There is a particular kind of meeting that almost everyone has sat through, and that nobody quite enjoys. Someone has built a deck. The deck is dense. The presenter walks through it, reading most of the slides aloud, while the audience reads the same slides faster than the presenter can speak. Forty minutes later, the meeting ends. Nobody is sure what was decided. The deck gets emailed around afterwards, where it sits in inboxes, unopened.
This is the failure mode of presentations that should not have existed in the first place. The presenter wanted to communicate information. They reached for a deck because a deck is the default format. The content did not belong in a deck. It belonged in a document. Both parties would have been better served if the deck had never been built, and a written brief had circulated in its place.
Recognising when this is the case — and being willing to say so — is one of the more useful disciplines in professional communication. It is also one of the rarer ones, because the deck is so deeply embedded in business culture that not making one feels almost transgressive.
The honest question
Before a deck is built for any purpose, there is a question worth asking. Will this content be more effective communicated in real time, with a presenter standing in front of an audience, or read at the reader’s own pace, alone, on a screen?
If the answer is the first — real-time, with a presenter — a deck may genuinely be the right format. The slides support the speaker. The audience listens, watches, asks questions. The presenter’s voice is doing most of the communicative work, and the slides are there to anchor the eye and reinforce key points.
If the answer is the second — read at the reader’s own pace, alone — a deck is almost certainly the wrong format. The reader cannot ask questions. They cannot hear the presenter’s emphasis. They are reading dense slides in a layout designed to be projected, not read. The deck has to carry the entire message on its own, in a form designed to support a speaker who is not there.
Most business decks fall somewhere in the middle. They are presented to a small audience in a meeting, and then circulated afterwards to a larger one. The presenter is there for the first audience and absent for the second. The deck is asked to do both jobs, and tends to do neither well — too dense for the live audience, too thin for the read-alone one.
The signs that the deck is the wrong format
Several signs suggest that what is being built is really a document in slide format.
The deck is being created without a planned meeting. There is no audience that will watch it presented. It is being made to be sent around, on the unspoken assumption that decks are more professional than memos. The deck does not need to be a deck. It could be a two-page brief, faster to read and easier to understand.
The slides are full of text. Sentences run to four or five lines. Bullet points have sub-bullets. Every slide has more content than the audience could absorb in the time the presenter would dwell on it. This is a sign that the writer has been forced to fit a document’s worth of content into a presentation’s container.
The deck includes detailed tables, charts with multiple variables, or technical appendices. These are reference material. They belong in a document, where the reader can sit with them. In a presentation, they appear, get glanced at, and disappear before anyone has understood them.
The deck has more than thirty or forty slides for what should be a thirty-minute meeting. The reality is that nobody is going to walk through forty slides at speaking pace. The presenter will rush, or skip, or apologise. The deck has the size of a document and is being asked to behave like a presentation.
The deck has been requested by someone senior who said “send me a deck on this,” but the content the person actually needs is briefer. They are asking for a deck because that is the format they are used to receiving, not because that is the format that will best serve their decision. A one-page summary, sent as an email or a memo, may serve them better.
What to make instead
Once you have recognised that the deck is the wrong format, the question becomes what to make in its place. Several options exist, each suited to different situations.
A one-page brief. For most internal communications that are currently being built as decks, a one-page written brief is faster to produce, faster to read, and clearer in its conclusions. The format forces the writer to lead with what matters. The reader, faced with one page rather than forty slides, actually reads it.
A memo. For more substantive matters, a two-to-six-page memo is the right shape. Some of the most effective organisations have made the memo their default internal format. The memo can carry nuance, evidence, and argument in ways that bullet points cannot.
A summary email. For very short matters, the right format is sometimes no document at all. A clear email, with the recommendation at the top and the supporting points below, communicates the same content more efficiently than any deck would.
A short report. For findings, analyses, and recommendations of substance, a written report with proper sections and a real executive summary serves the reader better than a deck pretending to be a report.
None of these are exotic formats. All of them existed before PowerPoint. They have fallen out of use partly because slide tools have become the default, and partly because making slides feels like work in a way that writing prose does not. The deck looks like effort. A clear one-page brief, despite often taking more effort to produce well, can look slighter.
The case for keeping the deck (sometimes)
There are situations where the deck is the right format. Decks earn their place when they are supporting a speaker in front of a live audience, when they are using visual elements that genuinely benefit from the slide form — diagrams, photographs, before-and-after comparisons, complex visual data — and when the audience is going to experience the content in the moment rather than reading it later.
A sales pitch in front of a client. A conference talk. A team kick-off where the energy in the room is part of the point. A pitch to investors who will be asking questions throughout. These are situations where the deck does work that no document could do.
The mistake is using decks for the situations where documents would work better, on the grounds that decks are the default. The deck is a tool. It is the right tool for some jobs and the wrong tool for others.
The harder conversation
Saying “this should not be a deck” is uncomfortable. It can feel like pushing back against a request, second-guessing a colleague, or refusing to do work that has been asked for. In practice, it is usually appreciated when handled well.
The phrasing matters. “I think a one-page brief will land better here, and I can have it to you by tomorrow” is constructive. “I refuse to make a deck” is not. The honest reframe is offered as a service to the requester, with confidence that the alternative will actually be better.
The people who accept this reframe most readily are the ones who are tired of decks themselves. The senior leader who has been receiving overlong slide decks for years often welcomes the chance to receive a memo instead. The colleague who has been struggling to fit their content into a presentation format may be relieved to be told that the format itself was the problem.
Not everyone will accept the reframe. Some requesters genuinely want a deck and are unwilling to consider alternatives. That is fine. The deck gets made. The point is not to refuse decks entirely. It is to make them when they are the right format, and to offer something better when they are not.
The short version
Sometimes the honest answer is that the deck should not exist. The content belongs in a document — a brief, a memo, a report, an email — and the choice of slide format is itself the source of the communication problem. Recognising when this is the case, and being willing to say so constructively, is one of the underrated disciplines in professional work. The deck is not the universal answer. It is a tool with a specific job: supporting a live presenter in front of an audience. For everything else, there is usually a better format available, if you are willing to step outside the default.
