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Writer's pictureNabeel Ansar

Writing an Effective Six- Pager

What are 6 Pagers Narratives

Narratives are designed to increase the quantity and quality of effective communication in your organization—by an order of magnitude over traditional methods. Creating such solid narratives requires hard work and some risk-taking. Good ones take days to write. The team writing the narrative toils over the topic, writes its first draft, circulates and reviews and iterates and repeats, then finally takes the vulnerable step of saying to their management and their peers, “Here’s our best effort. Tell us where we fell short.” At first this openness can prove intimidating. This model imposes duties and expectations upon the audience as well. They must objectively and thoroughly evaluate the idea, not the team or the pitch, and suggest ways to improve it. The work product of the meeting is ultimately a joint effort of the presenter and their audience—thinking that they can all stand behind. Silence in the discussion stage is the equivalent of agreement with what is presented, but it carries the same weight as a full- blown critique.


Writing a Six Pager narrative

Six-page narratives can take many forms. Headings and subheadings, graphs or data tables, and other design elements will be specific to the individual narrative.


Six-Pagers Vary in Structure and Content In the mock-up six-pager below, we’ve included two optional sections that many presenters at Amazon have found helpful. The first is to call out one or more key tenets that our proposal relies upon—a foundational element of the reasoning that led us to make this recommendation. Tenets give the reader an anchor point from which to evaluate the rest. If the tenet itself is in dispute, it’s easier to address that directly rather than take on all the logical steps that derive from that position. The second optional section, perhaps more commonly used, is the inclusion of an FAQ. Strong six-pagers don’t just make their case, they anticipate counterarguments, points of contention, or statements that might be easily misinterpreted. Adding the FAQ to address these saves time and gives the reader a useful focal point for checking the thoroughness of the authors’ thinking. (See appendix B for additional FAQ and tenet examples.)We should also note that some six-pagers are longer than six pages because they include supporting data or documentation in appendices— data that’s not usually read during the meeting. Six-page narratives can take many forms. Our mock-up provides one example, laid out specifically for our topic. We wouldn’t typically expect to see a section titled “Our Inspiration,” for instance, even though it serves a useful purpose in this narrative. Headings and subheadings, graphs or data tables, and other design elements will be specific to the individual narrative. An Amazon quarterly business review, for instance, might be broken down like this instead:

  • Introduction

  • Tenets

  • Accomplishments

  • Misses

  • Proposals for Next Period

  • Headcount

  • P&L

  • FAQ


Appendices (includes things like supporting data in the form of spreadsheets, tables and charts, mock-ups) The six-pager can be used to explore any argument or idea you want to present to a group of people—an investment, a potential acquisition, a new product or feature, a monthly or quarterly business update, an operating plan, or even an idea on how to improve the food at the company cafeteria. It takes practice to master the discipline of writing these narratives. First-time writers will do well to review and learn from successful examples.


Example from Amazon

Dear PowerPoint: It’s Not You, It’s Us Our decision-making process simply has not kept up with the rapid growth in the size and complexity of our business. We, therefore, advocate that effective immediately, we stop using PowerPoint at S-Team meetings and start using six-page narratives instead.


What’s Wrong with Using PowerPoint? S-Team meetings typically begin with a PowerPoint (PP) presentation that describes some proposal or business analysis for consideration. The style of the deck varies from team to team, but all share the constraints imposed by the PowerPoint format. No matter how complex or nuanced the underlying concepts, they are presented as a series of small blocks of text, short bullet-pointed lists, or graphics.Even the most ardent PP fans acknowledge that too much information actually spoils the deck. Amazon’s bestselling book on PowerPoint describes three categories of slides:

  1. 75 words or more: A dense discussion document or white paper that is not suitable for a presentation—it’s better distributed in advance and read before the meeting.

  2. 50 words or so: A crutch for the presenter who uses it as a teleprompter, often turning away from an audience while reading aloud.

  3. Even fewer words: A proper presentation slide, used to visually reinforce primarily spoken content. The presenter must invest time to develop and rehearse this type of content.

One widely accepted rule of thumb, the so-called 6x6 Rule, sets a maximum of six bullet points, each with no more than six words. Other guidelines suggest limiting text to no more than 40 words per slide, and presentations to no more than 20 slides. The specific numbers vary, but the theme—limiting information density—is a constant. Taken as a whole, these practices point to a consensus: there’s only so much information one can fit into a PP deck without confusing, or losing one audience.

