As we gathered around the horseshoe-shaped conference room table, I took a seat near the commanding general. Only a few weeks removed from a deployment, I still felt like a stranger in a strange land. But I needed to be present for this briefing, since I would be taking the reins soon as the G-3 and one of my future division chiefs was presenting.
I don’t even remember the subject matter, just the presentation. It was awful. The slides were all over map, the information seemed pointless, and the briefer filled every pause with the phrase, “and everything.” After concluding his briefing, he answered a few perfunctory questions before leaving the conference room.
“What was that?” Asked the chief of staff. It was a rhetorical question. “I don’t ever want to hear him brief again,” he told the current G-3. “That was terrible. This is why I hate PowerPoint.”
Death By PowerPoint
To be fair, PowerPoint didn’t ruin the briefing. The tool took the hit, but the tool, after all, is just a tool. It was the tool behind the tool — the one who crammed a large data table onto a single slide, spent fifteen minutes walking a room full of busy people through an obscure history lesson, and babbled “and everything” whenever he lost his train of thought — who turned a perfectly useful technology into a recurring nightmare. The problem was never the software. The problem was the story. Or, more precisely, the absence of one.
Every bad presentation falls flat for the same reason a bad story does: it has no point. No “so what.” No “wow” moment.
Just about anybody can produce a deck of briefing slides, but filling the white space on a PowerPoint slide and telling a compelling story are two entirely different things. The briefer who can’t answer “what problem are you trying to solve?” is the writer who can’t answer “what is this about?” They’re both lost in the same woods.
Good presentations, like good stories, are built around a central idea — one clear, defensible thesis that everything else orbits. They offer the audience a return on their investment of time and attention. They have appeal: a hook, a human element, a reason to actually care.
And they are ruthlessly edited. The briefer who respects the room understands the 3Bs — be brief, be brilliant, be gone — because they know that every extra slide represents a sentence that should have been cut. Attention to detail isn’t the icing on the cake; it’s the one thing that tells your audience that you took them seriously enough to prepare. Bad presentations don’t fail because of PowerPoint. They fail because somebody couldn’t tell a story.
Crafting a Good Story
I learned storytelling from my father, who along with his brothers were some of the most gifted storytellers I ever encountered. They took great pleasure in weaving fascinating – mostly fabricated – stories that could grab your attention and hold it. They took even greater pleasure from convincing others that their stories were true, then ridiculing them after the fact for being suckers.
But real storytelling is a skill, not a gift. You don’t have to have been born to it. You do have to put in the reps, the hard work. Neil Gaiman’s advice — simple, direct, and almost stubbornly practical — starts at the beginning: write. Put one word after another. Find the right word and put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Most people who complain that they can’t tell a story have never actually committed to finishing one. That’s not a talent problem; that’s a discipline problem.
Kurt Vonnegut had the same instinct but took it further. His fundamentals had less to do with the process of storytelling than they did about the storyteller’s obligations. Use the audience’s time as if it matters. Give them something to root for. Make sure every sentence either reveals character or advances the action. Start as close to the end as possible. Those rules were written for fiction, but they apply universally to storytelling.
Mark Twain had the purest version of this: “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.” Show; don’t summarize. Give the story life. Let the people in the story — even when they’re your data, stakeholders, or problem set — speak for themselves. And stick a fork in your adjectives. Modifiers like “very” and “significant” and “robust” translate to the slide equivalent of a weak verb: it signals to your audience that you really haven’t thought through your underlying idea. The fundamentals of good storytelling are neither myth nor mystery of science; they’re just a little harder to apply than most people realize.
Pitching The Story
Writing a good story and telling one are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is exactly where most presentations fall apart. You can have a clean central idea, a well-structured narrative, and a slide deck that would make a design school graduate weep tears of joy and still manage to lose the room in the first two minutes. Delivery is the last tactical mile of storytelling, and it’s the one most people cut short.
Charles “Skip” Stratton – my undergraduate technical writing professor – made a lasting impression on my when he scribbled Twain’s rules across a blackboard in our classroom. He was a demanding English professor, but an absolute taskmaster when it came to storytelling. He could weave a narrative around the driest material – he could talk for hours about 19th century rifle design – and make it edge-of-your-seat fascinating.
He understood that the storyteller’s job isn’t finished when the words are on the page; it’s finished when the audience feels something, when they’re connected to the storyteller. The great storytellers don’t recite their material — they inhabit it. They know where the story turns, where to slow down and let a moment breathe, and when to drive straight through to the point without apology.
That same instinct applies in the conference room. Know your material well enough that the slides are a reference, not a script. Read the room the way a storyteller reads an audience — adjusting pace, emphasis, and energy in real time. Pull the audience in close like you’re telling a ghost story around a campfire in the woods. The best presentations, like the best stories, end before the audience wants them to. They leave something in the room — a question, a decision, a new way of seeing the problem — that the briefer couldn’t have put on a slide if they’d tried.
That’s not PowerPoint. That’s storytelling.
