You will be able to turn rough notes into a storyline where each slide makes one point.
Before you open your presentation app for your next talk, write down in one sentence what you want your audience to decide at the end. Most weak decks fail before anyone designs the first slide, because nobody decided what the deck should say. The usual first move is to open the app, pick a template and start filling slides. Decide what the deck says first, and use an AI assistant to help you shape it.
Kavitha, an invented example along with all her figures, wrote a research brief in module 4, and it went down well. Her director asked her to present it to the management team in two weeks, with a recommendation. She opened the presentation app, picked a template and started filling slides. By the fourth slide she had a title page, an agenda, a "Background" slide and a "Competitor overview" slide with eleven bullet points, and she did not know what slide five was for.
A storyline is an ordered list of slide headlines, each a full sentence stating one point, built backwards from the decision you want. Because it starts from the end, you need three things clear before you ask the assistant for anything, and the assistant needs all three as well: what your notes contain, who the audience is, and what you want them to decide or do at the end.
Paste your notes into the assistant, handling confidential details the way module 2 teaches. Describe the audience in one or two sentences, including what they already know and what they care about. Kavitha's brief to the assistant named the managing director, the finance head and the sales head, and said that all three knew the market well but had not seen her research, that the finance head would care about revenue risk, and that the sales head would care about whether clients would actually buy.
Then state the decision or action you want as a specific destination. A vague aim such as "Present the research" gives the assistant nothing to work towards. A good destination is management approving a three-month pilot of an annual subscription offer for mid-sized clients.
Ask for slide headlines in order, each one a full sentence that states one point. For a typical twenty-minute presentation, ask for eight to twelve headlines. Asking for sentence headlines is the most useful instruction you can give the assistant. A topic headline names a subject but makes no claim, such as "Competitor pricing", and it lets a slide hold anything, which is how decks fill up with bullets. A point, or sentence headline, commits the slide to one claim, such as "Two of our three closest competitors still price per session", and everything on that slide either supports the claim or does not belong there.
Tell the assistant not to write any slide content yet. Changing a headline costs nothing and changing a finished slide costs a lot, so fix the story while it is still a list of headlines.
When the storyline comes back, read only the headlines, in order, as if they were a short essay. If the headlines alone tell the story, the deck will work, and if they don't, no amount of design will fix it. As you read, look for three problems: gaps, repeats and order.
A gap is where one headline does not follow from the one before, so the audience would need something in between. A repeat is two headlines making the same point in different words. An order problem is an important point that comes too late, or a point that comes before the audience has the background to understand it.
Fix these in the storyline yourself, or ask the assistant for specific changes. Keep revising until you could read the headlines aloud to someone in the corridor and they would understand the argument. Kavitha's revised storyline had nine headlines. Paraphrased, in order, they said:
Annual subscriptions are increasingly being offered to clients of their size. Two of their three closest competitors still price per session. One competitor switched to subscriptions last year, and its prices are now public. Their clients already behave like subscribers and book most programmes a year ahead. A subscription would make revenue more predictable for finance planning. The main risk is giving discounts to clients who would have paid full price anyway. A three-month pilot with ten mid-sized clients would test demand at low risk. Success means at least four sign-ups and no fall in average revenue per client. They are asking for approval to run the pilot from next quarter.
For the last check, test every headline against the decision you want, and ask whether that point helps the audience get there. Many decks carry slides because people expect them rather than because they help, such as the agenda, a long background section and a methodology slide nobody asked for. Some of these can move to speaker notes or an appendix, and many can simply be deleted.
Kavitha removed her original "Background" and "Agenda" slides. She cut the methodology to one line in the speaker notes of slide one, ready in case anyone asked.
Use notes from a recent project of your own for the next step. Give the assistant the notes, the audience and the decision, and work through the checks until you have a storyline that makes the case through its headlines alone.
Turn notes from a recent project into a storyline of eight to twelve sentence headlines and revise it until the headlines alone make the case.
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