You will produce a one-page talk outline you can speak from.
Arjun has his core message and audience profile from module 1. He also has an opening and a close he is fairly happy with. What he does not have is the middle, and his instinct is to open his slide software and start dragging charts in. That usually ends with thirty slides and no clear route through them.
This exercise puts the whole talk on one page before any slides exist. A one-page outline is short enough to see at a glance, easy to change, and enough to speak from if the projector dies. It takes about twenty-five minutes.
Write your core message as the first line of the page, exactly as you tested it in lesson 1.4, Write and test your message and audience profile. Everything below it has to serve it.
Arjun's top line: "Moving our one reminder from one day before to two days before would cut missed appointments."
Under it, write the slot length and your target. Your target is the slot minus at least one minute. Arjun's slot at the clinic managers' meeting is 12 minutes, so his target is 11 minutes or less.
Choose your structure from lesson 2.1, Structures that work for most talks. Arjun is making a recommendation to people senior to him, so he uses situation, complication and resolution, with the recommendation stated early, as lesson 2.2, Open strong in the first 30 seconds, suggests for senior audiences.
Then write the bones of the talk, each part on its own line or two. Here is Arjun's outline, with his signposts in quotation marks.
Opening: "I'm going to ask two of your clinics to try sending our reminder a day earlier." Then one sentence on why it matters to them: fewer empty slots and less time spent on rebooking calls. Point 1, the situation: "First, where we are." We send one reminder the day before each appointment. Point 2, the complication: "Second, what the data shows." Missed appointments are highest on Mondays and after public holidays, when the day-before reminder lands on a day off. Point 3, the resolution: "Third, what I'm proposing." Same single message, sent two days before, trialled at two clinics for three months, with no extra work for front-desk staff. Close: the message in the same words, then the ask: two volunteer clinics by the end of the meeting.
Keep each line short. The outline is a map, not a script. If you write full sentences for everything except the opening, signposts and close, you will read them on the day instead of speaking.
Next to each main point, write the one piece of evidence or example that supports it. One per point is enough. If a point has no evidence, it is an opinion, and the audience will treat it as one.
Arjun's notes: point 1, a screenshot of the current reminder text. Point 2, a bar chart of missed appointments by weekday across six months, from the group's booking system. Point 3, the reply from the messaging vendor confirming that changing the send time is a settings change with no extra cost. These are his own sources, and his talk names each one out loud.
Also note where a story would help. Module 3 covers stories in detail. For now a placeholder is fine, such as "story: the patient who missed two appointments after Deepavali".
Stand up, set a timer, and talk the whole thing through aloud from the outline alone. No slides, no full script. Speak at the pace you would use in the room. Silent reading tells you nothing about length, because people read much faster than they speak.
Arjun's first run took 14 minutes 20 seconds against a target of 11 minutes, so he needed to cut 3 minutes 20 seconds. Point 2 was the culprit. He had walked through every weekday instead of the two that mattered. He cut the walk-through to Mondays and post-holiday days and moved the full table to the appendix. The second run took 11 minutes 40 seconds. Trimming his opening story to two sentences brought the third run to 10 minutes 50 seconds, inside the target with a minute to spare in the slot.
Note each run's time at the bottom of the page. If you cannot get under target after three runs, go back to the keep, move or cut test from lesson 1.3, Cut what you love but they do not need.
A finished outline fits on one side of A4 or one screen. The core message sits at the top, then the opening, three main points each with its signpost and one piece of evidence, and the close with your ask. At the bottom are the times of your run-throughs, with the last one inside your target.
You should be able to put the page on a table, glance at it once, and give the talk. In the next module you will add stories and examples to it, and in module 4 you will build slides from it, so keep it somewhere you can find again. Your own outline, timer and first run come next.
Write the one-page outline, talk through it with a timer, and adjust it to fit your slot with a minute to spare.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).