I’m the guest on this week’s When Shit Hits the Fan podcast. You can hear about two of my fan shattings. Here’s the podcast in Apple, Spotify, and Overcast.

Favor documents over slides

Slides are an oral culture, not a written culture. Imagine civilization without writing: that’s what organizations relying on slides instead of documents are like.

There are workarounds, and they tend to prove the comparison. Often, you will see a slide with a lot of words, and the presenter will apologize that there’s too much text. That’s because the slides should have been a document.

Slides are not good at text, they’re good at visuals. Slides are good for enhancing spoken communication: showing examples, visualizing data (charts), even giving a written outline of the topics covered, major conclusions, and suggested actions. McKinsey titles are great for all of that. The right slides will make your talk better, more memorable, more “actionable.”

Slides are a terrible way to share, archive, and “document” your decisions and reasoning. For example, slides are terrible at strategy. Have you ever asked for the plans, the strategy, an overview of what a product does, and been sent slides? They’re usually not good. You’re usually left with many questions, especially when it comes to why and how. That’s because these types of things should be documents.

There’s an old maxim of keynote slide design: for your audience to understand the slides, you should need to be there giving the talk. The slides should not be able to stand alone. A document can stand alone, a document can be re-read, sent to people who weren’t in the room.

You can also collaborate on a document. You can suggest changes, you can ask questions in comments, you can update it. You can track changes on a document. A document is, somewhat ironically, more of a living document than slides. In contrast, have you ever tried to track changes and collaborate with slides? It’s a mess.

I use slides all the time for presentations, both public and internal ones. For internal collaborations and work, however, I start with a document and try to “force” the people I’m working with to use the document as well. Eventually, in most of the corporate cultures I’ve worked with, I have to switch to text pretty early on. But, at least the document is there to serve as the source of truth.

Most corporations are illiterate. From what I can tell, people avoid reading in large organizations. People don’t make the time to read, it’s faster to flip through slides. It’s faster to edit slides.

Guess what else: all this generative AI stuff is really good at text. If you think it’s hard to write, and that most people won’t be able to do it, even the simplest AI can help. You can even take a recording of your presentation of slides and ask the AI to convert it to a document.

This is an opportunity for management. If it seems like people aren’t “getting it” that ideas aren’t trickling down from management, that you keep getting the same questions over and over…maybe you should switch mediums from slides to text. Try something different. Slides are a poor way to run a company, and switching to documents is an easy, no cost way to boost productivity.

Relative to your interests

• Data Looks Better Naked - Good advice on formatting charts and data tables. The examples are incremental, so you can choose to go all the way, or just apply some of the design changes.

• OpenStack comes to the Linux Foundation

• Canadians’ Health Data Needs Safeguarding Against Our Increasingly Hostile Neighbor - Maybe Trump drives a lot of sovereign cloud.

• Cool native HTML elements you should already be using

• Who gets to do strategy?

• Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino - When your lover lets you down. // Also, how to detect vaporware. With AI, building up your bullshit detector is very important. A lot of it, at best, is just hopes and dreams. And a lot of it is just vaporware.

• Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination - ”Economics should emphasize the importance of technology as a solution to externality problems and focus less on social coordination.” // Does this apply to IT where we often say “technology is easy, culture is hard.”

• Ironies of Agentic AI - “[R]ather than removing human dependencies, automation often shifts and amplifies them.”

• Sensitive Information Disclosure in LLMs: Privacy and Compliance in Generative AI - Sensitive information in, sensitive information out. Also, make sure to have access control to your models.

• What Are Agentic Workflows? Patterns, Use Cases, Examples, and More

• Agentic AI Is The Next Competitive Frontier - “CEOs must architect the autonomous enterprise.” // Changing culture, org structure, and how work is done day-to-day. That’s a big ask. It rarely works. // It’s a much better strategy to just figure out how to use AI to improve how things are currently done.

• 5 questions to ask before deploying agentic AI

• Prompts for management communication - here’s commentary on it.

• Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa - Avoid using legs to lure dice-nerds.

• Navigating Private Equity ownership

• The Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD - ”Hypercuriosity is related to ADHD in several ways: individuals with ADHD often demonstrate heightened novelty-seeking behaviors, show intense focus on topics of interest, and experience stronger urges to explore new information and experiences. Beyond all this experimental data, this connection is supported by qualitative research suggesting that ADHDers relate their curiosity to their tendencies toward both impulsivity and distraction.”

• Revenge font - The tagger who did this must be so happy. And, way to turn a frown upside down!

• The Secret History of the Manicule - “The Little Hand that’s Everywhere.”

Wastebook

• “So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: ‘Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.’ Kurt Vonnegut.” Found by that guy Russell.

• “it’s hard to explain to the French that Americans are much more afraid of each other than they are of Russia. Conflict in the United States is usually an internal convulsion, a civil matter.” boom boom paris.

• “sitting in the buzzfeed offices just clickin on this off tweetdeck.” Good times.

• “The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion & affinity was five years ago. The second best time is today!” Robin Sloan.

• And: “pageants of minor chaos.”

• “I think that [parent’s] resilience. Or, their resilience at work is an incredibly important quality to transfer [to their children] and this might be one way to do that. Ooo! Looks like I had a thought!” On bringing your kids to work, having them see you work, etc. - John Dickerson on the Political Gabfest bonus episode, March 13th, 2025z

• A lot of lunch and learn sessions, weekly meetings, and other collaborative activities focus on building and maintaining a network of knowledge rather than just learning the specific topic covered in the meeting. These activities involve sharing information and establishing connections with others to enhance your understanding and access to a wider range of knowledge.

• “We’ve entered the ‘tamale layaway stage’ of late Capitalism.” Chris.

• “toyetic.” Here.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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There's a huge, great line-up of topics and people at Cloud Foundry Day this year, May 14th in Palo Also, hosted by my work, Tanzu. Come check it out - Cloud Foundry is the most proven, mature platform as a service I know of, used for over a decade in the biggest, mission critical organizations, and beloved by developers and operators.