One-pagers as fluent strategy artefacts

Is it me, or do most meetings and decks carry the risk of feeling quite dull? If you read Russell Davies’ book ‘Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint’, you’d think presentation software is a blessing. And it can be! So why doesn’t it feel like it? I have a simple thesis, see what you think.

The reason most decks and therefore meetings are dull is because they’re designed to show all the work someone did, not designed to help people discuss how to solve a problem. At least half of a presentation is showing you did the homework to get to an answer, instead of simply pitching the answer.

Part of me really gets it. It helps with buy-in, and growing a sense of trust between parties. It signals the cost of time, resources and critical thinking that went into a project. But this doesn’t mean everything needs to be a deck all the time. In fact, I increasingly love having a one-pager to do this job.

One-pagers are brilliant because they’re something you can present, but more importantly something you can have a discussion around. They are deceivingly simple but actually are the product of making informed choices about what goes in them. A bit on diagnosis. A bit on strategic decisions. A bit on tactical interventions we might want to start with. A bit of a roadmap.

Whether it's online or in person, one-pagers are useful artefacts we can look at together, critique, improve, and share after. Another alternative is the written memo, which sounds old school, but has genuinely been an unlock on some high stakes projects I’ve been a part of in the last 6 months. We literally printed our strategy story on 4 or 5 pages, circulated, and went through it. Most productive use of 60 minutes we saw in a long while.

Whether you do one-pagers or strategy stories, this is not about showing volume. It’s about getting to the value as quickly as possible. Because remember, particularly in the case of a one-pager, chances are your presentation will be a slide or two on someone else's presentation.

So the very least we can do, and also the very best in most cases, is to ensure that transmission of information happens as smoooooothly as possible. We talk a lot about fluent devices when it comes to brand communications, as a way for a brand to lodge itself in the mind as efficiently as possible. Perhaps we ought to talk more about fluent strategy artefacts inside businesses too.