From Brief to Outline

Warm-up: Let's Talk About Talks You Remember

4 warm-up questions

• What is the last presentation you sat through? What do you still remember about it?
• When you have to prepare a talk, what do you do first — slides, notes, or thinking?
• Have you ever asked an AI assistant to help you plan something, and disliked what it produced?
• If you could only tell your audience one sentence, and they forgot everything else, what would you want it to be?

Reading: The Outline Comes Before the Slides

Read a 425-word text about The Outline Comes Before the Slides

The Outline Comes Before the Slides Ask most people to prepare a fifteen-minute talk and they open the presentation software. Ask an experienced speaker and they open a blank page and write two things: who is in the room, and the one sentence they want those people to repeat afterwards. Why the audience decides everything A talk about a new payment system sounds like one topic, but it is really four different talks. Engineers want to know how it fails. Finance wants to know what it costs. The sales team wants to know what they can now promise customers. The board wants to know whether the company looks reckless. Same subject, four audiences, four completely different talks — and the difference is not the tone, it is the content. So before anything else, answer three questions. Who is listening? What do they already know, and what would you be insulting them by explaining? What do you want them to do differently on Monday morning? The one thing Every good talk has a through-line: a single idea that every section either supports or explains. If a section supports nothing, it is interesting rather than useful, and interesting material is exactly what runs you out of time. Write the through-line as a full sentence, not a topic. "Our payment failures" is a topic. "We can cut payment failures by half this year without new staff, and here is what it costs" is a through-line. The second one tells you what belongs in the talk and what does not. Where an AI assistant genuinely helps An assistant is useful at this stage, but only if you describe the job properly. Give it the audience, their prior knowledge, the length, the through-line, and the decision you want at the end. Vague in, vague out: ask for "a presentation about payments" and you will get a competent, forgettable structure that could belong to anyone. Then treat what comes back as a first suggestion from a colleague who has never met your audience. It will usually be reasonably ordered and slightly too long. Your job is to read it critically and say so: "Cut the history section — they lived through it." "Expand point three; that is the part they will argue about." "Move the cost figures earlier, before anyone asks." "This assumes they know what a chargeback is. They don't." That editorial conversation is the real work. The outline is not finished when the machine stops writing; it is finished when you can defend every section to a sceptical colleague.

Vocabulary: Shaping a Talk

10 items

Framework: Audience, Message, Shape

Audience – Message – Shape, 3 steps

Audience – Message – Shape: Three decisions to make before you write anything, and the same three things an AI assistant needs from you before it can produce a useful outline.

Practice: Complete the Planning Notes

Gap-fill exercise, 10 items

• The ____ of this talk is that small delays are costing us customers.
• I have used a ____ title until I decide what the talk is really about.
• We should ____ the subject down to one market before we go further.
• Section three is only a heading, so I need to ____ it out tonight.
• The draft runs to twenty minutes, so please ____ it by five.
• Could you ____ those two sections into a single slide?
• My biggest mistake was misjudging their prior ____ of the system.
• The outline rests on an ____ that nobody in the room has seen the figures.
• Let's agree the ____ first, because I cannot cover everything in twenty minutes.
• When I have not prepared a section properly, I tend to ____ for a minute.

Practice: The Problem and the Instruction That Fixes It

Matching exercise, 7 items

• The outline opens with five minutes of company history
• The section they will argue about is one line long
• The budget appears only on the final slide
• It explains a term the whole audience uses daily
• Nine sections have been proposed for a fifteen-minute talk
• Every section is the same length regardless of importance
• The ending simply thanks the audience for listening

Dialogue: Defending Your Outline

Role-play: A ten-minute chat with a colleague who has read your outline before you build any slides. (4 lines)

• Before I read this again — who is it for, and what do you want them to do? Answer with the Audience and Message steps. Give the audience, their prior knowledge, and the through-line as one full sentence ending in the decision you want.
• Right. So why does it start with two minutes of history? Criticise the outline specifically rather than apologising for it. Name the weakness, then say the instruction you would give to fix it.
• Seven sections in fifteen minutes sounds ambitious. What goes? Use the shaping verbs: narrow down, trim, condense, merge. Say what you are cutting, not just what you are keeping.
• One last thing. What's the weakest part of what you've got? Be honest about the section you would least like to defend, and say how you will flesh it out before the talk.

Discussion: Let's Discuss

5 discussion questions

• Tell me about a time you prepared something for the wrong audience. What did you notice while you were speaking?
• Do you think a first outline written by a machine makes people lazier or braver about editing?
• If you had to cut your next presentation in half, which parts would survive, and why those?
• How has the way people prepare talks in your industry changed over the last few years?
• Is a forgettable talk worse than no talk at all?