Key Takeaways
In the end, it all comes down to one practical question: What will remain in people’s memory when you’re no longer in the room? Because in business, the winner isn’t the one who talks the most. It’s the one who is remembered best.
So, when you design a presentation, ask yourself:
• Am I clear on what I want people to remember two days from now?
• Is that message expressed with simple, repeatable words, something anyone can say aloud?
• Have I intentionally repeated that message at strategic points (opening, middle, closing)?
• Have I made that concept experiential, asking people to do at least one thing (write, photograph, apply)?
• Have I managed the rhythm to avoid the beige wall: slides that drag on, zero movement, static monologues?
If even one of these questions makes you uncomfortable, you’re exactly where you need to be.
Because designing presentations is not about filling slides.
It’s about building memory devices, things that survive time, distance, and the hallways of organizations.
During our conversation, Barbara told me about a time when she worked for a large telecom company. Three times a week was “vendor day”: on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, different vendors would come in to present their amazing software, platforms and solutions. All with their demos, their numbers, their promises.
Then came the moment to decide. A week later, with the team around the table, the question was simple:
“Ok, who really convinced us?”
The problem was, no one remembered who had said what. The presentations had blended into a single background noise. Details, arguments, key differences, everything had evaporated in a few days.
And this is where the question that changed Barbara Jarrett’s career was born:
If we forget so much, how do we actually decide?
That’s exactly where this article begins. Not with the abstract charm of neuroscience, but with a very concrete truth:
If people don’t remember you, they’ll never decide in your favor.
And since business decisions almost always pass through a presentation, the question for anyone who works with slides is direct:
How many of your presentations survive once you’re no longer in the room?
Who is Barbara Jarrett, and why can her work transform the way we communicate?
Barbara Jarrett is not “just” a keynote speaker who talks about memory. She is a neuroscientist who studies, measures, and records what really happens in the brain while people are watching a presentation, interacting with content, being instructed by a human being or an artificial intelligence system.
She is the author of “Impossible to Ignore” and the more recent “Made You Look”, two books that, if you deal with communication, presentations or marketing, you cannot afford to ignore (precisely 😊). In there, you don’t find motivational phrases, but a pounding question: Why does the brain remember certain things and delete others?
I met her years ago, first as a reader, then as a colleague, and finally as an accomplice in experiments.
I participated in one of her studies: EEG headset on, sensors attached, screen in front of me, presentations to analyze.
Not a metaphor. Barbara literally watches what the brain does in real time, and I can assure you, seeing your EEG waves on a monitor is intense.
When I decided to interview Barbara for our community, it wasn’t about “creating content.”
It was a concrete response to a question that has fueled my research for years:
How can we design presentations that aren’t just correct, but so impactful they become unforgettable?
We always say we need to put people at the center, but here we must go even deeper—into the functioning of their brain. Understanding the laws of perception and the mechanics of attention.
Not surprisingly, all our Perfect Day instructors have, for years, been teaching a module on neuro-presentation design in both the Lean Presentation Design and Data Presentation courses.
The topic fascinates me so much that I recently held a full-day workshop at the Politecnico di Milano to share the new Perfect Day neuro-presentation design framework.
I wrote an article for those who missed the speech:
Memory as a Mission
There’s a line from Barbara, during the webinar, that, if you ask me, summarizes everything: Memory drives every decision.
If you think about it, it’s almost obvious. And yet, we often work in PowerPoint without considering it.
We prepare presentations full of content, data, charts, arguments, but we focus almost exclusively on “saying everything we need to say,” assuming that “something will stick.”
As if seeing were the same as remembering. Neuroscience tells us the opposite.
Every decision, personal or professional, rests on what we remember, not on what we have simply seen or heard once. If your client, your boss, your board, your buyer doesn’t remember your message when they talk about you without you, your presentation failed, even though everyone in the room was nodding.
Barbara sums it up like this: “If you want people to move in your direction, you have to make memory your mission.” It’s not a nice phrase. It is a paradigm shift.
