Build the deck for your talk

You will produce a slide deck for your real talk that supports you instead of repeating you.

It is the Sunday before Wei Ling's management meeting. She has the one-page outline from lesson 2.4, Outline your talk on one page, a story about a new picker who froze in front of a reach truck, a few numbers she knows how to say, and a company slide template open on her laptop. The template is where most people start. It is also where most decks go wrong, because an empty template invites you to fill boxes rather than make points.

This exercise builds your deck in a fixed order that keeps the slides serving the talk. It takes about forty minutes for a ten-to-fifteen-minute talk, and you need your outline and one other person with a phone.

Step 1: start from the outline, not the template

Put the template aside for now. Open your one-page outline, go through it line by line, and for each part decide what the audience needs to see on screen.

The opening usually needs one slide, or none. Each main point usually needs two to four slides: one that states the point and one or more that show the evidence. The close needs one slide with the core message on it. Your story may need a single image, or nothing at all, because a story told without a slide behind it often holds attention better.

Wei Ling's outline had an opening, three points and a close. Her plan came to eleven slides: one for the opening question, three for the problem, three for the pilot, three for cost and risk, and one for the close. Backup slides for the appendix came later.

Step 2: write all the headlines first, then read them aloud

Now open the template, choose its plainest layout, and create the eleven slides with nothing on them but headlines. Write every headline as a full sentence that states the slide's point, as in lesson 4.1, One idea per slide, stated in the headline.

Do not add charts, pictures or text yet. Writing headlines first forces you to decide what each slide is for before you decide what goes on it. If you cannot write a headline for a slide, you have not yet decided what that slide is for, and adding content will not fix that.

Wei Ling's headlines for the problem section read: "New hires spend four days in a classroom before touching a pallet." "Supervisors at all three sites describe the same first-week problems." "Trainers spend about a third of their week repeating the same classroom sessions." That last figure came from her own team's timesheets, and her speaker note said so.

Before you add anything else, read all the headlines aloud, in order, as if they were a short memo. Do they tell the whole story of the talk, from opening to close? Does each one follow from the one before?

Gaps show up quickly. Wei Ling's headlines went from "Pilot hires were picking on their own about two weeks sooner" straight to "We should run a six-month trial at Tuas from July", and cost never came up. The finance head would have asked about it at once. She added "The online modules use the training licence we already pay for, at no extra cost" in between.

Fix the headlines until the read-through sounds like a clear argument. This step is the cheapest place to fix a deck, because nothing else has been built yet.

Step 3: add the evidence to each slide

Now add evidence under each headline, one slide at a time. A chart built as in lesson 4.2, Charts that show one thing. A photo. A short quote from a supervisor. A few words. Keep the text readable, following lesson 4.3, Text people can read from the back of the room.

Your prompts go in the speaker notes, where only you will see them. Move detail to the handout or to backup slides at the end, as lesson 4.4, Your slide deck is not your handout, described. Wei Ling's appendix had three slides: pilot design, full cost table and the training records.

Step 4: get a phone check from someone else

Send the deck to one person and ask them to look at it on their phone, without you there. Ask them to flag any slide where they had to zoom, squint or guess, and any headline they did not understand.

Your own phone check is useful, but because you already know what each slide says, your eyes quietly fill in whatever is hard to read, and a fresh pair of eyes will not do that for you. Wei Ling's colleague flagged two slides, a chart with axis labels too small to read and a headline with an internal abbreviation the managing director might not know, and fixing both took her about five minutes.

What done looks like

You are finished when you have a deck that does five things. Every slide has a full-sentence headline stating one idea. Reading the headlines alone tells the whole story. Each slide's body shows evidence for its headline, with no paragraphs. Your prompts sit in the speaker notes and the detail sits in a handout or appendix. And one other person has viewed it on a phone, with their flags fixed.

Your deck comes next, built in the same order, headlines before anything else.

Build the deck, do a headline-only read-through, and revise it after one person reviews it on a phone.

Course

• Presenting and public speaking