The format forces presenters to condense their ideas so far that important information is omitted. Pressed against this functional ceiling, yet needing to convey the depth and breadth of their team’s underlying work, a presenter—having spent considerable time pruning away content until it fits the PP format—fills it back in, verbally. As a result, the public speaking skills of the presenter, and the graphics arts expertise behind their slide deck, have an undue—and highly variable—effect on how well their ideas are understood. No matter how much work a team invests in developing a proposal or business analysis, its ultimate success can therefore hinge upon factors irrelevant to the issue at hand. We’ve all seen presenters interrupted and questioned mid-presentation, then struggle to regain their balance by saying things like, “We’ll address that in a few slides.” The flow becomes turbulent, the audience frustrated, the presenter flustered. We all want to deep dive on important points but have to wait through the whole presentation before being satisfied that our questions won’t be answered somewhere later on. In virtually every PP presentation, we have to take handwritten notes throughout in order to record the verbal give-and-take that actually supplies the bulk of the information we need. The slide deck alone is usually insufficient to convey or serve as a record of the complete argument at hand.

Our Inspiration

Most of us are familiar with Edward Tufte, author of the seminal (and Amazon bestselling) book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In an essay titled “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” Tufte encapsulates our difficulties precisely:As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence-based, and resolution-intense, the more damaging the bullet list becomes. This certainly describes S- Team meetings: complex, interconnected, requiring plenty of information to explore, with greater and greater consequences connected to decisions. Such analysis is not well served by a linear progression of slides, a presentation style that makes it difficult to refer one idea to another, to fully express an idea in sparsely worded bits of text, and to enlighten instead of distracting with visual effects. Rather than making things clear and simple, PowerPoint is stripping our discussions of important nuance. Tufte’s essay proposes a solution. “For serious presentations,” he writes, “it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together. High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, narrate, and recast evidence. In contrast, data-thin, forgetful displays tend to make audiences ignorant and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the presenter.”He goes on: “For serious presentations, replace PP with word-processing or page- layout software. Making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive order: From now on your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint. Get used to it.” We’ve taken this recommendation to heart, and we now propose to follow his advice. Our Proposal: Banish PP in Favor of Narratives We propose that we stop using PowerPoint in S-Team meetings immediately and replace it with a single narrative document. These narratives may sometimes include graphs and bulleted lists, which are essential to brevity and clarity, but it must be emphasized: merely reproducing a PP deck in written form will NOT be accepted. The goal is to introduce the kind of complete and self-contained presentation that only the narrative form makes possible. Embrace it.

Our Tenet: Ideas, Not Presenters, Matter Most A switch to narratives places the team’s ideas and reasoning center stage, leveling the playing field by removing the natural variance in speaking skills and graphic design expertise that today plays too great a role in the success of presentations. The entire team can contribute to the crafting of a strong narrative, reviewing and revising it until it’s at its very best. It should go without saying—sound decisions draw from ideas, not individual performance skills. The time now spent upon crafting gorgeous, graphically elegant slide presentations can be recaptured and used for more important things. We can give back the time and energy now wasted on rehearsing one’s time at the podium and relieve a major, unnecessary stressor for many team leaders. It won’t matter whether the presenter is a great salesperson, a complete introvert, a new hire out of college, or a VP with 20 years of experience; what matters will be found on the page. Last, the narrative document is infinitely portable and scalable. It is easy to circulate. Anyone can read it at any time. You don’t need handwritten notes or a vocal track recorded during the big presentation to understand its contents. Anyone can edit or make comments on the document, and they are easily shared in the cloud. The document serves as its own record.

The Readers’ Advantage: Information Density and Interconnection of Ideas One useful metric for comparison is what we call the Narrative Information Multiplier (tip of the hat to former Amazon VP Jim Freeman for coining this term). A typical Word document, with text in Arial 11-point font, contains 3,000–4,000 characters per page. For comparison, we analyzed the last 50 S-Team PowerPoint slide presentations and found that they contained an average of just 440 characters per page. This means a written narrative would contain seven to nine times the information density of our typical PowerPoint presentation. If you take into account some of the other PowerPoint limitations discussed above, this multiplier only increases. Tufte estimates that people read three times faster than the typical presenter can talk, meaning that they can absorb that much more information in a given time while reading a narrative than while listening to a PP presentation. A narrative, therefore, delivers much more information in a much shorter time. The Narrative Information Multiplier is itself multiplied when one considers how many such meetings S-Team members attend in a single day. A switch to this denser format will allow key decision-makers to consume much more information in a given period of time than with the PowerPoint approach. Narratives also allow for nonlinear, interconnected arguments to unfold naturally — something that the rigid linearity of PP does not permit. Such interconnectedness defines many of our most important business opportunities. Moreover, better-informed people make higher-quality decisions and can deliver better, more detailed feedback on the presenting teams’ tactical and strategic plans. If our executives are better informed, at a deeper level, on a wider array of important company initiatives, we will gain a substantial competitive advantage over executives elsewhere who rely on traditional low-bandwidth methods of communication (e.g., PP).

