When developing a presentation, most people include far more detail than is necessary- especially novice speakers. I find there is a strong correlation between a speaker’s subject matter expertise and the amount of information they feel is needed to make their point. I titled my upcoming book So What? Better Briefs, Powerful Presentations because of the most common question we ask analysts in the intelligence community: so what? Why do I care about what you put on your slide? Why should the colonel pay attention to that image? What does the chart tell me that makes it important enough to include? Do I really need to know the complete history of office feuds to understand why the project is late?
No one likes having their time wasted, so it is important to include only that which will actually enhance the presentation. Too often, especially for people who are experts in their field, they assume that more detail equals better. Many people believe that the level of information needed to reach the conclusion is the same as that needed to understand the conclusion. The misconception is understandable. Being a professional in your particular arena, your knowledge and experience provide the very credence which led you to speaking in the first place (no matter how much imposter syndrome you might have). As such, it can be difficult to separate what can be known about a topic from what needs to be known. Put simply, I don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car.
So then, the question arises: how much detail is enough, and more importantly, how do you know when you’ve reached it? I employ and teach a method called BiCiMi (pronounced bih-SEE-mee), which stands for background information, current intelligence, and mission impact. Mission impact is anything that affects business operations or decisions. Current intelligence is any information or situation directly resulting in the mission impact. Background information is any foundational knowledge required to make sense of the current intelligence and mission impact. While current intelligence and mission impact are generally straightforward, many people get stuck on the background information piece – how deep, how broad, and how detailed does the background have to be? To answer those questions, I employ two techniques: 5 Whys and 3 Levels. The first provides speaking order, the second provides the level of detail.
5 Whys
Anyone with experience in root cause analysis will likely be familiar with the 5 Whys method. Much like the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the idea is that it seldom takes more than 5 times asking “why” to get to the root cause of any problem. For example:
The traffic light is broken.
Why?
Someone threw a rock at it.
Why?
They were unhappy with the new yellow light timing.
Why?
The new yellow light time is shorter than before.
Why?
So the city’s red light cameras would generate more revenue.
The same technique can be applied to any situation or brief to figure out the right order to present your information. Consider a scenario where the inventory system at a retail store shows items as missing due to a computer glitch. The manager has just arrived and asks for an update from the night shift supervisor. Depending on how the supervisor informs the manager, the information could be received as a non-event, daily update, or it could be an exercise in frustration. Compare the following versions:
Scenario A: Exercise in Frustration
Manager: How did everything go last night?
Supervisor: The inventory system shows a bunch of stuff missing.
Manager: How much stuff?
Supervisor: Thirty-two items.
Manager: Thirty-two? How much are we talking dollar-wise?
Supervisor: I don’t know.
Manager: What do you mean you don’t know? Thirty-two items went missing on your shift, and you don’t know what the total loss will be?
Supervisor: Oh, well, I mean, there won’t be any loss.
Manager: How can there not be any loss?
Supervisor: Well, they’re showing as missing in the inventory system, but they’re not actually missing. Like, we didn’t lose them. I checked and we have everything we’re supposed to.
Manager: You’ve completely lost me.
Supervisor: Corporate IT pushed a patch last night, and it showed a bunch of things here that haven’t arrived yet. I called distribution, and they should show up this afternoon.
Manager: So what you’re telling me is that we’re waiting on a delivery, and we should double check the inventory system until corporate fixes it.
Supervisor: I guess so, yeah.
Manager: Why didn’t you just say that?
Scenario B: Non-Event, Daily Update
Manager: How did everything go last night?
Supervisor: Corporate IT pushed a patch last night, and it messed with the inventory system, making it look like thirty-two items are missing, but they’re not. I checked manually, and we have everything we’re supposed to, so I called distribution, and they said they’re about to ship, so we should get them this afternoon. We should double-check the inventory system until corporate patches it.
Manager: Sounds good.
How would 5 Whys have made this easier? Let’s take a look. Pretend you’re the shift supervisor. You’ve just gotten off the phone with distribution, you understand how the IT patch messed everything up, you’ve manually confirmed your inventory, and all that’s left is to figure out how to inform your manager. Thirty-two items missing from inventory seems pretty alarming, so you decide to start there, but then you wonder if there isn’t a better way to present it.
Thirty-two items show missing from inventory.
Why?
They’re still in transit.
Why?
Distribution hasn’t sent them yet.
Why?
Because an IT patch messed with the inventory system and made it look like they were already here when they’re not.
Done properly, 5 Whys will give you a speaking order that is logical and succinct. Compare the supervisor’s answer in Scenario B to the 5 Whys – just start with the last answer and work your way up. Now, 5 Whys isn’t exhaustive. Note that the supervisor’s manual inventory check didn’t show up in the 5 Whys, nor did the recommendation to keep manually verifying. The limitation of 5 Whys is it won’t always get you the right amount of detail. For that, we employ 3 Levels.
