A lot of presentations have slides. Not many have a point.

Most Presentations Fail Before Slide 01

Have you ever been halfway through a presentation and suddenly realised you have no idea where it’s going? You’re still looking at the slides. You’re still listening. Maybe you’re even taking notes. But somewhere between chart number three and bullet point number twenty-seven, you’re no longer sure what the actual point is.

We’ve all been there. Done that.

When people talk about bad presentations, especially corporate ones, they usually blame the slides themselves. Too much text, too many charts, too many slides. And to be fair, they’re not wrong.

The longer I work with presentations, the more I think we blame the wrong thing. Yes, dense slides make it harder to follow a presentation, cluttered charts create a mess in our heads, and nobody enjoys being trapped in a deck that seems determined to break the world record for the number of bullet points on a single slide.

For me, those are often symptoms, not the actual problem. What people remember is the idea. Or at least they remember whether there was one.

Our brains are really good at finding patterns and making sense of information. It’s one of the reasons we can remember stories we heard years ago but struggle to recall what was on slide 32 of last week’s meeting. What we’re not very good at is processing multiple ideas and directions at the same time. When every chart is important, every insight is critical and every slide introduces a new direction, the audience ends up doing the hardest job in the room: deciding what matters before the presenter tells them. And if the presenter hasn’t figured that out yet, there’s very little chance the audience will.

That’s usually the moment people start losing interest. Not because they’re bored or distracted by their phones, but because they no longer know where their attention should go, and if we’re being honest, guiding attention is one of the main jobs of a presentation.

I see this happen all the time. A team spends weeks collecting research, data and stakeholder feedback. Everyone contributes something valuable. Every department has something worth sharing and every chart feels necessary. So the presentation grows, slide after slide, with the best intentions.

Eventually, it becomes one of those decks where you see “187 slides” in the corner and immediately start calculating how much coffee you’ll need to survive the meeting.

The interesting part, or as we say in Brazil, “o pulo do gato” (the jump of the cat), is that the more information we try to include, the harder it becomes to understand what actually matters. We often think clarity comes from adding more content, another chart, explanation or slide, just in case someone asks. In reality, clarity usually comes from deciding what can stay out. And trust me, that’s often the hardest part.

That’s why I think storytelling is so misunderstood in business presentations. People hear the word and immediately think about emotion, drama, public speaking or someone trying to turn a quarterly report into a Netflix documentary.

Most of the time, it’s much simpler than that. Storytelling is deciding what deserves attention. It’s deciding what the audience should remember once the meeting is over.

Once you’re clear about the idea, everything else becomes easier. You know which chart supports the message and which one is simply interesting. You know which detail belongs in the slide. You know which slide can disappear entirely without anyone missing it.

Good design plays an important role in that process. It helps people navigate information, creates hierarchy and guides attention. But design can’t decide what matters. It can only reinforce a decision that has already been made.

A few days after a presentation, most people won’t remember every chart, every bullet point or every number. They leave with a story, a perspective and an idea.

The question is: Did you give them one?

Maybe that’s the question we should be asking before opening PowerPoint. Not “What do we need to include?” But “What do we want people to leave with?”