Every agency discovery I've inherited ends the same way. A 60-slide deck arrives. It's beautiful. Nobody reads past slide 12. The CEO skims the executive summary, asks the same three questions the deck was meant to answer, and you start over in the next meeting.
The deliverable is wrong. The deck rewards thoroughness over decision-making.
We replaced ours with a one-page plan and a one-hour walkthrough. The page has four sections: the problem in one paragraph, the proposed shape of the solution in one paragraph, the sequence in a numbered list, and the cost. That's it.
Everything else — research findings, alternatives considered, risk register — lives in linked appendices that the team can open on demand. The page itself stays short enough that a CEO can read it on their phone while waiting for coffee.
Since we switched, our sign-off time dropped from a median of 17 days to 4. The work didn't get worse. The deliverable just stopped getting in the way.