3 Levels
The 3 Levels rule is simple. For everything in your presentation, know 1) what it is, 2) what you’re going to say about it, and 3) how you’ll answer the question your audience will most likely ask about it. Let me illustrate why this matters through a story.
In military intelligence, analysts are expected to be experts on whatever they’re briefing, so we train to a simple rule: never put anything on a slide if you don’t know what it is. It might sound like an obvious guideline, but intelligence involves synthesis from numerous sources, so building briefs often involves a lot of copy and paste. That said, just because something appeared in a previous brief doesn’t mean it’s accurate. As the saying goes, trust but verify.
Mission qualification requires analysts to build a capabilities brief for the aircraft they’re supporting, detailing armament, sensors, protective measures, maneuverability, and so on. They need to understand the platform in order to characterize threats against it. Now, it’s important to note that analysts were directed to build their briefs entirely from scratch. While real-world briefs involve a lot of copy and paste, this direction in training is much like learning to do math longhand before using a calculator. It is important that our analysts know not only what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.
As you can imagine, the guidance was regularly ignored. Analysts would recycle slides from previous briefs, particular those with good layouts or graphics that would be time consuming to build from scratch. As a trainer and certifier, that meant I saw the same slides a lot, so I knew exactly which slides my trainees recycled the most and researched the least, and they usually learned the trust but verify lesson the hard way. Building slides from scratch was not a graded item, meaning they didn’t lose points for recycling material, but it gave us insight into each trainee’s work ethic and attention to detail.
Mission tasking for a certain aircraft was somewhat complex, so one slide with a particularly well-made tasking flowchart showed up time and time again. A block in the upper left hand corner had an acronym that was not spelled out elsewhere in the flowchart, and even if it was, the meaning was not apparent from the individual words, so the only guaranteed way to know the definition was to look it up – unthinkable to novice analysts who don’t fully understand the criticality of their mission or the required level of performance. For illustrative purposes, we’ll say the acronym is ABCD, which stands for Aggregated Battlespace Coordination Database (there is no such database as of this writing).
Inevitably, I would ask the analyst, “What does that acronym mean?” There were only ever three responses. Most often was the simple, “I don’t know.” Sometimes they knew what the acronym stood for, but not what it meant. The worst – and shockingly common – were analysts who tried to make up the information on the spot. I don’t blame them. They were used to high school or college presentations and essays where incorrect information meant being docked a few points or, at worst, having to redo the assignment with a scolding about academic integrity. With intelligence, however, giving incorrect information means people can die.
The situation always deteriorated predictably. We gave the analysts enough rope to hang themselves, hoping they would just save face and admit they hadn’t done the research. Instead, time after time, they would keep digging deeper and deeper.
“What does ABCD stand for?” we’d ask.
“Um…Accelerated Bomber Combat Database?”
“Oh, interesting. And what is that?”
They would usually fidget uncomfortably and respond along the lines of “It’s a database for bomber targets.”
“I see. And why is it the first block in the diagram?”
“Because we need to know our targets before we fly the mission.”
“Mmhmm, okay. And seeing as we don’t support a bomber aircraft, why are we using a bomber target database?”
“Uh…because we’re going to get intel on bomber targets.”
“Before or after they bomb it?”
“Um…after.”
“So we’re going to get intel on smoking holes in the ground.”
“Yes…?”
Eventually we’d end the charade, chastise the analyst for making up information and illustrate the importance of admitting when they didn’t know something. I would remind them of the 3 Levels rule. Let’s apply it to the missing inventory scenario to see how it would work.
Level 1 – What is it?
The inventory system shows 32 missing items.
Level 2 – What will I say about it?
I manually verified that our inventory is correct.
Level 3 – What is the most likely question?
The manager will probably ask why this is a problem and how soon it will be corrected. The answer is that it’s due to a computer glitch, and the “missing” items will arrive this afternoon.
You might be saying, “Whoa…I have dozens of things on my slide. A handful of bullets, a graph, a picture, and a footnote.” If that’s the case, hopefully this helps you understand why it’s important to limit the amount of detail you include. Not only will it save you time, but the better you can tailor your information and delivery, the more credibility you will have to your audience. There are a lot of ways to go about researching the information you need to address the 3 Levels, and I’ll delve more into those in future posts. For now, use 3 Levels as a guide to determine how much information you need to include in order to explain your presentation, and use 5 Whys to determine speaking order.
There is more to BiCiMi than just these two rules, and I’ll write more about them in the future. You can also read more in my book, coming out June 1, 2025.