Let’s be honest. PowerPoint had a good run.

It gave us bullets. Animations. That satisfying click when you nailed the timing of a transition. But somewhere along the way, something got lost. We took a tool made for presenting ideas and twisted it into a format that actually limits how we tell stories. The result? Meetings that feel like conveyor belts. Click. Click. Click. Next slide. Next point. Same pattern, every time.

But here’s the thing. Humans don’t talk in slides. We don’t tell stories in perfect order. Real conversations don’t care about your agenda slide. They’re messy, they’re jumpy, they loop back and wander off.

And yet, we still build our presentations like trains. Everyone hops on at the intro, and you better hope they stay on all the way to the “thank you” slide. No stops. No detours. Just a straight track. But what if there’s a better way?

What if presenting could be more like walking through a forest than riding a train?

That’s what none linear presentation is about. It’s about moving with your audience instead of marching through a script. It’s about storytelling, not broadcasting. About creating a structure where you can jump to the parts that matter right now, not just the parts you planned to say next.

I’ve been experimenting with this for a while. Building tools. Tinkering with ideas. Sitting in meetings where someone asks a brilliant question and the presenter says, “We’ll get to that in a few slides.” Why wait? Why not go there right away? Why not show the thing the person actually wants to talk about?

Imagine giving a talk and someone in the back raises their hand, asking something just a bit outside your slide order. Normally, you’d get nervous. Maybe skim over some slides to find the right one. Break the flow. But with a none linear approach, that’s not a detour. That’s the whole point.

Think of your presentation like a map, not a road. A collection of ideas you can move between depending on where the conversation takes you. That’s what we do in real life, right? If you’re explaining something to a friend over coffee, you don’t say, “Please wait while I finish this point, and then I’ll address your question in section 3.2.” You go with the flow. You jump. You adapt.

And yet, in meetings or pitches or classrooms, we still treat communication like a fixed playlist.

Linear presentations are fine when you’re reading off a script or pre-recording a webinar. But when you’re in the room, or on the call, everything changes. You get real-time feedback. Facial expressions. Curiosity. Confusion. Those little sparks that tell you when it’s time to go deeper, or when to back off.

Linear slides ignore all that. They lock you in.

None linear presentation unlocks it.

It’s not just a tech thing. It’s a mindset. But let’s talk about the tech for a second, because it does matter. We finally have tools that can support this kind of flow. I’ve been building one myself, called Nyarna, which means story in Elvish. It’s designed to let you roam freely through your content. Want to jump to a live demo? Easy. Want to skip that whole section because the audience already knows it? Done.

The idea is simple. Your content is a graph, not a line. Nodes of information. Connections between ideas. You move through it based on the conversation. Sometimes you go deep. Sometimes you go wide. Sometimes you just need to jump into the “show me the numbers” slide because your boss is getting twitchy. That’s the magic.

When people hear “non-linear,” they often think it means chaos. But it’s not about ditching structure. It’s about adaptive structure. You still prepare. You still build your story. But you build it knowing you might take different paths through it, depending on who’s in the room and what they care about.

It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book. Except you’re the guide. You know the terrain. You know where the juicy plot twists are. You’re just letting the audience decide what order to explore them in.

If you’ve ever DM’d a tabletop RPG, you already know this instinct. You build the world, the encounters, the NPCs. But once the players step in? Anything goes. They poke at details you didn’t think mattered. They chase side quests. They surprise you. And the best DMs don’t fight that, they lean in. That’s the energy I want when I present something.

Now, let’s be real. Not everyone’s going to jump ship from PowerPoint tomorrow. And that’s okay. This isn’t about replacing everything. It’s about rethinking the moments that matter. Sales meetings. Strategy workshops. Product demos. Anywhere where real-time dialogue is more important than perfect delivery.

Because when you give yourself permission to move off-script, something shifts. You stop performing. You start connecting. You’re not just presenting anymore. You’re having a conversation.

It reminds me of how Netflix changed how we watch stories. Suddenly, we weren’t limited to waiting a week for the next episode. We could skip intros, jump ahead, rewatch the best parts. We were in control. Presentations should feel like that. Like you can go where you want, when you want.

And here’s the kicker. None linear presentations actually make you more prepared, not less. You have to know your material. You have to know your story inside and out. But once you do, the freedom to move through it naturally makes you feel more confident. More real. More human.

The audience feels that. They lean in when you respond to their curiosity. They remember the talk because it felt like theirs, not just yours.

I’ve seen this happen in rooms where people were half-checked-out at the start. But then something catches their attention. A slide appears that answers a question they didn’t know how to ask. Suddenly, they’re in. They’re part of the story. And we’re off.

That’s what great communication is. Not a transmission. A connection.

So yeah, linear slides still have their place. But if you’re presenting ideas to real humans, in real rooms, with real questions, maybe it’s time to think differently. Maybe it’s time to stop treating your audience like passengers on a train and start treating them like explorers on a shared journey.

None linear presentation is just a fancy way of saying “let’s talk like people.” Let’s meet our audience where they are. Let’s follow their questions, not just our agendas. Let’s build stories that bend, flex, jump, rewind, and evolve, just like the conversations we actually want to have.

Because in the end, the best presentations aren’t performances. They’re shared experiences. And the best tools? They don’t just show information. They help us navigate it, together.