Working in communications ruins presentations for you. You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and you start noticing the same pattern over and over again: the people who know a subject best are usually the worst people to explain it. Not because they’re not smart. Because they’re experts.
They’ve been living inside the topic for months, sometimes years. Acronyms become ordinary words. Technical details become obvious. Context disappears because they’ve stopped remembering what it feels like not to know. I do it too. Ask me about film photography and I’ll happily spend ten minutes talking about ISO, latitude, reciprocity failure, and why a forty-year-old Minolta makes me happier than most modern cameras. Somewhere around minute three, I’ve completely forgotten that you probably just wanted to know which camera to buy.
That’s what expertise does. It compresses years of learning into something that feels obvious. Communication is the opposite job. It’s unpacking that expertise until someone else can carry it too.
When someone hands me a presentation to redesign, I don’t start by opening PowerPoint. I read it. Not as the person who wrote it, but as the person who’s about to receive it. If this were my first day on the job, would I understand it? If I worked in another department, where would I get lost? If I weren’t an expert, what context would I need before any of this started making sense? Those questions usually solve more problems than any font, color palette, or animation ever will.
One of the requests I’ve heard most often throughout my career is, “Can you make it prettier?”
Maybe.
But I don’t think that’s the right question.
Pretty is subjective. What I think is beautiful, someone else might hate. What actually matters is whether it works for the audience.
Some weeks the best thing I do is delete half the words from a slide. Other weeks it’s breaking one overloaded slide into four simpler ones. Sometimes it’s taking a statistic the presenter desperately wants to include and moving it to the appendix because, while it’s accurate, it isn’t helping anyone understand the story. The goal isn’t to say less. The goal is to say exactly what the audience needs, exactly when they need it.
One of the best executive presentations I’ve ever worked on barely had any text at all. Outside the opening and closing slides, the story lived almost entirely in the script. The visuals and animations appeared exactly when they were needed, supporting the narrative instead of competing with it. It reminded me of a children’s book, and I mean that as high praise. Children’s books understand something a surprising number of executive presentations don’t: introduce one idea, let it land, then build on it. Nobody’s trying to impress the reader with how much they know. They’re trying to make sure the reader understands before turning the page.
That’s really the job, when I think about it.
Not making things prettier.
Working in communications ruins presentations for you.
You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and the same pattern keeps showing up: the people who know a subject best are usually the worst people to explain it. Not because they’re not smart. Because they’re experts.
They’ve been living inside the topic for months, sometimes years. Acronyms become ordinary words. Technical details become obvious. Context disappears because they’ve stopped remembering what it feels like not to know. I do it too. Ask me about film photography and I’ll happily spend ten minutes talking about ISO, latitude, reciprocity failure, and why a forty-year-old Minolta makes me happier than most modern cameras. Somewhere around minute three, I’ve forgotten that you probably just wanted to know which camera to buy.
That’s what expertise does. It compresses years of learning into something that feels obvious. Communication is the opposite job. It’s unpacking that expertise until someone else can carry it too.
When someone hands me a presentation to redesign, I don’t start by opening PowerPoint. I read it first. Not as the person who wrote it. As the person about to receive it. If this were my first day on the job, would I understand it? If I worked in another department, where would I get lost? If I weren’t an expert, what context would I need before any of this started making sense? Those questions usually solve more problems than any font, color palette, or animation ever will.
One of the requests I’ve heard most often throughout my career is, “Can you make it prettier?”
Maybe.
But I don’t think that’s the right question.
Pretty is subjective. What I think is beautiful, someone else might hate. What actually matters is whether it works for the audience.
Some weeks the best thing I do is delete half the words from a slide. Other weeks it’s breaking one overloaded slide into four simpler ones. Sometimes it’s taking a statistic the presenter desperately wants to include and moving it to the appendix because, while it’s accurate, it isn’t helping anyone understand the story. The goal isn’t to say less. The goal is to say exactly what the audience needs, exactly when they need it.
One of the best executive presentations I’ve ever worked on barely had any text at all. Outside the opening and closing slides, the story lived almost entirely in the script. The visuals and animations appeared exactly when they were needed, supporting the narrative instead of competing with it. It reminded me of a children’s book, and I mean that as high praise. Children’s books understand something a surprising number of executive presentations don’t: introduce one idea, let it land, then build on it. Nobody’s trying to impress the reader with how much they know. They’re trying to make sure the reader understands before turning the page.
