Slides do not explain. They admit. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it, and you become useless in any meeting where someone is presenting a deck they wrote themselves.
The form is dishonest by design. A slide allows three bullets and a chart. The world rarely arrives in three bullets. So the maker chooses which two bullets to drop, and the dropped bullets, almost without exception, are the ones that contradicted the chart. The deck is therefore not a description of the situation. It is a description of the situation minus the parts the maker could not yet face. That is the working definition of a confession.
I have sat in three board rooms in the last quarter where this was visible to everyone except the person presenting. In each case the slide that mattered was the one with the most words on it. The maker had run out of room to lie cleanly, and the truth had leaked in as a footnote.
Once you watch for this, the diagnostic is fast. Look for the slide that is laid out worst. The one with the awkward column, the orphan bullet, the chart that does not quite fit. That is the slide where the company is telling on itself. The other slides are advertising. That one is evidence.
The second tell is repetition. If a phrase appears on three slides in a deck, the company does not believe it yet. They are practising. The phrases that are most repeated are usually the ones that are about to fall apart. Customer-obsessed. Operating leverage. The platform. A confident company says these once, on slide two, and then describes what it actually did instead.
The third tell is the chart with no axes. A bar chart with no Y axis is a feeling. A line going up and to the right with no scale is a hope. There is nothing wrong with feelings or hopes, but you should know which of the two you are looking at, and it should not be the chart's job to disguise this.
When I am called in to look at a deck, I do not start with strategy. I start with structure. I count the bullets per slide, the words per bullet, the slides whose layout has been touched in the last week. The slides that have been most edited are usually the ones that contain the question the company is most afraid of. The neat ones, the ones that have not been edited since the kick-off, are decorative.
The deepest version of this is when the deck is being shown to a board, because then there are two confessions happening at once. The maker is admitting what they cannot quite face about the company. And the board, by the questions it does and does not ask, is admitting what it cannot quite face about itself. The richest twenty minutes of a strategy review are the ones where no-one is talking, and everyone is staring at slide nineteen.
Slide nineteen is always the one. I do not know why. Possibly because it is far enough in that the maker has stopped editing carefully, and not so far that the room has stopped paying attention. Look at slide nineteen of any quarterly deck and you will, with some reliability, find the question that the next quarter will be about.
None of this means the deck is a bad form. It means the deck is honest in a way the maker rarely intends. If you can read it for what it admits rather than what it claims, you will save yourself a great deal of strategy work, because the strategy is sitting there in the orphan bullets, waiting to be picked up by anyone willing to read carefully.
I keep a folder of slide nineteens, anonymised. It is the most useful thing I own.