The Presenters’ Advantage: Forces Greater Clarity of Thought We know that writing narratives will likely prove to be harder work than creating the PP presentations that they will replace; this is actually positive. The act of writing will force the writer to think and synthesize more deeply than they would in the act of crafting a PP deck; the idea on paper will be better thought out, especially after the author’s entire team has

reviewed it and offered feedback. It’s a daunting task to get all the relevant facts and all one’s salient arguments into a coherent, understandable document—and it should be. Our goal as presenters is not to merely introduce an idea but to demonstrate that it’s been carefully weighed and thoroughly analyzed. Unlike a PP deck, a solid narrative can—and must—demonstrate how its many, often disparate, facts and analyses are interconnected. While an ideal PP presentation can do this, experience has shown that they rarely do in practice. A complete narrative should also anticipate the likely objections, concerns, and alternate points of view that we expect our team to deliver. Writers will be forced to anticipate smart questions, reasonable objections, even common misunderstandings —and to address them proactively in their narrative document. You simply cannot gloss over an important topic in a narrative presentation, especially when you know it’s going to be dissected by an audience full of critical thinkers. While this may seem a bit intimidating at first, it merely reflects our long-standing commitment to thinking deeply and correctly about our opportunities. The old essay-writing adage “State, support, conclude” forms the basis for putting a convincing argument forward. Successful narratives will connect the dots for the reader and thus create a persuasive argument, rather than presenting a disconnected stream of bullet points and graphics that leave the audience to do all the work. Writing persuasively requires and enforces clarity of thought that’s even more vital when multiple teams collaborate on an idea. The narrative form demands that teams be in sync or, if they are not, that they clearly state in the document where they are not yet aligned. Edward Tufte sums up the benefits of narratives over PP with his own blunt clarity: “PowerPoint becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of PowerPoint makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

How to Conduct a Meeting in This New Format Narratives would be distributed at the start of each meeting and read by all in attendance during the time normally taken up by the slide deck—approximately the first 20 minutes. Many will want to take notes, or annotate their copy, during this time. Once everybody signals their readiness, conversation about the document begins. We know that people read complex information at the rough average of three minutes per page, which in turn defines the functional length of a written narrative as about six pages for a 60-minute meeting. Our recommendation is therefore that teams respect the six-page maximum. There will no doubt be times when it feels difficult to condense a complete presentation into this size, but the same limitation—which is really one of the meeting lengths—faces PP presenters as well. We believe that six pages should be enough, but we will review over time and revise if necessary.

Conclusion

PowerPoint could only carry us so far, and we’re thankful for its service, but the time has come to move on. Written narratives will convey our ideas in a deeper, stronger, more capable fashion while adding a key additional benefit: they will act as a forcing function that shapes sharper, more complete analysis. Six-page narratives are also incredibly inclusive communication, precisely because the interaction between the presenter and audience is zero during reading. No biases matter other than the clarity of reasoning. This change will strengthen not just the pitch, but the product—and the company—as well.

FAQs Q: Most other companies of our size use PowerPoint. Why do we need to be different, and what if this switch turns out to be the wrong move? A: In simplest terms, we see a better way. Amazon differs from other major companies in ways that help us stand out, including our willingness to go where the data lead and seek better ways of doing familiar things. If this move doesn’t work out, we’ll do what we always do—iterate and refine, or roll it back entirely if that's what the results show us is best.

Q: Why not distribute the narrative ahead of the meeting so we’re ready? A: The short time between a distribution and the meeting might not give all attendees sufficient time for that task. Also, since the document replaces the deck, no time is lost by dedicating this phase of the meeting to a silent reading that brings everybody up to speed before Q&A begins. Last but certainly not least, this gives each presenting team the most possible time to complete and refine their presentation.

Q: My team has proven to be very good at PP presentations—do we HAVE to switch? A: YES. One danger of an unusually strong PP presentation is that the stage presence or charm of the presenter can sometimes unintentionally blind the audience to key questions or concerns. Slick graphics can distract equally well. Most importantly, we’ve shown that even the best use of PP simply cannot deliver the completeness and sophistication that narratives can.

Q: What if we put our PP deck into printed form and add some extended comments to strengthen and extend the information content? A: NO. Reproducing PP on paper also reproduces its weaknesses. There’s nothing one can do in PP that cannot be done more thoroughly, though sometimes less attractively, in a narrative.

Q: Can we still use graphs or charts in our narratives? A: YES. Most complex issues derive key insights from data and we expect that some of that data may be best represented in the form of a chart or graph. However, we do not expect

that graphics alone can make the compelling and complete case we expect from a true written narrative. Include them if you must, but don’t let graphics predominate.


Source for this article is from Working Backwards Insights Stories Secrets


That is it for this article. I hope you found this article useful, if you need any help please email me at info@nabeelansar.com

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