Slideware: a presentation program, such as Microsoft
PowerPoint, LibreOffice Impress, or Apple Keynote.
In my previous post in this series, I argued for reserving
presentations, recorded or live, for content that needs your voice. Live
presentations should also merit the scheduling overhead. Once you’ve
decided on a topic to present, it’s tempting to go straight to slideware. I
suggest otherwise.
Narrative first, visuals next
The 16:9 slide format forces you to slice your narrative by
visuals. When you don’t know what that narrative is, you’ll often
second-guess yourself on every slide. Add to that confusion the
distractions of font size, colour, creating diagrams, finding images,
and deciding transitions and builds. The form precedes the function.
This is why going to slides without a narrative creates a massive
cognitive challenge for most presenters. This is also why we reach
for shortcuts such as canned slides, so we can at least make progress
with this demanding challenge.
I suggest nailing down your narrative before turning your
attention to slides, which serve as supporting visuals. There are
many ways to build a narrative, either on your own or with a
co-presenter. But step 0 is to describe your key idea and your
audience.
What are you saying and to whom?
When constructing my narrative, I find it useful to begin by
identifying what Nancy Duarte calls the “Big Idea”. Consider it a
way to describe the “so-what” of our narrative in a sentence. You can
get to the big idea by describing its two constituent parts.
- What’s your point of view? This could be a
contrarian take on a popular belief, a new perspective about a
topic, a novel idea, a practice you want people to adopt, or
something else. - What’s at stake? Why should anyone care about your
point of view? What if they don’t?
Once you’ve thought through those two parts, combine them into a
single sentence that isn’t a mouthful and rolls off your tongue with
ease.
Here’s an example of the big idea behind this video about
the case against brainstorming.
| My point of view | What’s at stake? |
|---|---|
| Brainstorming feels scientific and collaborative, but research debunks it as a corporate superstition. Brainwriting (solo, anonymous, written idea generation) is a better approach. |
Teams sabotage their best ideas through production blocking, conformity pressure, dominant personalities, and social loafing. By believing that brainstorming makes them more innovative, they lose out on valuable ideas and unique perspectives. |
| The big idea: Instead of brainstorming, a corporate superstition that kills your best ideas, adopt brainwriting and let independent judgment surface the widest range of ideas and the deepest thinking. |
|
Alongside the big idea, identify your audience. I suggest a
persona-building exercise to guide your thinking.
- Step 1: Give them a name. E.g Parul, the project
lead. - Step 2: Personify them with a photo or a stick figure.
Having this sort of personified audience allows you to empathise
with them as you build the narrative you’ll pitch. E.g.,
how will Parul feel when I challenge her assumptions about
brainstorming? - Step 3: Describe the persona. You can add as many
details as are relevant to your narrative; e.g. role, prior
experience and knowledge, goals, and interests. - Step 4: Say why they’d care. Think about why they’d
want to pay attention to your presentation. What problem might you
address for them? How will the ideas in your presentation make
their world better? - Step 5: What do you reckon they’ll take away from your
presentation? I suggest capping takeaways at three, so you don’t
overload your narrative.
Sometimes, these persona details are evident and intuitive. You
might be presenting to your teammates. In that case, you might speed
through the persona-building step in minutes and tweak it a little
after each iteration. In other situations, you may need to ask around
to learn about your audience. For example, you may be presenting to
a new client. In such situations, investing time to learn about your
prospective audience will help you sharpen your eventual
storyline.
Here’s an example of a persona for the same video I linked earlier
in the piece.
