Learning objectives
You can:
- Write a governing thought for a body of analysis and defend it against three tests: it is a claim someone in the room could contradict, it answers the question the reader actually holds, and an action with an owner and a date follows from it.
- Distinguish a thought from a topic using the negation test, and reject candidate governing thoughts that are subject headings, restatements of the work performed, or truisms that survive every outcome.
- Build a three-level pyramid (governing thought, key line of three to five claims, support) and state what belongs at each level and what does not.
- Apply the MECE test horizontally across a key line, testing all pairs for overlap, checking exhaustiveness against the frame you declared, and naming the residual rather than hiding it.
- Apply the vertical test between levels, by writing the question each box provokes and confirming that the boxes below answer that question and no other.
- Write an SCQA opening for a stated audience, and find the complication by locating the number that moved, the decision that is due or the commitment that no longer holds.
- Compress SCQA into SCR and say when the compressed form is right, pricing the saving in words and reader-seconds.
- Order a key line inductively or deductively, compute the expected surviving value of each under stated rejection probabilities, and defend the choice.
- Write an executive summary that is the pyramid's top two levels and passes a read-alone test against a named list of questions a decision-maker must be able to answer from it.
- Diagnose and repair a failing storyline by running the two read-alone passes, naming which of the three standard breaks has occurred, and rebuilding the level that caused it.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. Nothing inside this branch, which starts here. You should be able to write a one-sentence takeaway and name a reader and a decision, which is what PR0.01 teaches, and you will find the work easier if you have already sketched a deck as a ghost deck in PR3.02, since a storyline is what a ghost deck is a sketch of. Neither is a gate. Any analysis of your own will serve as raw material: a teardown from M8.02, a case answer from the CN modules, a valuation, a market study.
Feeds forward. PR4.02 takes the key line built here and turns each of its claims into a slide title, then tests the title sequence as a whole. PR4.03 takes the finished pyramid and asks what a narrative arc adds to it. PR5.01 to PR5.03 apply the structure to the consulting deck, the board deck, the investor pitch and the research report, each of which distorts the pyramid in a characteristic way. PR6.01 owns what happens when the room interrupts. PR7.01 runs the sequence end to end on an unseen brief. The executive one-pager and SCQA summary template that ships with this branch is built from the top two levels of the pyramid you construct here.
Six neighbours own material that touches this one, and the boundaries are drawn on purpose so that nothing below rebuilds them. CN1.03 owns answer-first synthesis for a case: the so-what ladder, the hypothesis tree and the interview-to-insight path that produce a governing thought in a client engagement, and its hand-off note draws this same line from the other side. What is owned here is the same logic applied to a deck, where the levels become slides, the key line becomes a title sequence and an appendix has to carry a contract. M10.03 owns the analyst's written deliverables, the one-page memo and the longer written note, where the pyramid is expressed in paragraphs rather than in boxes. PR4.02 owns titles: the wording of a claim on a slide, the two-line rule, hedging, and the read-only-the-titles test applied to a whole deck. Everything below stops at the claim and hands the sentence to that module. PR2.03 owns the single chart's action title and the one-message rule inside an exhibit. PR0.01 owns the audience profile and the medium choice that precede any structure at all. Where a section names one of those ideas, it names it and moves on.