Blank Space

Q&A, the last session of a children's hospital retreat weekend. A hand goes up.

"I noticed you used a lot of blank slides in both of your presentations. I was wondering why."

I've been doing it for years. Nobody had ever asked me that question before.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

Here's roughly what I told them.

A slide full of text asks your audience to do two things at once: read and listen.

Most people can't do both well, so they pick one.
Usually reading, because reading is faster than listening, and the brain would rather finish the sentence in front of it than wait for you to finish yours.

Cognitive load doesn't clear itself.
It needs a gap.
A slide with nothing on it removes the reading option entirely.
For a few seconds there is nothing to do except listen, and think, and catch up.

Without that gap, the audience does what my kids do when I take them for a walk by the lakes. They scatter, each one on their own track, chasing whatever's caught their eye, and they get to the end without ever really walking together.

An audience does the same thing with an idea. Nothing to slow them down, and they each arrive at their own version of your point, usually before you've finished making it.

The blank slide isn't empty. It's the only moment in the whole talk where the room has nowhere to look except you.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

Here's the part that complicates my own answer.

I told the room it was for their cognitive load.
It is.
​
But nobody in that Q&A could tell what my mechanism actually was.
They didn't know if slide fourteen was the third blank slide of the day or the first.
They didn't know how long my notes were, or whether I was working from a single bold word or a full script.

The audience never experiences the technique. They only experience the result.

Which means the blank slide was never a service to them. It was a test for me.

I try to avoid a lectern, I'd rather walk the room and talk as I need to.
So when the slide goes dark, there's nothing left to hide behind.
No text. No furniture. Just me, in the room, saying it.

Dead letters on a screen can carry a talk. They can't carry you.

🛠️ TRY THIS

You don't need slides for this. If you're mid-explanation and about to lose the room, stop.

Not a beat before your next sentence, a real few seconds of nothing, long enough for them to catch up before you take them further.

You don't even need to have built the blank slide in advance.
​
In both PowerPoint and Keynote, pressing B mid-presentation blacks the screen out on the spot, W does the same in white.

You can create the gap the moment you realise you need one, not just the ones you planned three weeks ago.

If you do build them in, drop the blank slide wherever you're about to make a point that needs the room to sit with it. Not every transition, just the ones that matter.

Then check your notes.

If they're full sentences, you're one bad night's sleep away from reading them aloud.
Swap the sentences for a handful of bold words, the concepts you need to hit, and trust yourself for the rest.

You'll wander a little. That's fine. It beats getting to the end without the room walking with you.

🧭 ASK YOURSELF THIS

What would happen if the screen went black?