Story chapters.

The problem.

Slides make you think one screen at a time. You add a title slide, an agenda, some context, a graph and another graph. Before long, you have a deck, but not necessarily a story.

When I write a presentation, speech or workshop narrative, I first divide it into chapters. This sits between defining what I want to tell and designing individual slides.

The chapters reveal the structure before slide production hides it.

The model.

1. Define the frame. Who is the audience? What should they understand, feel or do afterwards? What kind of meeting or session will this be? What are the practical requirements? An empathy map, meeting canvas or story header can help answer these questions.
2. Build the chapters. Name the main blocks of the story. Give each chapter a job, not just a topic. “Context” should help people enter the subject. “Trends” should establish evidence and create the need for what follows. “The proposal” should make the idea easy to understand. “Next steps” should turn agreement into action.
3. Sequence and adapt. Move the chapters around before touching the slides. Do you need to build towards the main idea, or start with it? Where does the audience need breathing room? Which chapters need evidence, examples, interaction or a visual? Then decide how each chapter changes for each audience.

For every chapter, answer four questions:

• What is its purpose?
• What content or evidence does it need?
• What should the audience think, feel or do after it?
• What is the clearest way to show it?

Only then start breaking the story down slide by slide.

Example.

Imagine one project that needs to be presented to your manager, the board, the team and an external conference audience.

The basic chapters might stay the same: context, progress, evidence, recommendation and next step. Their weight changes by audience.

The board needs the business case, risks and decision. The team needs examples, responsibilities and practical consequences. The external audience may value the journey and lessons, but should not see confidential numbers.

This is where a story-audience matrix helps. Put the audiences on one axis and the chapters on the other. Decide which version of each chapter every audience gets.

If several people are building the story, put the chapters in a shared document or hang draft slides on the wall. A presentation gallery walk lets people review the full storyline without discussing slides one by one.

Why it matters now.

AI can produce a plausible slide deck in seconds. That makes slide production cheaper, but structure more important.

A tool can generate twenty slides. It cannot decide which tension matters in this room, which evidence this audience will trust or which chapter should be removed because it distracts from the decision.

The quality of a presentation is rarely determined by the number of slides. It is determined by the logic between them.

Origin: developed through my own presentation practice, first sketched in 2020. Related, still to come here: empathy map, meeting canvas, story header, story-audience matrix, presentation gallery walk and the road to change.