Almost every learner shows up with one of three habits, and naming yours saves a branch of frustration.
What is the data dump?
The data dump is the most common and the easiest to diagnose. The deck contains everything the author found, in the order they found it, because leaving something out felt like hiding it. A real example of the shape: 34 slides and 41 charts booked into a 30-minute slot, which is 53 seconds a slide and 44 seconds a chart. An audience carries about three claims out of a room. Forty-one charts for three surviving claims is 13.7 charts per claim, and thirty-eight of them were work that the audience will never use.
The repair is not "cut slides", because the author doesn't know which to cut. The repair is upstream: write the takeaway, then keep only what makes the takeaway believable, and put the rest in an appendix where it costs nothing and answers questions if they come. The instinct that leaving things out is dishonest is worth respecting and worth redirecting. An appendix honours it without spending the room's attention.
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What are the other two failure modes?
The beautiful empty deck is rarer and more dangerous, because it survives review. Fonts consistent, everything aligned, a considered colour palette, an icon set, and not one slide that makes a claim. It usually happens when someone learns mechanics before message, which is the order most training uses and the reverse of the order taught here. The diagnostic is the title stack: read only the titles, in order, and see whether they form an argument. If they read as a table of contents, the deck is empty however good it looks.
The deck that answers a question nobody asked is the most expensive of the three, because all the work is real and all of it's wasted. It's the direct output of skipping the four questions in the section on finding the decision, and so of never recovering the decision. The symptom in the room is a first question that starts "this is helpful, but what we actually need to know is". The repair is upstream of everything, in the four questions, and the cost of skipping them is roughly the whole build: 22 hours of build plus a 60-minute meeting for seven people is 29 person-hours, of which the two slides that touched the real question are 7.7% of a 26-slide deck.
You probably have one of the three. Data dumpers are usually analysts with real depth who are afraid of being caught not knowing something. Empty-deck builders are usually people with design instincts and no ownership of the argument. Wrong-question builders are usually eager and under-briefed, and they're the easiest to fix, because the fix is a conversation before the work rather than a habit change during it.