Why polishing slides provides value

After uni I worked in management consulting for two years. And true to the stereotype about consulting, I spent a lot of time building slide decks back then. Fresh out of uni, it took me a bit of time to figure out why things work the way they do.

Specifically on the topics of making slides presentable, I had a bit of a hang-up at first. Aren't smart people able to figure it out from my first draft? Why should I care how polished my slides are?

In a sense, this post is giving the answers to those questions to my younger self.

You want your audience to belief you. You make this more likely by increasing cognitive ease.

Among the things that surprised me was how much polishing the senior managers at the firm demanded for slides. For a long time the only explanation I had for this was "cognitive ease", which I read about in Thinking, Fast and Slow . Cognitive ease describes the effect that when things are easier to make sense of we are more likely to believe and less likely to question them. So when you read an argument in a very legible font printed with high contrast, you will be less critical then you would be if the same argument is presented scribbled with pencil onto a napkin. This is essentially a zero sum explanation from the perspective of the organization, or even worse since we now had people polishing slides where, if everyone didn't do it we would be better if it' because people would spent time more productively on other things. To be clear, I consider cognitive ease a good enough reason to make your point as clear as you can make it, but since I started managing and making important business decisions on a much higher frequency, I realized there is another aspect to it.

You want your audience to focus on content. High-quality visual presentation helps your audience to focus on content.

People who make a lot of high-impact decisions have fined tuned their minds to spot inconsistencies and lack of quality. Without it they wouldn't be effective decision makers. But this means their minds often compulsively focus on inconsistencies even if they are only on a poorly aesthetic level, like bullet points that are slightly of or inconsistent casing. So when polishing slides you effectively make it easier for other people in the organization to follow along on the content, concentrating on the substance of the argument and not being distracted by presentation layer flaws. So you enable other people doing their work.

Of course cognitive ease on it's own is already a sufficiently good reason, after all we do love in a world where this effect exists and to be effective I use every tool I get. To me, this makes the picture a bit rounder. You help others to focus. That's nice of you! I also realized some people have an easier time accepting the "positive sum" explanation then the cognitive ease one alone.