The Ghost Deck and Dot-Dash: Sketch the Story Before You Build

Learning objectives

You can:

1. Compute the rework cost of building before sketching, from stated page counts, per-page build times and a cut rate, and state the break-even number of cut pages at which a ghost pass pays for itself.
2. Build a ghost deck from a finished analysis: one page per slide, each carrying a dot, a dash, an exhibit sketch, a source and a status, with the page count fixed before the first page is drawn.
3. Write a dot that passes four tests: it is a claim, it carries the number that decides it, it runs to fourteen words or fewer, and it is not a restatement of the dot above it.
4. Write a dash that names the exhibit form, the specific figure and the source, and recognise the dash that is secretly two dashes, which means the page is secretly two pages.
5. Sketch an exhibit in about ninety seconds in three candidate forms, recording the axes, the sort order and the series that carries the accent, and choose between the three against the dot rather than against taste.
6. Run the read-only-the-dots test on a ghost deck, score it against a fixed question set, and diagnose the three failure signatures: the label dot, the duplicate dot and the leap between dots.
7. Cut pages on paper using a stated ceiling, defend each cut with the question it fails to answer, and compute what the cut saved in build minutes.
8. Set a page count from airtime, dividing the speaking minutes left after a discussion reserve by the minutes per page the format needs, and state what the resulting number implies about the audience.
9. Apply the placeholder discipline where the data does not exist yet: bound the unknown with an honest range computed from what is disclosed, mark its status, and never let a placeholder cross into a shown page as a fact.
10. Convert a ghost deck into a build plan, ordered by data readiness and argument load rather than by page number, and state the condition under which the correct output of a ghost deck is a decision not to build at all.

Prerequisites & connections

Builds on. PR3.01 is the branch prerequisite and supplies the visual vocabulary the exhibit sketches use: the five diagram families, the Gestalt grouping principles and the discipline of drawing the mechanism rather than the org chart. PR0.01 supplies the three inputs a ghost deck consumes and does not re-derive, which are the one-sentence takeaway, the audience profile and the medium choice. If you arrive without those three, the first page you draw will be a title page for a deck whose purpose nobody has stated. M8.02 or any completed case gives you an analysis of your own to storyboard, which makes the practice worth roughly double what a supplied brief is worth.

Feeds forward. PR4.01 takes the ordered dots and gives them a formal structure: the governing thought, the key line, and the situation-complication-question-answer opening. PR4.02 owns the title stack as a sequence and the horizontal and vertical logic tests that a finished deck must pass. PR2.01 through PR2.03 own everything about the exhibit that the sketch deliberately leaves undecided, which is form choice in full, decluttering, colour and the action title. PR5.01 to PR5.03 take a validated ghost deck and pour it into an archetype template. PR7.01 runs the sequence end to end under a time limit, and the ghost pass is where most of the time saved in the capstone comes from.

Five neighbours own material that touches this one, and none of it is rebuilt here. CN1.02 owns the ghost deck as a consulting planning tool: reverse-engineering a lean workplan from a day-one hypothesis, with the guardrails that keep placeholder numbers from anchoring a team. What is owned here is the same artefact used for a different job, which is compressing and testing a story you have already finished rather than scoping analysis you have not yet run. CN1.03 owns answer-first synthesis, the governing thought and the so-what ladder, and its own hand-off note draws the boundary from the consulting side: claims and their order belong there, slides and their look belong here. M10.03 owns the written analyst deliverables, the memo, the report and the flip test applied to a finished title stack. PR4.01 owns the pyramid and the SCQA opening as structures, where the sketching practice that precedes building is owned here. PR2.01 owns chart-form choice; the compact grammar table below exists only so a sketch can name a form correctly, and it is deliberately shallow.