Building the storyline
Are you ready to go to slides yet? Nope. Once you’ve identified
your big idea and the top three takeaways, I suggest fleshing out
your narrative to serve them. Narrative building is a subjective
craft, so choose a story structure that fits your content. Here are
six story structures I’ve used with success.
| Format | What it is | Stages |
|---|---|---|
| Sparkline | A narrative that swings back and forth between where things stand today and where they could go, using repeated beats to make the future feel real rather than abstract. |
What is (today, as it stands) → What could be (the future you’re selling) — repeat as many beats as you need to make your point. |
| Explainer | A structured walkthrough of a concept or insight the audience doesn’t already have. It follows the “tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” format. |
Context (lay of the land) → Story structure (the roadmap) → Steps (the narrative, step by step) → Recap (what you told them) → Celebrate! (a call to action) |
| Pitch | Recommends a new, inspiring solution to a problem the audience is experiencing, and makes that solution stand out from the obvious, boring options. |
The windup (where we are today) → The hurdle (the problem) → The vision (the way out) → The options (a few paths — mostly boring, one inspiring) → The close (why the inspiring option wins) → The fine print (how it happens, plus a bonus) |
| Hook, meat, payoff | A short, punchy talk structure that grabs attention upfront, introduces the substance next, and then lands a conclusion that reinforces the opening. |
Hook (a provocative opener — a question, challenge, or personal story) → Meat (structured narrative, e.g. lists or a timeline) → Payoff (call to action that connects back to the hook) |
| Situation, complication, resolution | This is the classic consulting shape. Start by describing the world as it is. Next, introduce a problem or opportunity, then land the solution that addresses it. |
The situation (objective context) → BUT → The opportunity/complication (the challenge or opening) → THEREFORE → The resolution (the solution) |
| Hero’s journey | The most dramatic of the six. This structure starts in normalcy, descends into a crisis, hits rock bottom, then climbs back out stronger. It’s a Pixar/DreamWorks favourite, and a natural fit for project stories and experience reports. |
The situation (normalcy before the problem struck) → The challenge (a problem you couldn’t ignore) → The crisis (things go south) → Hitting rock bottom (the worst point) → The comeback (how you fought back) → Emerging stronger (lessons learned) |
With unpredictable audiences, I’ve tried a seventh, more flexible
structure in which one presentation holds multiple smaller
storylines. In such presentations, I show my audience a list of
potential topics to dive into. Each topic could have a different,
independent story structure. Such talks give the audience a sense of
control, but also demand a lot from you as a speaker. Neal Ford calls
this pattern, “Á la Carte Content,” and
it works well when you have more content than the time allows.
Figure 1: A flexible narrative
structure. When reporting on an internal research survey, I let my
audience choose the question they wanted me to answer using the
research data.
If you’ve never built a storyline before, I understand it can be
daunting. I suggest four approaches to building your storyline.
Collaborative whiteboarding
If you’re co-presenting with someone, I recommend whiteboarding
your storyline with them. You can follow one of my recommended
story structures, or build your own. Sticky notes on a physical
whiteboard work fine, but if you’re remote, you can even use tools
like Miro or Mural.
Sticky notes offer a distinct advantage for crafting your
narrative. You can move stickies back and forth, edit them, or
trash them. Colour-coding sticky notes helps you visualise related
themes, and placing them close together helps you notice
adjacencies.
If whiteboarding is your thing, I’ve created a Mural template
with all my favourite story structures and panels, so you can
outline your big idea and describe your audience persona.
Diagram-centric narratives
Of late, I’ve found myself creating presentations that start as
a boxes-and-arrows style diagram in my notebook, or even on a
slide. In these situations, the diagram becomes the spine around
which I construct the rest of my narrative.
For example, when I was starting my most recent role, I doodled
the diagram you see below, on a piece of paper. It was my way of
thinking about how I intended to play my role as head of culture
at Thoughtworks. After a few more hours of scribbling and making
notes, I reproduced the diagram on a slide. I built my final slide
deck using a combination of animations and nested slides.
I’ll expand on this example further down in the article.
Figure 2: A core diagram can
start as an excellent spine for your narrative.
Narrative-based writing
If you don’t enjoy whiteboarding, I suggest writing your
narrative in text. This approach can work well if you’re a solo
presenter and prefer writing as a thinking tool. You can start with a
bulleted structure for your ideas and flesh them out as you go.
