Executive summaries and recommendation slides that leaders act on

Most decks shown to senior leaders are read in a hurry, out of order, or not at all beyond the first two pages. The executive summary and the recommendation slide carry most of the weight. If those two pages are clear, leaders can decide in the meeting. If they aren’t, the meeting turns into a tour of the analysis and the decision slips to next month.

This guide is about those two pages. It assumes you already have a sound storyline (our guide to the Pyramid Principle covers how to build one) and focuses on writing a summary and a recommendation that someone senior can act on.

Put the answer first

The single most useful rule is to state your answer at the top. The US Army calls this BLUF, bottom line up front. As Wikipedia’s entry on BLUF explains, it comes from Army writing standards and is now common in executive summaries, reports and policy memos, because busy readers get the key point before the detail.

Business readers work the same way. Monash University’s guide to the Minto approach notes that readers often jump straight to the answer and only then check the background. So the first line of your summary should be the recommendation, written as something the reader could approve: “We recommend raising the standard subscription price by £2 from April.”

The presentation firm Duarte gives a practical test in its advice on presenting to senior executives: plan as if your slot has been cut to five minutes. Whatever you would say in those five minutes is your summary.

Set the scene in three lines: situation, complication, resolution

An answer with no context can feel abrupt. A short scene setter fixes that. Barbara Minto’s introduction runs situation, complication, question, answer. Many consultants shorten it to situation, complication, resolution (SCR).

• Situation: what the reader already knows and agrees with. “Subscriptions grew 30 percent last year.”
• Complication: what changed or went wrong. “Packaging and courier costs rose faster than prices, and margin per box has halved.”
• Resolution: your recommendation. “A £2 price rise restores margin, and our tests suggest few customers will leave.”

Keep each part to a sentence or two. The situation is there to create agreement, not to recount history. If it runs to a paragraph, cut it.

Build the executive summary page

A good summary page has four parts, in this order:

1. A title that states the answer in one sentence.
2. Two or three lines of situation and complication.
3. Three to five supporting points, each a full sentence with its key number.
4. The decision you need, from whom, and by when.

Each supporting point should match the title of a later section, in the same order. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic of storytelling with data calls this horizontal logic: read only the slide titles from start to finish and they should tell the whole story, with the summary acting as a table of contents. If someone reads nothing but the summary, they should still know what you recommend and why.

Duarte suggests a ratio for long decks: about one summary slide for every ten slides of supporting material, with the rest treated as an appendix. For most decisions, one summary page is enough.

Write action titles, one message per slide

A topic title such as “Customer research” tells the reader what the slide is about. An action title tells them what it shows: “Two in three customers would accept a £2 rise.” The second can be read, agreed with or challenged in seconds.

There is some evidence behind this. Michael Alley’s group at Penn State promotes the assertion-evidence approach, in which each slide has a sentence headline stating its main message, supported by a visual rather than bullet points. A 2013 study by Garner, Alley and colleagues found that an audience shown assertion-evidence slides understood and remembered the content better than an audience shown the same talk with conventional slides. Washington University’s teaching centre summarises that study, which compared two versions of a lecture for engineering students. It is one study in a classroom, so treat it as support for a good habit rather than proof.

Rules that help:

• One message per slide. If the title needs “and”, you probably have two slides.
• Write the title as a full sentence of no more than two lines.
• Make sure the chart or table below proves the title, and nothing else.
• Put the number that matters in the title, not only in the chart.

The recommendation slide

The recommendation slide turns agreement into action. It should answer what a decision-maker needs to say yes.

• What we recommend, stated precisely.
• Why: the two or three reasons, each with its evidence.
• What it costs and what it returns.
• The main risks and how you will manage them.
• Options you considered and why you rejected them, in one line each.
• Next steps with an owner and a date for each.
• The decision needed today.

End the summary, and the meeting, by asking for that decision. Duarte’s advice is to answer the specific request that brought you into the room directly and quickly, and to close with a call to action.

An example (illustration only)

A subscription snack box business needs board approval for a price rise. Here are its slide titles before and after rewriting.

Read only the right-hand column and you have the whole argument. A board member can challenge a specific claim, such as the 10 percent churn assumption, instead of asking “so what are you proposing?”

Common mistakes

• Building up to the answer on the last slide, as if it were a reveal.
• A summary that lists what the team did (“we interviewed 40 customers”) instead of what it found.
• Long situation sections that retell history the audience already knows.
• Topic titles that make the reader work out the point.
• Recommendations with no owner, date or cost.
• Ending without a clear ask, so the meeting closes with “let’s discuss offline.”

Use this structure whenever a senior reader has to decide, approve or fund something. For updates where no decision is needed, a shorter status note works better. Even then, put the main point first.