I once spent three hours in a meeting to prepare for a meeting. We discussed what to present, how to present it, who should present it, what the client might ask, how we should answer, what could go wrong, and how to prevent it.
Then we had the meeting. It lasted twenty minutes. The client liked everything. We'd prepared for a war that never happened.
This is how organisations die slowly. Not from bad work, but from the compounding cost of overthinking the theatre of work.
Meetings about meetings. Decks about decks. Briefs about briefs. Layers of process that exist not to create value, but to create the feeling of control and work.
I've never been in a bad meeting that started with a well-written memo. And I've rarely been in a good meeting that started with a PowerPoint deck or a video.
The deck is theatre. It's designed to present, not to think. Which means the thinking gets done later, or never. The deck looks finished, so we assume the thinking is finished. But the deck is just disguising the gaps.
Here's a test: if we can't explain the idea without the deck, we don't have an idea to present.
The best meetings I've been in had no deck. The best ideas that I’ve sold, I’ve sold with a marker and a board, or a pen and a paper.
We don't need better presentations. We need clearer thinking. And clear thinking looks suspiciously like a short email or a conversation over coffee.