If you want to use one of the story formats I described
earlier, I’ve created a pack of Google Docs templates that you can
use as an alternative to the Mural whiteboarding option.
Voice memos + AI
Since AI voice transcription has gotten better in recent years,
I’ve also used voice memos to flesh out my thinking. The Voice
Memos app on iOS and the Recorder app on Android offer excellent
transcripts, and once you’ve picked a story structure, you can use
these apps to record your thoughts for each segment and then pass
the transcripts to any AI chatbot to clean up and structure your
narrative draft. You may need to clean up the AI-produced draft,
but with some practice and by creating some custom skills, you can
push AI tools to get you close to a usable narrative. Of course,
you can’t, and you shouldn’t outsource your thinking to AI.
Whichever approach you take, the success criterion remains the
same — you should know your narrative well enough to voice it
without any visual aids. And if you achieve that outcome, you’ll have
a solid narrative platform, which you can then enhance using
audio-visual aids.
Create a storyboard to make your plan concrete
Almost there. One more step. Your narrative is a clarifying
artefact for what you want to say. You now need some clarity on what
you want to show. This is where a storyboard comes in handy.
The simplest storyboard describes each slide you create in as
simple a way as you can get away with. If you’re already using a
physical or virtual whiteboard, sticky notes or index cards can help
you build that storyboard — one sticky note to describe each slide.
The Mural template I shared also has a panel to organise your
storyboard. As I’ve explained
earlier, don’t worry about the number of sticky notes. The slide
count doesn’t matter when you control the pace of your
presentation.
Figure 3: A storyboard with sticky
notes. (generated using AI)
You can also use documents to create your storyboard, though they
aren’t as flexible as sticky notes. The Google Docs template pack
also has a storyboarding template you can use.
Storyboarding using slides
These days, I often create my storyboards using slides,
especially when I use a diagram-centric narrative. The slide
sorter or light table view in your presentation tool is excellent
for creating storyboards because it allows me to drop in text and
sample images and reorder my panels until I’m satisfied with the
plan.
The trick with slide-based storyboarding is to resist the
temptation to design slides. When storyboarding this way, I limit
my focus to the spine of my slide deck. The polish comes
later.
Remember the diagram I shared earlier in this article? The
images below show my final diagram, the storyboard that I created
using that diagram as the spine, and then a light-table view of
the final deck after I added a few layers of polish.
If you’re accustomed to starting your presentation design by
opening a presentation tool, my suggested approach will perhaps
feel onerous. From experience teaching presentation skills to
hundreds of Thoughtworks colleagues, I find this approach to be a
way to start slow so I can go fast later. Once you try this
approach a few times, you’ll notice that it doesn’t take as much
effort as you may fear. It also speeds up slide creation because
you’re working off a plan, as against playing it by ear.
On the other hand, if you’re a skilful presenter, my suggested
approach may seem rigid and linear. That’ll be a fair criticism.
I’ll use a Pablo Picasso quote in response to that reaction.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an
artist.— Pablo Picasso
Here’s what I’ve noticed when coaching colleagues to
present:
- Presenters who aren’t accustomed to thinking about their
narrative, audience, and presentation outlines benefit from a
structured approach to these aspects of their presentation. - As people gain skill and experience, they shift to a more
fluid process. They may skip a step because it feels intuitive,
or they may bounce back and forth between other steps without
adding to their cognitive load.
All this said, the narrative won’t be a static artefact. As you
build your storyboard, you may tweak the narrative. Even as you
design your slides, you may reconsider your narrative, storyboard,
and even your assumptions about your audience. None of these
artefacts and considerations is a one-and-done. The outline feeds
the design, but the design can also challenge the outline. That’s
the narrative you want walking into slide design: solid enough
that building your slides becomes an exercise in execution, not
invention, yet open enough to flex when the details teach you
something new.
With that narrative platform in hand, let’s explore some
principles for slide design in the next few posts.
