We learned to eliminate the bullets. Perhaps it’s time to eliminate PowerPoint altogether.
For years, we’ve been told that PowerPoint presentations are killing our meetings.
Too many slides. Too much text. Too many bullet points.
Death by PowerPoint.
So we learned to make better presentations. We reduced the number of bullets, introduced visual storytelling, and encouraged presenters to engage their audiences.
But perhaps we’ve been solving the wrong problem.
What if the problem isn’t how we use PowerPoint, but that we’re using PowerPoint in the first place?
The Meeting That Could Have Been a Document
Consider a typical management meeting.
A group of experienced professionals gathers around a table. Someone opens a PowerPoint presentation and starts explaining what everyone needs to know.
For the next 30 minutes, the participants listen. Or at least pretend to.
Some already know the material. Others struggle to follow. A few are checking their emails.
Then, with ten minutes remaining, the presenter reaches the final slide:
Questions?
And that’s when the meeting could finally become interesting.
Unfortunately, we’re almost out of time.
We’ve spent most of our collective time transferring information and left very little for actually doing something with it.
What If We Started by Reading?
Jeff Bezos once described an alternative approach used at Amazon.
Instead of PowerPoint presentations, meeting organizers prepare written narratives, often six pages long.
At the beginning of the meeting, everyone reads the document silently.
Yes, silently. Like in a classroom.
The reason is refreshingly pragmatic: if you send material beforehand, some people will read it and others won’t.
So instead of pretending everyone has prepared, the meeting begins by ensuring that everyone actually has.
Then the discussion starts.
And here’s the important difference:
The meeting isn’t used to present the information. It’s used to think about it.
PowerPoint Makes It Too Easy
There is another problem with PowerPoint.
It makes it remarkably easy to create the appearance of structured thinking.
Put five statements on a slide. Add a heading. Perhaps an arrow or two.
Suddenly, it looks like an argument.
But are the statements actually related? Does one support another? Are there assumptions between them? Is there evidence?
A PowerPoint slide doesn’t necessarily require us to answer those questions.
Writing a coherent narrative does.
You cannot simply place five unrelated statements next to each other and assume that the reader will construct the reasoning for you.
Well, you can. But it becomes much more obvious that something is missing.
PowerPoint helps us organize information. Writing forces us to organize our thinking.
That’s an important distinction.
Stop Fixing the Audience
When people lose attention during presentations, we often blame the audience.
People have short attention spans. They check their phones. They multitask. They don’t prepare.
So we introduce meeting rules.
Close your laptops. Put away your phones. Pay attention.
But what if the audience isn’t the problem?
What if we’ve designed a meeting that requires people to remain passive for 45 minutes, and then complain when they behave like passive participants?
The Amazon approach doesn’t solve this by demanding better behaviour.
It changes the mechanism.
Everyone reads. Everyone starts with the same information. Everyone can participate in the discussion.
Instead of trying to make people pay attention to a poorly designed process, redesign the process to make their attention useful.
Kill the Presentation, Not the Discussion
Of course, there are situations where presentations are valuable.
A visual demonstration. A compelling story. An explanation that genuinely benefits from images, diagrams, or animation.
But how often is that what we’re actually doing?
How often are we simply displaying information on a screen while someone reads or paraphrases it?
And why do we need ten people sitting in a room to watch someone do that?
If the purpose is to distribute information, distribute it.
If the purpose is to make a decision, provide the evidence and create the conditions for discussion.
If the purpose is to solve a problem, bring people together to solve it.
Stop confusing presenting information with working together.
The Death of PowerPoint?
Perhaps PowerPoint doesn’t need to die.
But its position as the default mechanism for meetings probably should.
We’ve spent decades improving our presentations.
Perhaps it’s time to improve what happens instead of presenting.
And that starts with a rather uncomfortable question:
If we removed PowerPoint from tomorrow’s management meeting, what would we actually do with the time?
If the answer is think, discuss, challenge assumptions, and make decisions, perhaps we should have killed it years ago.
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