Audience
Audience is the first variable in any storymaking decision. Every other choice — arc, temperature, Big Idea, level of Proof — is downstream of who the audience is and what they need to do.
The four audience questions
Before structure, before evidence, before slide one:
- Who are they? Roles, seniority, prior context. Are they the decider or an influencer?
- What do they already accept? The Situation in SCQA. Skip this and you start from a vacuum.
- What do they fear? Fear of failure, fear of competitor, fear of looking late. Fear is the lever.
- What can they decide? What action is in their power? If the deck asks for a decision they cannot make, it fails by construction.
Needed-state-after
A useful frame: complete this sentence — "After this deck, the audience will ___."
The verb tells you the narrative temperature:
- "Know" → Inform
- "Agree" → Align
- "Choose" → Recommend
- "Be convinced" → Persuade
- "Want to act" → Inspire
If you cannot complete the sentence, you do not have a deck — you have material.
Audience signals to gather
- Their domain vocabulary (use theirs, not yours).
- Their incentives (what does success look like for them?).
- Their priors (what do they already believe? what do they reject?).
- Their constraints (budget, political, technical).
Failure modes
- Audience-of-one as audience-of-many. Designing for one person but presenting to a committee — only the one person is moved.
- Wrong decider. Spending the deck persuading an influencer when the decider is in the room.
- Generic audience. "Senior leadership" is not an audience; it is a folder.
- Inherited audience. Reusing a deck without re-asking the four questions.
Canonical phrasing
If you cannot say what the audience will do differently after the deck, the deck does not know who it is for.