From slide decks to a culture of clear, written decisions

The situation

A Fortune 500 tech company was changing how its leaders made big decisions. It wanted to replace slide decks with written narratives, Amazon-style: a PR/FAQ (a future press release and frequently asked questions) to test a new idea, and a six-page memo to drive a big decision or plan.

Its executives had already been trained in the method by leading experts, and they were keen. What the training hadn’t given them was practice applying it to their own work. The company’s learning team was finding it hard to turn the method into workshops that busy executives could actually use, and asked me to help.

What we did

I reshaped it into a practical format built around the executives’ real work, so they could apply the method to decisions they were already making.

We ran four workshops over two months. Two were on PR/FAQs, open to executives from anywhere in the business. Two were on six-pagers, in smaller groups working on real documents. Each started with why to write and how the write, review and revise cycle works, then moved to a live review of a real document, and finished with peer reviews of participants’ own drafts in small groups.

Executives brought the documents that mattered to their business: proposals for new ideas, investment cases and plans. Between sessions I coached some of them on their drafts. The sessions were recorded, and with the templates and guides they went onto the company’s internal learning platform, available company-wide to thousands of employees.

What changed

Executives started writing documents to drive key investment and planning decisions, and presenting them to senior management and stakeholders. Decisions and investments were made on the strength of those documents, and some leaders replaced regular slide reviews with written ones. The workshops replaced polished slides with open discussion and candid critique of the thinking itself.

After the first session, the sponsor wrote that it was exactly what they had been hoping for. Keen attendees went on to coach and review for their colleagues, and teams ran their own reading-and-review meetings. A year later the development team was still using “the format we developed last year”, and shared the templates with leaders across the company.

One of those leaders brought me into a leadership offsite. There, 18 managers and directors worked on documents critical to their business decisions: quarterly business reviews, annual and three-year plans, and decision papers. They reviewed each other’s drafts, and finished by agreeing next steps and holding each other to them.

The practice became part of how the company works, bringing clearer thinking, better decisions and improved operating results.