The Cost of Lingering

Walk into a casino and try to find a clock. You won’t. There aren’t any windows either, so an hour in, you can’t tell whether it’s two in the afternoon or two in the morning, and nobody in the building plans to tell you.

At the coffee shop down the street, you’ll find a gentler version. The chair swallows you, the Wi-Fi is free, and the restrooms are cleaned every hour.

The grocery store doesn’t bother with subtlety. You’re there for milk, and the milk is in the back left corner.

Then there’s the place most of us go when the stakes go up. You double-click the orange P, and a template is waiting for you. “Insert headline,” it says.

Relief. The blank page is gone.

Enjoy that feeling. Someone else is paying for it.

Thoughtfully Designed. With You in Mind.

Each of those establishments knows exactly who its customer is. For the casino, it’s the aspiring whale at the table. For the coffee shop, it’s the solopreneur with the backpack camping in the corner.

Presentation software’s customer? You.

The person who opens the file is the beneficiary of the software. The people who sit through the result never choose the tool, never renew it, and never get asked how it went. So the template, the design suggestions, and now the AI that builds the whole deck for you all get judged by a single measure: how good building it feels.

And it feels great. Every click, every tweak hands you the illusion of progress.

To be fair, the template does solve a real problem. It just solves it for you, and only you. Slide software encourages coverage. It rewards completeness. Completeness protects you from the question you didn’t see coming. It does remarkably little for the person in the audience deciding whether to believe in your idea.

Stay longer in the casino and you pay. Stay longer in the software and your audience pays.

It feels like preparation. All of it is preparation for the wrong person.

They Had an Outline Before They Knew Their Audience

A few years ago, I worked with the executive team at a large healthcare organization. They were about to unveil a new strategic direction to 600 operations leaders.

When I first sat down with them, they already had an outline. It was essentially a tour of where the organization was going, written in the language that energized them.

That language fit them perfectly. They were innovative, future-focused, and restless for change.

The audience, on the other hand, ran the day-to-day of a complex healthcare system. They were protective of what was working, skeptical of change, and they were terrified of what a new strategic direction might cost them and the people under their care.

Delivered as planned, that tour would have done real, lasting damage to the vision they were building.

So they stopped asking, “How do we present where we’re going?” 

They kept every piece of the strategy and changed whose frame of reference they were speaking from. By channeling their audience, they ended up rallying, re-recruiting and enrolling six hundred ambassadors.

Open the Dialogue, Not the Deck

Start with one real person in your audience. Answer two questions about them. Each one forces an intentional choice.

1. Who are they? Relatable audiences are grounded and team-first. Think Woody from Toy Story. Aspirational audiences live in the future and see themselves as the star of the movie. Think Buzz.

2. What do they want? Some want change, because the status quo is the problem. Think Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. Others want preservation, because their job is to protect what works, like James Bond.

Where your two answers meet, you’ll find a posture, and each posture trusts a different language. The Underdog (relatable, wants change) trusts resilience and potential. The Survivor (relatable, wants preservation) trusts stability, evidence, and protection. The Disruptor (aspirational, wants change) trusts bold, decisive vision. The Protector (aspirational, wants preservation) trusts duty and the safety of the people in their care.

Now go back to that healthcare team. You can place them yourself. The executives were Disruptors. The six hundred were Survivors, who move when they trust that what they value won’t be lost.

Here’s the question the team finally asked:

“What does this mean for you, survivor, based on where you are today?”

That’s what the exercise does. It gets you out of your own head and into your audience’s before you ever commit to putting a word on paper.

That beautiful template you and your team built to save you time? That runs the other direction. It gets you onto paper before you’ve left your own head.

There’s a guided version of the two questions if you want one. After that comes the story, then rehearsal, until it stops sounding like a deck.

The software won’t change. But we can.

Who’s Sitting in the Chairs This Time?

Who’s the one person in your next audience you’d start with? Which of the two answers about them are you guessing at? And how many of last week’s prep hours did that person get?

“But the Template Saves Us Time.”

Sure it does.

But the trouble is where that time goes. Most presenters spend it back inside the file, and then the audience doesn’t benefit from a single minute of it.

The Campfire Method requires you to spend it on them. On who’s listening. It’s a day with your team, about ten people, with your real audience on the table.

Let’s build your team’s Campfire Method workshop.

🔥 Hi, I’m Eric, and every week, I share insights, observations and tools so you can ditch decks and light a fire in your high-stakes presentations. If you like what you see here, follow me on LinkedIn.