As long as you design presentations thinking only of informing, you remain in the world of interchangeable content. When you start designing, thinking about what will be remembered tomorrow, in a week, in a month, you start to really strategize.
After all, if you think about it, when we make a presentation, for example, in B2B we hardly present to the final decision maker and often, for a negotiation or a contract to close, it is necessary for the presentation to go up several hierarchical levels.
So, we introduce it to someone who will introduce it to someone else, and so on!
It often happens that the decision is made even several months after the presentation itself. Maybe at the time of the presentation, the project was liked but there was no budget.
Moral of the story: either our presentation is able to convey a message that will be remembered or it was better to let it go and save everyone’s time.
The ten percent that really matters
One of the most striking findings is this:
After 48 hours, the “business” brain forgets about 90 percent of what it saw in a presentation.
It’s not a bug. It’s the way we’re made.
The point, as Barbara emphasizes, is not to be obsessed with what is forgotten, but to become obsessed with what remains. That famous ten percent, which you use as a metaphor.
Sometimes it will be a little more, often it will be much less, but that’s the order of magnitude.
Then the question is reversed, not how much material should I put in the slides, but what is that ten percent that I cannot afford to leave to chance?
Before opening PowerPoint, I always ask three basic things:
- Who is really my audience
- What do I want them to do after the presentation, that they wouldn’t have done on their own
- Why might they still not do it, even if what I say makes sense to them?
When you have clear audiences, goals and objections, that ten percent starts to take shape.
It is no longer a vague phrase, it is not a “nice” slogan. It is the essence of what must remain in memory to unlock a decision.
The question becomes very concrete: “if in two days they could remember only one thing of what I said, what would it be?”.
If you can’t answer, you don’t have an introduction yet. You only have slides.
How to make an idea easy to tell
Defining your ten percent is the first step. The second is to ensure that the idea can travel in the mouths of others.
Barbara uses a term that I really like: “retellability”.
A message isn’t really strong until it’s easy to repeat.
Think of the lines from the movies we keep quoting years later:
“I’ll be back.”
“Houston, we have a problem.”
“Show me the money.”
They are not memorable because we have studied them. They are memorable because they are short, concrete, wearable. They work in different contexts. They slip away naturally.
Now, the uncomfortable question: Do your key phrases work like this?
If your ten percent sounds like: “Redesigning the integrated architecture of the digital communication ecosystem to support internal and external stakeholders”, I can guarantee it, no one will ever repeat it to anyone.
The challenge is to find words that have at least three characteristics:
- Are “understandable” without belonging to your industry
- They are “pronounceable” even by those who are not native speakers of the company language
- They lend themselves to being linked to multiple situations, not just your specific case
During the webinar, Barbara tells the case of a construction company that had to convince a large property owner. The key message was summarized in a simple and visual concept:
A layered guest experience. A “layered” experience, for those who live, buy, use the spaces, while other buildings are built around them.
It’s not just loud because it sounds good. It’s strong because:
- It’s easy to remember
- It’s easy to repeat
- It’s intuitive for anyone who’s ever lived in a building under construction
And so the point is this: it is not enough to be right, you have to find the right way to say it, so that your idea can walk on the legs of others.
Smart repetition without getting bored
As soon as we talk about repetition, the reaction is almost always the same: “But then I get boring.” I can’t say the same thing three times, I would look unprofessional.”
Adults are afraid of repetition, much like children are afraid of the dark. Yet, from the point of view of memory, there is no history. Without repetition, there is no consolidation.
A message heard once, among thirty others, does not have much chance of surviving beyond the day itself.
The key is this: You don’t have to repeat the slides, you have to repeat the message.
I see it often in the classroom.
There are people who go back to the same course a second or third time. I once asked openly, “But why are you here again? You already know the stories, the jokes, the examples…”
The answer was very lucid:
- The first time we take inspiration
- The second we begin to really see the technique
- The third we focus on the application
Repetition is not a defect. It’s the way we learn. The same principle applies in a presentation.
