How to stop loving all your children equally.
I was going to call this post “Killing your babies” or “Sophie’s Choice” but those are a little too dramatic and macabre when I’m really just talking about slides.
I see this a lot with strategists a coach. They’re working on a deck and a slide or framework or schematic really resonates with them. So they spend a lot of time on the slide to make it beautiful, and meaningful. And because it then carries an outsized importance to the strategist, they tweak the rest of the narrative so this Beautiful Slide hits as hard as possible. I get it - when you have a star you build your team around them, because that can make the whole team shine.
But usually, your Beautiful Slide is not Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi, and you shouldn’t try to build the team around it. If you’re working hard to keep the Beautiful Slide centered in your story, or if it’s moving around to different parts of your presentation, that’s probably evidence that it’s not advancing your narrative. Which is what every slide needs to do - make a single point that helps make your strategy narrative more clear and more persuasive.
Strategy is inherently a creative process. It requires innovation, insight and no small amount of conjuring. And while the Google Sheet scratch pad that you might use to list all your inputs and musings and hypotheses is part of the strategy process, the catalog of ideas - however brilliant - is not a strategy. Like every creative process, strategy needs a good editor.
When I see strategists struggling with this issue, with a child they love a little too much, here’s what I tell them:
I agree this is a Beautiful Slide. But not in this deck. Save it for another presentation - or another client - where it can be a star.
Start - and finish - an outline before you create a single slide. Each bullet point in your outline is a slide, and each one clearly telegraphs the single point you want your slide to make. Once you can read your outline aloud from top to bottom and it’s clear and persuasive, it’s time to start making slides.
The Beautiful Slide is a very easy rabbit hole to fall into. The strategic process almost invites it. We start broad and get narrower as we go through the process. So when we find ourselves on a slide that causes us to focus and be specific, it can feel like we’re in the right place. But pay attention to where you feel resistance. If it’s not fitting, it might mean that your story is right and you’re just trying to shoehorn in an idea that doesn’t make it any more persuasive, and considerably less clear.