Beyond PowerPoints - Tackling Process Debt in Management

If you’ve ever sat through a corporate presentation and thought, “Wow, that’s a great deck, but what are we actually doing?”  you’re not alone. Somewhere between the animations, transitions, and font debates, managers start managing slides instead of systems. It’s a quiet epidemic of style over substance.

I’ve seen it in every corner of the business world: the prettier the PowerPoint, the shakier the plan. The people who polish their slides most tend to pivot the fastest — not because they’re agile, but because constant change looks like progress. And that’s the trap. The flashiest idea often wins, even when it’s disconnected from the real work.

But what happens when that same executive has to compare ten different decks, each with its own color scheme, file format, and naming convention? Context-switching kills clarity. One slide might represent $1,000 in effort, another $10 million, but without scale or context, it’s all just rectangles and bullet points.

Imagine if every deck had to show a small pie chart of how big the idea is relative to the total budget. You’d instantly know whether to lean in or nod politely. Instead, we burn hours perfecting slides while decision-makers struggle to see the forest for the fonts.

That’s where process debt creeps in. Each change in format, each “small tweak,” adds friction — not insight. The cost isn’t in the PowerPoint itself; it’s in the mental tax leaders pay to keep up with every new iteration.

Tim Cook reportedly structures his days down to the minute. Athletes do the same before game day — not because they crave rigidity, but because routine removes noise. It frees up cognitive space to focus on performance. Great managers do this too: they standardize the structure so they can personalize the content.

So here’s a challenge for anyone leading change: before you introduce a new format, tool, or initiative, ask two questions:

1. Could three other teams adopt this with me?

2. Would we still be doing it this way in three years?

If the answer to either question is no, it’s probably not ready. Amazon’s six-page memo model is a great example — same structure, every time. Leaders walk into meetings knowing what to expect. That predictability doesn’t kill creativity; it creates the conditions for it.

Because at the end of the day, every new slide, every new “initiative,” either compounds your organization’s clarity or your chaos. Process debt doesn’t always show up in broken systems, sometimes it hides behind perfect PowerPoints.

Process Debt Truth: Consistency isn’t the enemy of creativity. It’s the foundation that keeps your big ideas from collapsing under their own formatting.