That’s really the job, when I think about it.
Not making things prettier.
Not proving how much the presenter knows.
Making experts understandable.
Because if your audience still needs a translator after you’ve finished presenting, you haven’t really communicated.
Let’s Talk
Whether you’re presenting to executives, frontline employees, customers, or a room full of people who have never heard of your project before, the challenge is always the same: helping them understand.
If you’ve got a presentation that feels too dense, too technical, or just isn’t landing the way it should, I’d love to help you turn expertise into understanding.
Trabajar en comunicaciones te cambia la perspectiva. Ya no ves la presentación en powerpoint. Ves a la gente. Quién presta atención. Quién se perdió hace rato. Quién se rindió y ya está leyendo tres párrafos de texto mientras el que presenta sigue hablando de otra cosa.
Después de años haciendo esto, el patrón se repite siempre igual: los que más saben de un tema son, casi siempre, los que peor lo explican. No por falta de capacidad. Todo lo contrario. Es por ser expertos.
Llevan meses, a veces años, metidos en el tema. Los acrónimos dejan de sonar a acrónimo. Los términos técnicos se vuelven parte del vocabulario de todos los días. El contexto se pierde porque ya ni se acuerdan de lo que es no saber.
A mí también me pasa.
Pregúntame de fotografía análoga y te hablo diez minutos de ISO, de latitud, de fallo de reciprocidad, y de por qué una Minolta de hace cuarenta años todavía me hace más feliz que cualquier cámara moderna. Y pa'l tercer minuto, ya se me olvidó que lo único que querías saber era cuál cámara comprar.
Eso hace la experiencia. Comprime años de aprendizaje hasta que todo suena obvio.
La comunicación hace lo contrario. Coge ese conocimiento y lo desempaca, poco a poco, hasta que otro también lo entienda.
Cuando alguien me pasa una presentación para rediseñarla, no abro PowerPoint primero.
Primero la leo.
Pero no como quien la escribió. La leo como quien está a punto de recibirla.
¿La entendería si hoy fuera mi primer día en el trabajo?
¿En qué momento me perdería si trabajara en otro equipo?
¿Qué contexto necesitaría si nunca hubiera oído hablar de este proyecto?
Esas preguntas resuelven más que cualquier tipografía, paleta de colores o animación.
Hay una petición que llevo escuchando casi toda mi carrera.
"¿La puedes poner más bonita?"
Tal vez.
Pero esa no es la pregunta.
Lo bonito es cuestión de gusto. Lo que a mí me encanta, a otro le puede caer mal.
Lo que importa es si funciona pa' tu público.
Hay semanas en que el mejor trabajo que hago es borrar la mitad del texto de una presentación.
Otras veces es partir una presentación pesada en cuatro bien sencillas.
Y a veces es convencer al que presenta de mandar esa estadística que tanto quiere meter, al apéndice. Porque, aunque sea correcta, no está ayudando a nadie a entender la historia.
La meta no es decir menos.
Es decir justo lo que tu público necesita, justo cuando lo necesita.
Una de las mejores presentaciones ejecutivas en las que he trabajado casi no tenía texto.
Fuera de la intro y el cierre, la historia vivía casi entera en el guion. Los elementos visuales y las animaciones entraban justo cuando hacían falta, apoyando la narrativa, no compitiendo con ella.
Siempre me recordó a un libro infantil. Y lo digo como el cumplido más grande que hay.
Los buenos libros para niños entienden algo que muchas presentaciones ejecutivas todavía no entienden: sueltan una idea, dejan que el lector la procese, y ahí sí pasan a la próxima.
Nadie está tratando de demostrar cuánto sabe.
Está tratando de asegurarse de que el otro entendió antes de pasar la página.
Al final, ese es el trabajo.
No hacer las cosas más bonitas.
No demostrar cuánto sabe el que presenta.
Es lograr que los que más saben sean también los más fáciles de entender.
Porque si tu público termina la presentación y todavía necesita un intérprete, realmente no hubo comunicación.
Hablemos
Ya sea frente a ejecutivos, empleados, clientes, o gente que nunca ha oído hablar de tu proyecto, el reto es siempre el mismo: que tu público entienda.
Si tienes una presentación que se siente muy densa, muy técnica, o que simplemente no está conectando, hablemos. Me encantaría ayudarte a convertir conocimiento en entendimiento.