The Radio Test

How to tell if your presentation is decoration or story

There’s a familiar phrase in business communication: “Show, don’t tell.”

It’s sound advice — in moderation. The idea is to use examples rather than adjectives, to earn trust through evidence. Instead of saying a product is innovative, you show how it solves a problem in a way no one else has.

Fair enough. But perhaps that rule has gone too far. It assumes that what’s seen is always more persuasive than what’s felt.

Not so.

Feelings often move people more than visuals do. Alfred Hitchcock knew this. He once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

He was describing his philosophy of suspense — the notion that emotion comes not from the explosion itself, but from the build-up, the pause, the waiting. By letting the audience sense danger before it happens, Hitchcock created something more powerful than fear: imagination.

Collaboration through Imagination

The same principle applies to communication. Curiosity and emotional investment don’t come from the slide animation or the big reveal. They come from the audience’s imagination, from their participation in completing the thought before you do.

In other words, lead with feelings. Stir the imagination first. The right visuals will naturally follow.

Ira Glass, host of This American Life, once said that radio is the most visual medium. He meant that the human voice — its rhythm and emotion — can paint scenes more vividly than any slideshow. His colleague Robert Krulwich took the thought a step further: when radio works, the listener becomes a co-author. 

That’s a beautiful idea, and one worth reinforcing. It suggests that communication isn’t a broadcast; it’s a shared act of imagination. Same goes for a pitch or a team meeting. When we present, we often forget that. We try to show everything, filling slides with evidence and animation. But showing too much can rob the audience of the chance to see for themselves. Imagination needs space to breathe — a pause or a turn of phrase that lets the listener meet you halfway.

The Radio Test

Over the past two decades, the tools for creating beautiful slides have become effortless and irresistible. Keynote and PowerPoint and Canva democratized design, but they also changed how we think about clarity. Suddenly, we could choreograph our ideas instead of composing them.

When the medium becomes the message, the message is at risk of becoming decoration. 

None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s simply the environment we inhabit. When the world hums with motion and light, stillness and silence can feel unnatural. But those are crucial ingredients to making an idea memorable.

So here’s a thought experiment: What if every presentation had to pass a “radio test”?

No visuals. No charts. Just the story, told aloud. Would it still land? Would the audience feel the heartbeat of the idea?

That’s what great radio producers do. They shape arcs, vary tempo, and leave space for reflection. It’s a skill worth borrowing. If business communicators studied radio the way actors study theater, they might find themselves closer to the storytellers they aspire to be. They’d learn that:

• Pacing builds trust. A pause can be more persuasive than a graph.

• Precision paints the scene. Hemingway once wrote an entire tragedy in six words: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” That’s the power of getting one image exactly right — it lets the listener imagine the rest.

• Structure matters. Every story needs an arc that holds our attention and earns the silence that follows.

These lessons apply to every corner of business life. They remind us that clarity is less about what’s on the slide and more about what’s in the listener’s mind. 

We live surrounded by screens. They blink at us from every surface — phones, laptops, dashboards, grocery aisles, and wrists. There are now more mobile phones in the world than people, and nearly 60 percent of us carry a smartphone everywhere we go.

So it’s no surprise that our presentations have become so dependent on visuals (and hooked on visual noise). 

Roughly 30 million PowerPoint decks are created each day. The modern business presentation has become its own genre: cinematic, data-heavy, and meticulously styled. But here’s a question worth asking: What would happen if the power went out? If the slides vanished, could the story stand on its own?

Podcasts give us a glimpse of this rebirth. Programs like The Moth and StoryCorps rekindled our appetite for stories that sound true because they feel lived. They remind us that authenticity doesn’t need animation. It needs cadence, honesty, and a little air between sentences.

The French author, actress, and shameless libertine Colette once wrote, “To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”

That perspective may be the best advice for presenters today. Because sometimes, the highest praise for a story well told isn’t applause — it’s quiet. The kind that means the audience is still picturing it long after the lights come up.