In this week's newsletter

• How to design slide decks when they serve multiple purposes
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use this week
• Your Weekly Bird Break

A few years ago I was preparing to lead a workshop with our executive team. The objectives included sharing a progress update, checking our assumptions, and pushing for greater strategic clarity before kicking off more work. They asked for a deck. Translation:

• a pre-read
• a compelling presentation
• a takeaway artifact to reference later
• a summary to share with anyone absent from the meeting

The problem: there is no way a single slide deck can fulfill all of those purposes well.

I know I’m not alone in this. I see the creation of "franken-decks" play out across organizations on boards and on teams of all types.

These decks are difficult to understand as pre-reads, boring as presentations, confusing to people who weren’t in the room, and an incomplete record of how the meeting went.

So what can you do in a slide-deck-obsessed organization?

Begin with the end in mind

• What is your meeting objective?
• What information do participants need to process before they can engage?
• What kind of engagement in the meeting will help you avoid the “could have been an email” trap?

Get clear on all the purposes your deck is trying to serve.

• What do attendees need to know before, during, and after this meeting to meet your objectives and engage the way you hope?
• What do people who aren’t there need to know?
• Note: these are separate things

Design accordingly

Once you’re clear on all the jobs your deck is trying to do, you can start designing more intentionally. To avoid presenting a dense deck while still meeting the needs you identified, consider:

• Creating an appendix with all the context people will need before and after. This is where to put all your text-heavy slides for reading.
• Asking whether a deck is the right format for everything you need to communicate. You might create a deck and include a slide with links to relevant memos and background materials.

Rework it afterward for posterity

If your organization commonly refers back to decks later, or communicates what happened in a meeting by forwarding the deck around, you can adapt your final deck to serve this purpose.

Set aside 30 minutes after the meeting to:

• Add a new intro slide including the meeting date, attendees, decisions made, next steps, and whom to contact with questions
• Link to the meeting recording if it exists
• Decide whether to keep or delete speaker notes if you scripted talking points there
• Delete or hide slides that only make sense in presentation mode
• Add “last updated by [name] on [date]” for version control

Going back to my original example, for this specific executive team workshop, we bucked our org’s culture. We wrote a memo as a pre-read and reference artifact. And we made a visually appealing slide deck for the meeting itself where we linked the memo in an appendix.

The deck helped us facilitate our participatory workshop. The memo format allowed us to be much more detailed and structured in our writing, and we continued to reference that memo for years to come.

Meeting Minute

Use these to start and end your meetings this week

​Warm-up question​

If you sent something in advance, this question helps you see what people understood, where they’re stuck, and where to focus the discussion. If you think people did not read it beforehand based on their questions, say, “let’s take 5 minutes right now for everyone to review it once more to ensure we’re starting on the same page.” Before jumping into the discussion be clear about which questions you'll answer this meeting and which are out of scope for the time you have.

​Check-out question​

This question helps you align as a group about what to share (and not share) beyond the meeting. It can also prevent a game of telephone with some leaders sharing more or different context than others. If you’re going to update the deck with a new post-meeting context slide, this question will help you decide what to include. You can also ask a follow-up: “what should we avoid sharing until we have more clarity?”

Hi, I’m Jess!

Meetings are where leaders make decisions, navigate change, build trust, develop people, and turn priorities into progress. I help leaders and organizations make those meetings count. Learn more here.​