Stop telling people to look at your blisters

It's been nearly two decades since I was in high school, but there's one story that I still remember to this day.

It was my junior year of high school. I took a history class, and it came with a mid-term research project.

It was an interesting topic, and I wanted to impress.

So after countless hours in the library, I put together a mega-deck. I gave generous real estate to every artifact I meticulously collected during my research – and I ended up with 50+ slides.

I then packed everything together and submitted my magnum opus, and waited for the praise that was sure to come my way.

I ended up getting one of the lowest grades I'd ever received all semester.

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"Hey, look at my blisters"

I haven't had to do a history report in a long time (thankfully), but I think about this story a lot.

Why? Because every now and then at work, I come across presentations that remind me of that research project.

No, it's not that these presentations contain 50 slides (OK, unfortunately once in a blue moon they do).

Rather, it's that they're crafted in a way that focuses on showing off the author's blood, sweat, and tears – instead of optimizing for insight and digestibility.

These types of presentations then do things like:

• Use 5 slides when 1 will do (to prove a lot of time was spent)
• Include irrelvant datapoints ("more numbers = more rigorous")
• Create complicated visuals (to establish credibility & authority)
• Refuse to curate (lest some efforts go unheralded)

It's the equivalent of not only forcing the audience to look at how the sausage is made – but also forcing them to look at all your blisters from operating the machine.

Why is this an issue? Well, for a few reasons:

• Your message fails to land – because your audience is distracted by tangential information
• Your message backfires – because your lack of curation means unintended signals are sabotaging your core message
• You lose credibility – because you're implying that you don't have a sharp view of what you're trying to say

So in today's issue, we'll look at some common examples of how this mistake manifests itself at work.

...But why do we do this?

Before we talk about examples, it's important to answer one question first: Why do we tend to show way too much in our work?

The first reason is that it's hard not to. Because it takes a lot of skill to...

• ...take something complex and distill it down to its essence
• ...scrap something when we know how much time we spent on it
• ...pretend we haven't seen our work and apply a fresh perspective

And thus, without learning how to critically examine our own work – we default to including as much as we can.

The second reason is that we're afraid. We're afraid that if we don't include enough "stuff" in our work – people won't recognize the efforts we've put in.

We think that even if the message doesn't land – the audience will at least cut us some slack, knowing that we worked really hard on this presentation.

Unfortunately, that is rarely true – except perhaps very early on in one's career.

So without further ado, let's look at 3 of the most common ways in which this defense mechanism manifests itself at work:

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Mistake #1: Too many slides (and not enough tightness)

I've previously written about the concept of "tightness" when it comes to exec-ready comms.

In the context of presentations, this means that you:

• Focus real estate on only what is most critical to your message
• Minimize any slides that are repetitive or duplicative
• Construct an effective and efficient storyline "flow"
• Cut down on unnecessary or tactical detail

But most people have not been trained to bias towards tightness. In fact, they're trained to do the opposite.

As a result, most presentations contain way too many slides, which is a problem because:

• They waste time with duplicative or irrelevant content
• They create "rabbit hole" opportunities along the way
• The audience gets distracted by the "flicking" back and forth

But the truth is this: the most important presentations you build are almost always intended to solve some kind of problem.

As such, the structure of these presentations should be highly predictable, for example: