# Deck story - the argument before the slides

The slides guide (instructions/slides.md) gives the method. This file is the
depth behind its first steps: how to find the answer, shape the argument, calibrate it to
the room, and write words that carry it. Pull it when the material is thin or
rich, the audience is senior, or the first slide list reads like a table of
contents.

## Intake - seven questions, one message

Ask them all at once; skip any the human already answered (pasted bullets, a linked
doc). The first three are required - ask again if skipped, they shape everything.

0. **The one thing.** If they remember nothing else, what? ("Approve the Q3 budget",
   "Retention is the lever, not acquisition".)
1. **The goal.** What happens after the last slide? (a decision, alignment, a meeting)
2. **The audience.** Executives / cross-functional team / own team / external
   (client, partner, board). Named people help.
3. **Raw material.** Bullets, a doc, "start from scratch" - messy is fine.
4. **Numbers.** Metrics and proof points. Numbers make slides land.
5. **The energy.** Urgent / confident / informational / exploratory.
6. **Constraints.** Time, slide cap, topics to avoid, must-have slides, who presents.

## Find the answer first - five questions, in order

| Ask | Yields |
|---|---|
| What is top of mind for the audience - goal, worry, definition of success? | the objective |
| Twenty seconds in a lift: what do you tell them? | THE ANSWER |
| Which logical steps take them from where they are to the answer? | the storyline |
| Where will they disagree? What moves them to act? | the slides |
| What do you not know? What is the burden of proof? | the evidence |

Top-down, always. Never start from the slides or the analysis. The answer's shape:
context ("this matters, in these ways") · options ("two paths, here they are") ·
recommendation ("the first, for these reasons") · next steps ("what it takes, by
when"). "We don't know yet, but here is how we find out" IS an answer; a hedge is not.

**The pyramid.** Slides 1-2 carry the conclusion. Each argument is a slide group.
Evidence sits under its argument, never free-floating. A deck where the answer
arrives on slide 14 has been built bottom-up - rebuild it.

**Insights first, outputs second, provenance never.** How the model works,
what alternatives were considered, how long it took, what went wrong - none
of it belongs in the room. Time spent making a slide earns it nothing. (A
process that IS the subject - the operating model you propose, the rollout
plan - is content, and the atlas has layouts for it.)

## Calibrate to the room

- **Executives** - so-what framing, 12-15 slides, one ask.
- **The team** - actionable detail: owners, dates, dependencies.
- **External (client, partner, investor)** - polished narrative, social proof,
  evidence-heavy, the firm's specific language in the titles.
- **Board** - trajectory, risks, asks. Concise.
- **Summary vs full material.** A summary is the conversation about the
  answer: sized to HALF the meeting (a 45-minute slot carries 12-20 slides;
  the rest is discussion). The full deck is the reference ("see slide 53"),
  organised behind the thesis and its drivers, as long as it needs to be.
  Know which you are building; never blend them.
- **Wayfinding.** An agenda only when there are three or more sections, each
  item a section name + the slide it starts on. Section dividers only past ~25
  slides - below that, section changes live in the assertions themselves.

## The evidence check - before designing anything

Walk every planned slide with one question: could I draft this without inventing a
single fact? Mark it has-enough or not. For the gaps, write SPECIFIC questions (not
"more on the team" but "which four people, prior firms, role on this project?"),
at most two or three per slide, only where the answer changes the slide. Then one
deck-level call:
- **ask** - the default when any slide lacks material; put the consolidated list
  to the human before building;
- **shrink to the evidence** - when most slides lack material and the human
  plainly has no more (early stage, the narrative is the product) - propose the
  smaller deck;
- **proceed with placeholders** - only when the gaps are editorial (framing,
  taglines), never data (numbers, names, dates).

Every claim traces to source, and the gap has a stage. In the scaffold (the
one-sentence slides on the canvas) a missing fact is a visible `[PLACEHOLDER:
what belongs here]`. In the build, a factual placeholder BLOCKS its slide -
answered, or the slide is cut - never filled with plausible prose. Editorial
gaps (a tagline, a caption, a transition line) you DO draft, labelled as
proposed in a note on what you drafted (`npx marver comments new <scene/frame> --on "<the
words you drafted>" --body "Proposed: ..."`) - that is writing, not invention.

## Writing that carries

- **Distil the voice first.** Scan the material for concepts that recur on three
  or more slides; give each a 2-4 word mnemonic, imperative verb preferred
  ("Decide fast", "See everything"), and use it identically everywhere it applies.
- **Mine the material for specifics** and keep them verbatim: "19 of 25 operators"
  beats "most operators"; "$100k to $480k MRR" (from X to Y) beats "grew strongly".
- **Headlines fit their composition.** A headline that runs to three or four
  lines usually holds two ideas - compress the phrasing, keep the claim, and
  check the render: where the line breaks is part of the design.
- **Paragraphs over bullets for narrative.** 15-30 words, one to three per block.
  Bullets are for parallel lists and action items; a bullet with "and" is two.
- **Tone follows the energy.** Urgent: "Double down now or miss the target."
  Confident: "Retention hit 85%, the best quarter yet." Informational: "Retention
  stands at 85%, up 12 points." Exploratory: "Three approaches, different trade-offs."
- **Voice follows the deck type.** Strategy commits to positions. A pitch is warm
  and aspirational. A case study attributes results to named actions. A status
  update is crisp - state, delta, next.
- **Kill list, extended.** Beyond the guide's: "utilize", "unlock", "harness",
  "empower", "seamless", "delve", "unleash", "synergize", "operationalize",
  "cutting-edge", "best-in-class", "at the end of the day", "in terms of".
- **The ask closes.** Decision, owner, date: "Approve $200k for Q3 retention by
  Friday." The closing slide is that ask - if the house style ends on a bare
  end card (mark on an image), the ask is the slide before it.