is bad.
The solution is long form writing.
Jeff Bezos (I know you know him) presents an alternate view to slide deck culture (h/t to Joshua Steinman, a man on the internet I do not know, for sharing this clip from Lex Fridman’s pod):
“My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document,” he explains. “I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. The meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution . . . you get real breakthroughs.”
Bezos goes on to describe the process of meetings at Amazon and the philosophy and process behind the memos:
“A typical meeting will start with a six page, narratively structured memo. And we do study hall. For 30 minutes we sit there silently together and read, make notes in the margins. Then we discuss. You could say read these memos in advance, but people don’t have time to do that and they come to the meeting having skimmed the memo or not read it at all . . . Now we’ve all read the memo and have an elevated discussion. This is better than a slide show, where one of the problems, PowerPoint is designed to persuade, it’s a sales tool. Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You are truth seeking. The other problem is that it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience.”
You can watch the whole clip here, but the last sentence is, in my mind, the most important.
As a comms flack, I cannot tell you how many slideshows I’ve built, meticulously planning my speaker’s notes to explain a strategy, only for the conversation to veer off course. I am a confident presenter and speaker; I am inclined to buy into the idea that decks sabotage good presentations.
Decks inherently do not provide the audience all the information up front. Decks do not enable deep thinking about the subject at hand. Decks do not afford the opportunity for a truly elevated conversation.
Why? In a slide deck, it’s a common best practice to make slides less text dense and then give a deeper voice over when presenting.
But what if the speaker's notes were also written down, along with the text on the slide? What if, instead of saying them out loud, goals, strategies, and tactics were written, and edited, and edited, and edited, and edited, and polished, and refined, and edited some more, over the course of weeks?
Why wouldn’t we want to choose the form of communication that most saliently articulates the strategy or decision matrices required — if it’s something important?
Beats me. I’m pro memo. I dig long form writing. Inject a well written profile piece right into my veins (I love this profile of Mitt Romney, this piece on acclaimed director Michael Mann, and this piece on acclaimed ex-Patriots coach, Bill Belichick).
Keep the important thing the important thing
Lots of people say “Keep the main thing the main thing.” It’s also true of the important things. When a task, strategy, conversation, or decision is earnestly important, it is worth spending time on. It’s easy to get caught up in urgent tasks, putting out fires — especially in a startup environment, where moving quickly is both the nature of the beast and a competitive advantage relative to bureaucratic industry giants.
The Navy Seals have a saying: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The emperor Augustus (how often do you think about the Roman Empire?) made a similar phrase popular: Festina lente. It translates to, roughly, “make haste slowly.”
Both address the same concept: When doing something, if you take your time and do it deliberately and right the first time, you’ll reach your destination or achieve your goal more quickly than if you just go fast without intention, making little or no progress forward or even worse, retreading ground because you went too fast in the other direction.
Now, back to long form memos and slide decks, with Navy Seals and our favorite emperor in mind.
I’m sure many people have thought, “this meeting could have been an email.” Meetings centered around slide decks, because they are so hard for the audience, often veer away from their intended purpose. We waste the time of attendees, we leave the meeting with unclear next steps or no next steps at all. We are moving quickly, but we aren’t moving forward.
A well-written, long form, intentional document solves those problems. Bezos’ model of allowing attendees to spend time reading the memo allows everyone consumes the content exactly as the author intended. It requires the author to spend time on a crisp, salient memo — ensuring they are not wasting their audience’s time.
The resultant discussion is one that is valuable. New questions are asked and answered. Input is received. Direction is clear. Next steps are actionable. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
You are glad this meeting was a meeting because you are moving forward.
Important things are worth spending time on to get right.
Long live the long form memo.
Festina lente.