Sense-Making Before Slide-Making
- Lakshmi Ramachandran
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The Presentation That Took Two Weeks to Build and Why It Failed
Priya had spent two weeks preparing. Her deck was forty slides of thorough, well-designed work. Every data point verified, every scenario modelled. She walked into the partner meeting feeling ready.
But she walked out without their buy-in.
"They said it was thorough," she told me. "And then they said they would revisit."
I asked her one question.
"What did you need the room to do at the end of that presentation?"
She thought about it. "Approve the budget for the new service line."
"Where in the deck did you make that ask?"
A pause. Then: "Slide 38."
That was the problem.
Not the data or the design or even her delivery, which was confident and clear. The problem was that Priya had prepared the report but had not prepared to present the message and ask clearly, upfront.
The preparation trap most brilliant leaders fall into
In my work with senior leaders, the issue is almost never too little preparation. It is preparing the wrong thing.
Leaders spend days, sometimes weeks, building slides. They research, verify, and design. They arrive at the room thoroughly prepared and then they wonder why the room did not move.
The answer is usually the same. They prepared the work. They did not prepare the message.
AI can build your slides in seconds now. But it cannot make sense of your data, thoughts, and make sense to the room the way you can. That is your edge and it has to show up before you open the slides.
Nancy Duarte, one of the world's leading voices on presentation and communicationmakes this point directly:
"My best advice is to not start in PowerPoint. Presentation tools force you to think through information linearly, and you really need to start by thinking of the whole instead of the individual lines."
Her own preparation method before a single slide is built is to have one idea per sticky note. Arrange and rearrange until the structure feels sound. Then start making the slides.
As Seth Godin has observed: "If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, cancel the meeting and send in a report."
A report walks the audience through your thinking. A presentation moves the audience toward a decision. These are not the same thing.
Simple approaches to prepare the best way
Here is the approach I use with leaders before any high-stakes presentation
Start with the outcome, not the content
Before you open a slide, ask: what do I need this room to understand, feel, or do by the end of this conversation? Be specific. "Approve the Q3 budget" is an outcome. "Share our progress" is not. If you cannot name the outcome in one sentence, the audience will not be able to either.
Work backwards from there
Given that outcome, what is the one core message the audience needs to hear? What story makes that message land emotionally? What evidence makes it credible? Everything else is supporting material which belongs in the appendix, not the opening fifteen slides.
Audit what you have built
Now look at your deck. Does each slide serve the outcome or does it mirror the order in which you did the work? Those are very different structures. The first moves a room. The second documents a process.
What happened when Priya changed her approach
After that conversation, Priya rebuilt the presentation. Not the content, the structure. The new deck was twenty slides. It opened with the problem the business was experiencing, moved to the opportunity the new service line would capture, and placed the budget ask on slide four.
Not slide 38.
The partners approved it in the first meeting. Nothing in the underlying analysis had changed. The thinking about the audience had.
That is sense-making before slide-making in practice. You bring the same depth of expertise into the room. You simply decide, before you build anything, what the room actually needs from you.
Closing Reflection
Think of a presentation you have coming up. What does the room need to do at the end of it and where in your current structure does that ask appear?
Watch my 1 min Video on the topic: https://youtube.com/shorts/poqBNEOUqLc?si=Vub7sosqWN1iCmT2
P.O.W.E.R UP - Brilliance to Influence is a weekly newsletter on leadership communication for leaders closing the gap between their expertise and their influence.
Dr Lakshmi Ramachandran, PhD, PCC is a leadership communication coach and keynote speaker working with senior leaders and expert professionals across Asia Pacific. She helps leaders who are exceptional at what they do turn that brilliance into influence.
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