Prep sheet · one talk · fill it the day before
Executive story prep sheet
SeventhSlate
seventhslate.com
The room
☐ All-hands ☐ Board / investors ☐ Keynote
Minutes I have
The one thing they repeat
The point, stated first — write it in one sentence before anything else
Senior rooms do not wait for a payoff. Front-load the point; the story is there to make it durable, not to reveal it.
Four or five beats — beats only. Not sentences.
01
02
03
04
05
First line — memorise exactly
Last line — memorise exactly
The cost I am naming out loud
If this box is empty, do not give the talk yet. Describing a hard change as an opportunity with no cost tells a room that already knows the cost either that you have not understood it or that you are managing them. Naming the trade-off is the cheapest credibility available to a leader. If part of it cannot be said yet, say that.
Rehearsal · with one person paid to disagree
Ask them these three
1 · Which part of this is no longer true?
2 · Where does it sound like I'm the hero?
3 · What will people say about it in the hallway?
Why you need them
Rooms defer to rank. In our own edit bay, one subject in 31 delivered films has ever asked us to change a cut — and they had no reporting line to us at all. Nobody will volunteer that your story has drifted.
☐ Said out loud twice, to a person, without notes ☐ Anything I had to retrieve has been cut ☐ No borrowed anecdote ☐ No tidy ending we haven't reached
Board room: Situation · Complication · Question · Answer — answer first, every element standing alone.
Free to copy and use · seventhslate.com/blog/executive-storytelling