Exec Vs Working Deck Skill

The working deck — forty slides of exploration, methodology, and dead ends — is a diary of the analysis. Presenting it to executives narrates the journey chronologically, landing the answer at slide 34 of a meeting that ended attention-wise at slide 6. The exec cut inverts the geometry: the answer first (slide 2 at the latest), the three pieces of evidence that carry it, the risks and the ask — 6–10 slides — with the working deck demoted to appendix, where it does its real executive job: existing, as the visible proof of rigor behind every Q&A answer ("slide 24 has that cohort — here").

What This Skill Produces

• The exec cut — answer-first, 6–10 slides, built from the working deck's strongest material
• The compression map — every working-deck section: promoted / compressed to a line / appendixed / cut
• The appendix strategy — the Q&A-ordered depth, indexed so retrieval is instant in the room
• The two-deck discipline — when each artifact is used, so the working deck stops leaking into exec rooms

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The working deck (or analysis) — the source material; the cut is extraction, not new writing
• The answer, committed: the exec cut requires the author to have a conclusion — "here's what we found, you decide" working decks first need the conclusion conversation (executive-summary BLUF discipline; no cut can rescue an uncommitted analysis)
• The executives' currencies — what this audience weighs (growth? risk? cost?) — the three surviving evidence pieces are chosen in their currency
• The likely hard questions — each one gets its appendix slide, pre-ordered by likelihood