Let them eat PowerPoint

A few years ago I sat in a boardroom while one of the Big Four consultancies presented our new strategy. It was a beautiful deck. Confidently presented by people fresh out of University, who were more confident than I was at that age when I didn't really know much about business. They had confident postures and were wearing confident looking clothes.

Ninety slides of immaculate typography, tasteful kerning, sweeping arrows and a colour palette that had "luxury" written all over it. The Execs were loving the first two slides and giddy with excitement. This deck was going to turn the company's poor run of results around.

Then we reached slide three. It had another company's name on it. Not ours, but our competitor's. The market share chart beside it contained their numbers too.

I pointed this out. I had to. It's in my nature. The lead consultant looked at the slide, paused for half a second and said, with extraordinary confidence: “Ah. I must have missed that in the edit. Easy enough to fix with find and replace.” Which was true, technically.

The more interesting problem was that the entire presentation had been written for somebody else. We had simply received the rebranded edition. I found this staggering, yet, when I looked around the room at the fellow Execs, who'd commissioned this work at great expense, they laughed, nodded and carried on as though there weren't a series of remarkable questions to ask here.

I've thought about that meeting ever since, because the deck had achieved something quite impressive: it looked exactly like the thing we needed without actually being it.

The brioche problem

This reminded me of Marie Antoinette, who famously said: “Let them eat cake.”

Except she almost certainly didn't. The phrase appears in Rousseau, years before Marie Antoinette had even arrived in France, and was a common and well travelled phrase. And it wasn't really cake anyway. The French is brioche — rich, buttery, delicious bread.

Which makes the story more interesting. The problem wasn't that the queen offered people something unpleasant. She offered them something rather lovely. The problem was that she offered the wrong thing.

People were hungry, starving even and instead of solving the problems in the country, she offered brioche.

And I think we do this constantly at work. Someone asks for clarity, so we make a deck at great expense and assume clarity was created, communicated effectively and understood. Someone asks how to change something, so we buy a framework and spend years trying to retro-fix it onto a system it was never designed for.

Someone asks what we should do next year to solve the market share problem, so we commission a strategy from a big firm, and, given we've spent so much money on it, accept that it was written for someone else, had a different company's name on it, and accept what it says without question. Someone asks for progress, and we produce an artefact that looks suspiciously like progress, but is actually closer to watermelon reporting.

The artefact often simply becomes the point itself.

This is why work can become wonderfully busy while remaining rather static. It's why each year can look and feel the same. It's why good people are busy yet feel hollowed out. It's why everyone's working long hours but the business results aren't going anywhere positive. It's why lots of activity often doesn't create any more clarity or alignment.

A deck is easier than a difficult conversation. A framework is easier than going to see what's actually happening. A strategy document is easier than admitting we don't yet know what to do. Long hours are easier to demand than truly getting to know people and what they're capable of.

And, crucially, all are much easier to show the boss, or put in a report, or, more importantly, to pass the burden to.

There is nothing wrong with decks, frameworks or strategy documents. They can be extremely useful. But they're means, not ends.

So I've started asking four rather annoying questions of important work, especially work presented in PowerPoints, which I thought may be helpful:

Does it create clarity?
Do we understand something we didn't understand before?
Do we know something we didn't know before?

Does it create alignment?
Are we genuinely looking at the same thing?
We may privately nod along, but collectively do we all align on the same thing?

Does it create momentum?
Has anything become easier to do?
Do we have the first few steps, or the next moves, so that momentum can form?

Does it produce results?
Can we eventually draw a line from this artefact to something that actually matters?

If the answer is no, you may not have produced the answer. You may have produced the brioche. And there is an alarming amount of brioche being produced in corporate life. Beautiful brioche, of course. Usually in PowerPoint. With very nice fonts.