You can return to your ten percent several times in different ways:
- At the beginning, as a promise
- Halfway, as a summary of what you are demonstrating
- In the end, as a phrase that closes the circle
The sentence remains the same, the context changes.
And it is precisely this combination of constancy of the message and variety of examples that creates familiarity without boredom.
The problem is not to repeat. The problem is repeating without knowing what you’re repeating.
AI as a coach and the irreplaceable value of human experience
At one point in the interview, we couldn’t avoid the subject. Can AI help us become better speakers?
Barbara has conducted several studies on this.
Half of the participants were trained by a human, half by an AI system. Same simulated situations, identical goal: to improve the ability to manage a dissatisfied customer, show empathy, guide the conversation towards a solution.
Interesting result.
During the exercise, the performance was not so different. Where the real gap emerges is later, when you measure what people remember about the feedback.
Human feedback leaves a deeper trace.
Because?
Because it is steeped in experiences, deviations, small details that belong to real life.
In his example, the “human customer” tells of a trip, a wedding, a child caught watching something inappropriate online. There is a story behind the refund request, there are emotions that make sense of the situation.
The “AI customer”, on the other hand, cuts it short: “This is not relevant, I just want the refund.”
The difference is not only stylistic. At the memory level, those human details make all the difference. This is not to say that AI is not needed. Indeed.
To try different versions of a sentence, to generate metaphors, to be challenged on possible objections, AI is a very powerful sparring partner.
But the role of the human remains fundamental on one point.
Bringing into play stories, experience, imperfections, everything that makes content not only correct, but memorable.
The question is not “AI or humans”.
The question becomes, “How do I train AI to think about good frameworks, and how do I use my experience to turn those suggestions into something worth remembering?”
“Embodied cognition” and presentations that also involve the body
One of the most intriguing concepts in Barbara’s work is embodied cognition.
Simply put: The brain does not build memories only with thoughts and words, but with the interaction between mind, body and environment.
It is not an abstract philosophy. It is extremely practical. When you write by hand, you’re not just “taking notes.” You are engaging fingers, hand, arm, posture, eyes, selective attention. You’re filtering, choosing what’s worth fixing on the card. And this, for memory, counts.
It’s one of the reasons why, during a presentation, inviting people to take handwritten notes on a key concept makes much more sense than saying “we’ll send you slides anyway”.
Even small movements, getting up for a moment, looking around, taking a picture of something that represents an idea – help build a richer memory.
Barbara, at Stanford, proposes to the participants to capture “the essence of the human being” with a photo in the environment in which they find themselves.
There are those who photograph a child, those who photograph the dog, those who photograph a plant, those who photograph a plate of food.
It sounds like a game. In reality, it is a way to make brain, body and context work together.
In our presentations, we often forget this. We design as if the audience were just a series of eyes on a screen.
Instead, the question to ask is: “What can I ask people to do, even if only for thirty seconds, to transform content into an experience?”
Sometimes it is enough to say it explicitly: “This is a point that you will need in the coming months. If you write it now, it will be much easier to apply it in your reality.”
At an event, you could also invite your audience to take a photo of a slide that contains content that you want to be shared on social media, and you can also ask them to tag you.
That message will go multi-channel and those who posted it will remember it!
It is not rhetoric. It is memory engineering.
Virtual, in the presence and the risk of the beige wall
A part of the interview that struck me a lot concerns the distribution of attention between us and our slides.
In virtual contexts, we often end up in a tiny box, while the slides take up most of the screen. Barbara, thanks to eye trackers and real measurements, sees where the gaze goes and how much cognitive energy we devote to what.
But the real discovery is not the precise percentage. The real discovery is another.
In both cases, online and in person, an important slice of attention is lost. There is never a hundred percent “available” to the speaker.
Worse still.
