I’ve been reading Eben Hewitt’s Technology Strategy Patterns, and one idea keeps rattling around my head: the Ghost Deck.
The premise is simple. Before you write a single slide body, before you make a chart or pull a data point, you write every headline. Every slide gets a bold, audacious claim as its title. Then you review the headlines as a sequence. If someone could follow your entire argument just by reading the headlines, you’re done with the structure. Only then do you go back and fill in the evidence.
Most people treat slide titles as passive summaries. A weak restatement of whatever content they dumped into the deck. The Ghost Deck flips that. Your headlines become stakes in the ground. “We should buy company Y.” “We must move the data center to the cloud within two years.” “We need to get out of the coffee business and into paperclips.” Whatever the argument is about, the headline advances it.
Why this matters for compliance and project work
I’ve been spending a lot of time on ISMS compliance metrics lately. Readiness scores, KPI tracking, management reviews. The kind of work where you eventually have to present a case to someone who controls budget or headcount. And the natural instinct is to build the deck chronologically: here’s the problem, here’s the analysis, here’s what I found, and finally here’s what I need.
Hewitt calls this a mistake. He says put the ask on slide one. Write it last, but present it first. The CFO is going to flip to the back of your deck to find the number anyway. Save them the page turning. Give them the bottom line up front so they can contextualize everything else.
The structure for an Ask Deck is brutally simple:
- Slide one: The ask. Current state, proposed project, milestones, duration, cost, end state. If the executive says yes here, the rest of the deck is just a double-click.
- Imperil the hero: Show the dire situation or the missed opportunity. Let the data drive.
- Save the hero: The path forward. Roadmap, timeline, cost, who does the work.
- The ask again: Explicitly ask for a decision.
- Appendix: Everything else. Charts, queries, substantiating data. Can be longer than the deck itself.
The MergeSort meeting
One more pattern from the same chapter that I plan to use: the MergeSort Meeting. When you’re early in planning a large project and have a mountain of ideas, get everyone to write their own list of lists independently. Then merge them together in a single session. The key insight is that independent brainstorming generates more ideas and flattens out the loudest voices in the room. You get the quiet person’s best thinking before the group dynamic takes over.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out in project planning sessions. The person who talks first sets the frame, and everyone else builds on or pushes against that frame. You lose the ideas that would have come from a completely different starting point. Having everyone write first, then merge, is a cheap fix.
The takeaway
The Ghost Deck pattern costs nothing to try. Next time you need to make a case for something, write the headlines first. See if the story holds together at that level. If it doesn’t, you’ve saved yourself the time of building slides you’d have to throw away. If it does, you’ve got a wireframe that anyone can review before you invest in the polish.
I’m going to use this for my next ISMS readiness update. One slide, top of the deck: here’s where we are, here’s what we need, here’s what it costs, here’s what you get. If the answer is yes, great. If not, the appendix is waiting.