The Presentation Virtuoso: When Your Deck Gets More Attention Than Your Architecture

Greetings, noble architects of the slide and the silo,

Ever find yourself spending more time animating bullet points than aligning business capabilities? Welcome to the bizarre reality where your PowerPoint deck is the real enterprise deliverable, and your actual architecture? A supporting character—if it's lucky.

The Main Story: Slides Before Strategy

Meet Clara, a seasoned enterprise architect with a mastery of TOGAF and a mild addiction to hexagonal diagrams. She’s spent weeks refining a coherent capability model. But when she walks into the steering committee meeting, the first comment is:

“Can we use a lighter blue on Slide 12? It’s more... stakeholder-friendly.”

The room proceeds to spend 47 minutes debating fonts, transitions, and whether the slide should “pop more.” Not a single soul asks what the architecture actually solves.

Meanwhile, Clara’s carefully crafted metamodel lies in obscurity, while her animated "As-Is vs To-Be" gets shared on the company Slack with the caption “🔥🔥🔥”.

TOGAF to the Rescue (Sort Of)

TOGAF, dear friends, has an answer.
Enter the Architecture Repository.

Instead of worshipping at the altar of .pptx, TOGAF nudges us toward:

• Architecture Contracts — Clear expectations, not slide decks

• Architecture Building Blocks (ABBs) — Tangible components, not abstract metaphors

• Architecture Governance Framework — Where substance trumps sparkle

TOGAF reminds us: “A pretty picture is not an architecture.”

Educational Twist: Slay the Slide, Save the Architecture

Want to restore sanity? Try this:

• Document First, Present Later: Build the architecture in ArchiMate or Sparx first, then distill it.

• Use TOGAF’s Content Metamodel: Show how your work links to real outcomes.

• Send pre-reads. Set expectations. If the font becomes a topic in your governance forum, something went very, very wrong.

Humor in Diagrams

Reader Engagement

What’s the most absurd feedback you’ve ever received on a slide?

• “Can you make the arrows happier?”

• “This feels too… architecture-y.”

• “Let’s turn this into a TikTok.”

Reply and share yours. We might just do a whole episode.

Next Week’s Tease

Digital Twins: Two for the Price of One — because managing one version of the truth is clearly too easy.