Canon glossary

Start with small request to increase later compliance

Planting hints of what's to come for later payoff

Motivation increases as people approach their goal - show progress

People overestimate their ability to have predicted events - acknowledge unpredictability

Curiosity arises from gap between what we know and want to know

Get commitment first then reveal additional costs/requirements

People overestimate likelihood of positive events - balance hope with realism

Delivering on earlier setup for satisfying resolution

Experiences judged primarily by their peak moment and ending

Emotional tension oscillation mapping between what is and what could be

People reluctant to abandon situations they've invested in - acknowledge shared journey

Planning emotional peaks and valleys throughout the narrative

Pivotal moment where perspective shifts or insight emerges

Three parallel phrases of increasing length or intensity

Incomplete tasks are remembered better than completed ones - create open loops

The McKinsey-bred discipline of writing every slide title as a complete declarative sentence with a verb and an insight, not a topic label. Each title is a sub-claim that ladders up to the deck's governing thought; read in sequence, the titles reconstruct the executive summary.

When to use

Any decision-grade deliverable — strategy recommendation, board update, investment memo, M&A review, post-mortem — where the reader is being asked to agree, decide, or act and will skim the title bar at speed.

Why it works

Solves two failure modes at once. (1) The buried claim: action titles place the conclusion on the page before any analysis is read, so a busy reader doesn't reverse-engineer it from the chart. (2) The spineless deck: because each title is a claim, slides have to ladder up to the governing thought; logical gaps become visible as topic-shaped titles in a sequence that no longer reads as a story.

Purpose

Forces the deck to carry its argument in the title bar so a senior reader can extract the recommendation without opening a single slide; converts a binder of topics into a navigable pyramid where every slide is a node defending the apex.

Anti-pattern

Topic labels disguised as titles — Volume by quarter, Key findings, Pricing strategy, Margins have been impacted. No verb, or a passive verb with no agent, or a fact (Revenue grew 12%) without the so-what. Also: titles that overreach the chart's evidence, multi-claim X-grew-but-Y-fell welded titles, and mechanical repetition of the same X-drove-Y template across the deck.

The discipline of distilling raw analysis, data, or content into a single declarative sentence — the slide's core message — that the audience would walk away with if they remembered nothing else. Process, not artefact: extraction questions run on the raw content until one sentence falls out.

When to use

Any slide that carries an argument or finding. The diagnostic: if the slide has a chart on it, it needs a core message. Run extraction whenever the current title is a topic (Q3 performance, Customer satisfaction) rather than a claim, or when a reader could reasonably draw more than one conclusion from the visible evidence.

Why it works

Solves the two failure modes of slide writing simultaneously: the topic title (which outsources interpretation to the audience and produces three different conclusions in three different heads) and the multi-thesis stapler (which exceeds working memory and gets remembered as fragments). Aligns with how readers actually consume decks — Heath & Heath's Find the Core, the journalist's nut graf, and Minto's governing thought all converge on the same cognitive economics.

Purpose

Forces the slide author to do the interpretive work before the slide ships, so the audience does not have to do it during the meeting. Wins the WYSIATI battle on purpose — the loudest fragment on the page becomes the author's chosen sentence rather than whichever chart label happens to be largest.

Anti-pattern

Topic titles disguised as core messages (Customer satisfaction, no verb, no stake); multi-thesis sentences stapled with and; hedged sentences (may show signs of possible softening); chart-caption titles (Revenue fell 4%) that restate what the chart already shows instead of naming the so-what; meta-commentary (this slide explores...) that describes the slide rather than concluding it.

People tend to stick with default options - make desired action the easiest path

Anticipating and designing for user errors and edge cases

Designing for easy recovery from mistakes

A three-question editorial test applied to any candidate slide title or headline: does it have a real verb, does it make a defensible claim, and would the reader walk away with the right point if they read only that line?

When to use

On every body slide title, every memo subject, every section header, every dashboard tile and every blog H1 — applied at draft time and again at review. Skip only on divider / agenda / neutral-framing navigation slides where the title is intentionally not summarising.

Why it works

The title is the only line statistically read by every reader (eye-tracking evidence from Nielsen Norman Group); a three-step filter on verb, claim, and memorability forces the analyst to commit to a finding rather than decorate the slide with a folder name, and catches the failure mode pyramid-MECE checks alone miss — clean ladders of invisible labels.

Purpose

Acts as the cheapest universal quality gate on every line of text whose job is to summarise what comes after it — converting topic-shaped labels into claim-shaped action titles so that a reader scanning only headlines reconstructs the argument.

Anti-pattern

Titles whose only verb is a copula (is, has, are), passive constructions hiding the agent, hedging adverbs that dilute the claim (may have somewhat softened), meta-descriptions (this slide shows...), bare numeric facts without a so-what, and topic labels masquerading as titles (Cost dynamics, Strategic implications).

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept

The recursive editorial discipline of asking so-what of every slide, chart, and statement until the answer is an implication for the audience — that final answer becomes the slide's title; the chain becomes its body.

When to use

On every slide carrying a chart, number, list, or finding intended to inform a decision; whenever a draft title is descriptive rather than directive; whenever the deck will circulate without its author.

Why it works

Solves the two failure modes of analytical communication at once: stopping at description (analyst-confidence problem) and leaving insight stranded in the analyst's head (translation problem). The recursion is what guarantees the implication makes it into ink.

Purpose

Forces every analytical artefact to close the gap between fact and decision, so the reader holds the recommendation by reading titles alone rather than reconstructing the analyst's mental model from raw evidence.

Anti-pattern

Stopping at the first tighter description (still a fact, not an implication), regressing past the audience's decision space into philosophy, smuggling the so-what into speaker notes, or re-using an implication aimed at a previous audience.

Allowing reversal of actions reduces fear of experimentation