What is a strawman deck? And how consultants build one

The first time someone asked me for "the strawman" I nodded and had no idea what they meant. Consultants storyboard, wireframe and build strawmen. In other words, we draw. I swear we have another language.

What a strawman actually is

A strawman is an outline of what the structure of the presentation is going to be. Slide 1, slide 2, slide 3, and so on, and within each one the key message you want it to land and the points that back it up.

That's it. No formatting, no colours, no icons. It can be boxes on a page, a sketch on paper, or a deck of blank slides with a title and three bullets each.

The important bit is in the name. A straw man is something you put up to be knocked down. A strawman deck is meant to be preliminary, incomplete and maybe even wrong. If yours looks finished, you've spent too long on it.

Why you build one before anything else

Because the alternative is building twenty beautiful slides and then watching your manager bin half of them because the storyline doesn't hold.

The strawman lets you get feedback on the story before you've invested in it. Take it to your team, ask them to pick it apart, change it, take it back. Every round costs you minutes, not days. Fine-tuning a slide that ends up in the bin is the most expensive thing you can do on a project.

It also saves you a step most people don't realise they're taking. A lot of people write all their points into a Word document first, put them in order, and then chop them into slides. Do it straight onto the strawman and you've skipped a whole draft.

What goes on each slide

Two things, and only two:

• The title, written as the message. Not the topic. Not "Highest revenue-making areas", which tells the reader nothing, but "Chocolate, groceries and magazines contribute 80% of total sales". Some people call these action titles. I just call it a good title.
• The key points underneath that prove the title is true. Two or three is usually enough.

If you don't have the number yet, write a placeholder. "[X]% of shelf space" is a perfectly good strawman title. Agreeing the story first and then going to find the data that proves or kills it is exactly how it's supposed to work.

The test: read only the titles

Partners and clients often don't have time to read your slides. They read the titles. So a strawman has to pass one test:

Read the titles in order, and nothing else. Do they tell the whole story? Title 1 + title 2 + … + title N should equal your argument and your recommendation. If they don't, no amount of formatting will save the deck. Fix the titles first.

Pick the storyline before you write it

The order of the slides is a choice, and it changes how the audience feels. Two I use most:

The pitch, for when you're recommending something new:

1. The problem: the hurdle you're facing and need to get over.
2. The vision: what the world looks like if it's solved.
3. The options: the different ways you could get there.
4. The recommendation: the one you believe is right.
5. The appendix: the fine print, how you'd make it happen, and the research behind it.

Situation, complication, resolution, the classic McKinsey structure, which you can reorder on purpose depending on whether you want to ease people in or hit them with urgency. I've gone through the orderings in how consultants make slides.

A worked example

Say a retailer wants to know why sales are flat. Here's a strawman using the pitch structure, with the placeholders left in, because that's what a real one looks like at this stage:

1. Chocolate, groceries and magazines contribute 80% of total sales
2. But those three categories get only [X]% of the shelf space
3. The layout hasn't been reviewed since [year], while what customers buy has moved on
4. Matching shelf space to what sells could lift sales without a single new product
5. There are three ways to get there: reallocate space, cut slow lines, or redesign the layout
6. Reallocating space first is the fastest, cheapest and easiest to reverse
7. Next step: pilot it in [N] stores before rolling it out

Appendix: sales by category, the shelf-space audit, assumptions.

Now read just those seven lines. You know the problem, the answer and what happens next, and nobody has opened PowerPoint. That's a strawman doing its job. Every bracket is a piece of analysis the team now knows it has to go and do.

Where people go wrong

• Polishing too early. If you're choosing colours, you've stopped thinking.
• Topic titles. "Market overview" and "Next steps" are labels, not messages. They fail the title test every time.
• Building it alone. The point of a strawman is that other people pull it apart. If nobody has challenged it, it's not a strawman yet. It's a first draft you're attached to.

Where to start

Next time you're given a deck, don't open PowerPoint. Write the titles, just the titles, as full sentences that say something. Read them back in order. Then take them to someone and ask them to tear it apart.

I walk through this, along with the rest of how a consulting deck gets built, in my video make slide presentations like consultants. The written version is how consultants make slides.