In recent years, CEOs at behemoth organizations like Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn have been reconsidering the use of PowerPoint in meetings (Amazon has gone so far as to ban the program entirely). And if you’ve ever sat through a PowerPoint presentation and gotten to the end with no clear idea of what the point was, then you know exactly where Jeff Bezos et all are coming from.

PowerPoint was created in 1987 to accompany, or rather, facilitate presentations as an alternative to flip charts and overhead transparency projectors. While innovative at the time, our understanding of the tool has vastly changed since then.

Human brains are hardwired for narrative allegory. Anthropologists and neuroscientists agree: we process, speak and retain information more effectively when it is delivered in narrative form. What’s more, narrative stories are persuasive because they successfully appeal to emotion, the quickest channel to the brain. Which means storytelling is the most effective instrument humans have to convey messages and provoke reactions.

Researchers at Princeton found that while telling and hearing a story respectively, speakers and their listeners’ brain activity often synchronize. PowerPoint presentations restrict our ability to objectively analyze information because of the format’s limiting nature. Speakers rely solely on the slides in front of them instead of accessing their critical thinking skills. With a traditional, bulleted PowerPoint presentation, it comes as no surprise that you and your audience fall into autopilot.

A group of physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider encountered this dilemma during their internal meetings. Speakers were too dependent on their presentations and often couldn’t answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on screen.

“The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University. He notes that their meetings became infinitely more productive after moving away from the traditional slide presentation.

“The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster.”

For companies using PowerPoint presentations to solicit partnerships, pitch at high stakes meetings, or present to prospective buyers, fostering that same kind of engagement with their target audience can be a challenge.

The perils of the program become inflated when companies work on presentations internally. Not only has critical thinking been disabled but they are confined by the tools of the software: from which font size to use to how to adjust an image to where to edit a chart. These micro decisions overtake the critical thinking process.

Furthermore, companies are often so immersed in the complexity of their work, that they struggle to extract a clear and simple message to communicate to their audience, which in turn makes their presentations fall flat.

Frequently, an outside perspective is needed to achieve this.

“It is difficult to juggle when you run and sing at the same time,” says Oksana Bovt, founder of Theoria Creative. “That’s what the typical process of developing an internal presentation can be compared to.”

“Many of our clients come to us concerned strictly about the appearance of their presentation, but only when we begin our process, do they realize that what’s missing in the deck is, in fact, a clear message.”

Theoria Creative develops effective presentations for their corporate clients using PowerPoint merely as an output tool to hold the completed presentation, not as a driving force behind it. Instead, Theoria creates successful scientific and corporate presentations by separating strategy from content development and design, as well as PowerPoint. This separation ensures that the focus is kept on the narrative and overall business goal of the presentation meeting or investor pitch.

At the end of the process, Theoria Creative’s life sciences clients are able to use this newfound perspective, ensuring a more engaging delivery and thus, an interested audience. This, in turn, increases their chances of achieving their business goals, whether that’s raising capital, pitching to new clients, or explaining complex concepts at high-stakes meetings.