Six Pivots for a Better Presentation
When a presentation goes sideways, most people blame the slides.
But the problem usually has a lot to do with what the presenter believes a presentation is supposed to do.
My argument is simple: A presentation is not a performance. It’s a conversation. The moment you treat the room like a stage, your message starts working against you.
The Two Traps That Wreck Presentations
There are two failure modes, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is helplessness. People—especially in the military, where I spend a lot of my time—feel locked into a standard briefing format. The thinking goes: This is the template, it’s going to be lame, and there’s no way out of the box.
The second is overproduction. On the corporate side, people swing the other way. Pitching the board becomes a Broadway show. Everything needs sizzle and wow factor. The presenter tries to dazzle instead of communicate.
Both traps share the same cause. The biggest mistake people make is turning the presentation into a performance—making it about themselves.
When that happens, you step outside your own voice and start trying to become someone you’re not. And audiences are starving for the opposite: authenticity. A good presentation is you, authentically you, talking to the people in front of you in a way that resonates.
PowerPoint, for the record, is not the villain. Microsoft is a client of ours, and the tool is a good one. But people misuse it.
A Presentation Is Always a Conversation
I start every piece of presentation advice the same way: Presentations are always conversations, never performances.
Whether the audience is three people or 3,000 the principle holds. Nerves are normal—I get them too—but the antidote isn’t a slicker performance. It’s a real exchange with real people.
That mindset is what makes the following six pivots work. They aren’t presentation “techniques” in the performative sense. They’re ways to escape the two traps—so you never feel helpless and never feel the need to overdo it.
A presentation is always a conversation.
Pivot #1: Give people a choice
Treat the audience like they have options. If you’ve built a 10- or 15-slide deck, open with a simple A/B offer:
I can walk you through what I prepared, or we can skip it and just have a conversation.
The key is to give the choice cleanly, without steering. I told a contact in Washington, D.C. to try this, and he reports that people now consistently choose the conversation.
My advice: Don’t push. Let people opt in freely to (a) the presentation or (b) the conversation, and let the choice stand.
Pivot #2: Insert a story
I cannot overstate the value of an example, a vignette, or a story to illustrate a point. Narrative sticks in people’s heads.
The phrase let me give you an example activates something in the brain that makes people want to listen.
- Make sure the story accurately illustrates the point you’re making.
- Give it a clear beginning, middle, and end.
- Keep it short. Stories that drift into “once upon a time” put audiences to sleep.
A story can be true or hypothetical—it doesn’t matter, as long as it leads to the point and is engaging.
Pivot #3: Talk like the power went off and you lost your notes
This is a thought experiment with teeth. Imagine the projector is dead, the screen is dark, and the notes you packed are sitting on your kitchen table.
What would you say?
I’ve lived this. Before a keynote at a summit in upstate New York, the organizer warned me the generator might fail and the room might lose power. I’d been preaching this idea for years, so I thought: I’ve got this.
Preparing as if the slides and notes might vanish forces you to own the message—which is exactly what makes it land, slides or no slides.
Pivot #4: Let visuals speak volumes
When a slide is on screen, pivot from text to image. A picture is worth a thousand words.
One strong, relevant image per slide can carry more weight than a wall of bullet points. The image should match the message and can be expected or unexpected, creative, or thought-provoking—but it has to be relevant.
I used Haiku Deck when my book BRIEF came out, built around a clean formula: One primary image, a major headline, and a subheadline. Simple, and effective.
Pivot #5: Shrink the deck
Here’s why PowerPoint gets a bad name: People use it for two different jobs—documentation and presentation—and then confuse the two.
They document in PowerPoint, then present from that same document. That’s not the tool’s fault.
The fix is to separate the two. If a 20-page deck is your leave-behind documentation, build a separate, shorter version from which to present.
- Turn 20 slides into 10.
- Turn 10 slides into 5.
- Make each slide a section anchored by a single primary image.
Fewer slides mean a shorter presentation time, and your audience feels the relief.
I once worked with an iconic Fortune 100 brand whose digital marketing team insisted its 80-slide board deck couldn’t be cut. It was one of the most beautifully designed presentations I’d ever seen.
My advice to the team: “You’ve made a beautiful movie. Let’s make a trailer.”
Pivot #6: QCO (question, comment, observation)
The last pivot gives the audience a voice. Instead of talking for 50 minutes straight, talk for 25 and reserve the rest for what I call QCO.
It works like this:
- Ask everyone to take a minute and write down a question, a comment, or an observation.
- Have each person do it.
- Field the questions, comments, and observations as a way to summarize and close the presentation.
It turns the final stretch from a monologue into the conversation the whole thing should have been.
Don’t Feel Helpless—Have a Plan of Attack
The thread running through all six pivots is control. Walk in with alternatives, and you won’t feel trapped by a format or pressured to put on a show.
Give people a choice. Insert a story. Talk like the power went off. Let visuals speak. Shrink the deck. Run a QCO.
This is the kind of intentional communication we teach every day at The BRIEF Lab—helping leaders, teams, and organizations cut the noise and say what matters with clarity, brevity, and impact.
If your presentations, briefings, or everyday messages could be sharper, explore our training and resources, and tune in to the Just Saying podcast for more.
Joseph McCormack first shared these ideas in the Just Saying podcast Ep. 396: Six PowerPoint Presentation Pivots