In many cases, when comparing brain activity during a presentation to that in front of a simple beige screen, there are no significant differences.
This is where the image of the beige wall was born.
Presentations that, in fact, do not exceed the threshold of “minimal stimulation”.
This is a punch in the stomach for me, but it is also a call to action.
Movement, in this sense, does not mean bouncing logos and texts around the screen.
It means managing the rhythm
- Don’t show everything at once
- Using gradual appearances
- Switching from one slide to another at a certain speed
- Avoid standing on the same screen for ten minutes
In a recent speech, I had four and a half minutes on stage. My presentation had seventy-four slides.
The coach, behind the scenes, looks at me and says: “Look at your deck is three times longer than the others, are you sure with time?”
I was sure because I had not done the work on the slides, but on the rhythm. None of the screens were heavy, none of them stayed there long enough to turn into my beige wall.
A sea of text on a slide and ten minutes of still monologue do exactly the opposite. They increase predictability, lower attention, make the brain lazy.
The question to ask is simple: “My presentation, seen from the outside, looks more like a beige wall or something that, every now and then, forces the brain to wake up and ask itself, “What happens now?”
Conclusion and a small checklist so you don’t forget
If you put all these pieces together, memory, ten percent, retellability, repetition, embodied cognition, rhythm, the conclusion is much more practical than it seems.
In business, the one who talks the most does not win. The one who is best remembered wins.
Every time you design a presentation, you can at least ask yourself these questions:
- I know exactly what I want people to remember in two days
- The sentence that sums up this ten percent is simple, repeatable, pronounceable by anyone
- I voluntarily repeat this message at several times during the presentation, with the same wording
- I ask people to do something – write, get up, look around – to turn a concept into an experience
- I’m avoiding the beige wall, managing rhythm, transitions and amount of information so as not to anesthetize attention
If even just two or three of these answers today put you in a bit of trouble, that’s not a problem. It’s a great place to start.
This interview with Barbara, for me, is just that: An invitation to stop thinking of presentations as a slide-filling exercise and start considering them for what they really are.
Memory devices. Tools that must survive the moment the meeting closes.
Hearing her explain, with the calm of someone who has been studying these things for a lifetime, what the brain really does while you are on stage or in front of the webcam, changes the way you look at your next slides.
And maybe, the next time you’re preparing an important presentation, you’ll stop for a second to ask yourself before opening PowerPoint: “What I really want to stay in their memory and what I’m willing to let go”.
FAQ
Why can we say that memory is the real goal of a presentation?
Because every decision is based on what we remember, not on what we have simply seen or heard. If a message does not remain in memory, it can never influence any decision.
What does it mean to design “ten percent” of a presentation?
It means consciously locating the one message you want people to remember even days or weeks later. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t have a presentation yet: you just have slides full of content.
How do I know if my message is really memorable?
Ask yourself: Could someone easily repeat it to someone else, without distorting it? If the answer is no, it should be simplified and made more pronounceable, visual, concrete and transferable.
How does smart repetition work without getting bored?
You don’t have to repeat the slides. You have to repeat the key message several times, but in different contexts: at the beginning as a promise, in the middle as confirmation, at the end as a summary and call to action.
What does the body have to do with memory in presentations?
The brain does not only memorize through words, but through the involvement of the body and the environment. Writing, photographing or interacting makes the message more memorable: it is embodied cognition.
What do we mean by the expression “beige wall”?
It is a condition in which a presentation does not generate sufficient cognitive stimuli to stand out from a neutral background. It happens when the slide remains too still, too dense or too predictable.
Can AI really train us to become better speakers?
Yes, but only up to a certain point. AI is great for challenging us, proposing alternative versions, and simulating conversations. But memory sticks better when the feedback is human, because it brings stories, emotions, context, imperfections.
How can I tell if my presentation really “survives”?
Imagine that you are not there. People talk about your idea with others. If the message still arrives, recognizable, coherent and whole, then you have designed something that works.