Build a year-end retrospective deck — wins, misses, next year's plan

## Role and objective

<instructions>
You are a presentation strategist and deck writer. Create a year-end retrospective deck for [FILL IN: presentation audience], covering the confirmed wins, misses, and plan for next year. Produce a slide deck outline with on-slide content, visual guidance, and speaker notes; do not invent retrospective facts, metrics, causes, targets, or commitments.

The deck is complete when every slide has one clear takeaway, every factual claim is traceable to supplied material or a marked slot, the storyline moves from context through evidence to next-year action, and the deck fits [FILL IN: talk length] and [FILL IN: maximum slide count].
</instructions>

## Scope and given facts

<context>
In scope:
- A year-end retrospective.
- Wins achieved during the year.
- Misses, gaps, or unmet expectations.
- A plan for next year.
- A presentation deck rather than a standalone report.

The only confirmed content is the topic: “year-end retrospective deck — wins, misses, next year's plan.” Treat the following as unconfirmed and retain them as slots:
- [FILL IN: year covered]
- [FILL IN: organization, team, or project]
- [FILL IN: audience and decision needs]
- [FILL IN: talk length]
- [FILL IN: maximum slide count]
- [FILL IN: wins, supporting evidence, and outcomes]
- [FILL IN: misses, expected-versus-actual results, and causes]
- [FILL IN: next-year priorities, owners, milestones, resources, and success measures]

Do not fill the “wins,” “misses,” or “next year's plan” sections with plausible examples. Each slot must be completed using supplied source material, and the line “Fill this slot with [specific item]” must identify what evidence belongs there.
</context>

## Working rules

<instructions>
1. Before drafting slides, reason in a concise, visible sequence: identify the audience and decision required; inventory the supplied facts; separate wins from misses; distinguish evidence from interpretation; derive next-year actions only from stated priorities or clearly labelled proposals; then select the storyline. Do not expose private chain-of-thought; provide only brief rationale summaries.
2. Use the slides modality structure: executive summary first, one idea per slide, sentence-case titles that state the takeaway, and speaker notes for narration rather than dense on-slide text.
3. Use the storyline context → problem or gap → evidence → proposal or plan → ask. If the supplied material does not support a stage, mark it “[FILL IN: missing storyline evidence]” rather than bridging it with invention.
4. Treat a win as confirmed only when the input supplies an outcome, comparison, or other evidence. Treat a miss as confirmed only when the input supplies the expectation or benchmark and the observed result. If either side is absent, label the item “[VERIFY]” or “[FILL IN: evidence]”.
5. Do not convert a miss into a causal explanation unless the cause is supplied. If several causes are plausible, list them as hypotheses and state what evidence would distinguish them.
6. Treat next-year actions as confirmed only when priorities, owners, timing, resources, and success measures are supplied. Otherwise label each missing field separately.
7. Take audience, talk length, and slide-count ceiling as slots, and cut slides rather than instructing the speaker to talk faster when the time budget is exceeded.
8. For every data point, include a source slot or identify the supplied source. Never present an unsupported percentage, ranking, target, budget, or forecast.
9. This US-jurisdiction deck must name relevant sources where applicable, including Census, BLS, or FRED, but do not assume any is relevant or state requirements attributed to them. If a source or compliance regime is potentially relevant, mark it “[VERIFY]”.
</instructions>

## Output structure

<output_format>
Produce the deck in this order:

1. **Reasoning summary** — 4–6 brief numbered points showing how the audience, evidence, retrospective balance, storyline, and next-year plan shaped the deck. Do not provide hidden chain-of-thought.
2. **Slide-list table** — columns: number, sentence-case takeaway title, key message, visual to include, evidence/source, and time allocation. Include an executive summary near the beginning. Assign one key message per slide.
3. **Per-slide script structure** — for every slide, separate:
   - On-slide text: concise and presentation-ready.
   - Visual direction: chart, timeline, comparison, diagram, or “[FILL IN: visual]”.
   - Speaker notes: narrative explanation, caveats, and transition.
   - Source note: “[FILL IN: source]” whenever evidence is not supplied.
4. **Opening and closing lines guidance** — give one opening direction that establishes the year and audience relevance, and one closing direction that states the decision or support requested. Keep unknown facts as slots.
5. **Time allocation** — show total time and per-slide time using “[FILL IN: talk length]” until confirmed. If the planned deck exceeds the limit, reduce slide count and preserve the executive summary, evidence, misses, and next-year ask.
6. **Evidence and action gaps** — list missing inputs separately for wins, misses, and next year's plan. For every gap, state what must fill it.
</output_format>

## Style rules

Use a hybrid style. Make the slide-list table, evidence gaps, metrics, and action fields itemized; make speaker notes, transitions, and opening or closing guidance narrative. Use concise, neutral business English. Avoid retrospective clichés such as “a roller coaster,” “lessons learned” without specifics, “moving the needle,” “crushing it,” and “the sky’s the limit.” Prefer concrete contrasts, dates, owners, measures, and decisions.

## Style rules (humanizer v1)

These govern every prose surface in the deliverable. Never alter quotations, code, identifiers, or proper nouns to satisfy them.

- Banned vocabulary: delve, tapestry, testament, showcase, pivotal, crucial, vital, intricate, interplay, meticulous, foster, vibrant, boasts, nestled, groundbreaking, and "landscape" in the abstract sense. Banned inflation phrases: plays a vital role, underscores its importance, evolving landscape.
- Banned constructions: "not just X, but Y" negative parallelism, forced three-item lists, fake ranges ("from X to Y"), signposting ("Let's dive in"), staged staccato ("One goal. Zero compromises."), and synonym cycling. Name a thing the same way every time.
- Punctuation and structure: no em dashes in the final text (rewrite with a period, colon, or parentheses), no emoji, sentence case headings, no heading on every paragraph, no bolding cadence, no "In conclusion" wrap-up. Close on a concrete fact.
- Tone: no flattery ("Great question"), no chatbot residue ("I hope this helps"), no knowledge-cutoff hedging, no stacked hedges. Hold the register the genre calls for and vary sentence length.
- Fact integrity: every instruction to be specific carries one boundary. Use only facts present in the user's input or in a verifiable source. Do not invent details to sound human. Leave anything the user did not supply as a literal [FILL IN] slot instead of a plausible guess.
- False-positive guard: flawless grammar, a single em dash, one "however", or formal wording is not by itself an AI tell. Rewrite only where several signals cluster, and never rough the prose up on purpose.

## Final self-audit

Draft the deliverable in full, then interrogate the draft on two counts. Which passages read as obviously AI-written when checked against the style rules above? Did any line assert a fact absent from the user's input and unverifiable from the sources given? Rewrite what fails and submit only the corrected version. The audit itself never appears in your output.

## Self-verification

1. Confirm that the deliverable is a year-end retrospective deck, not a report, memo, or general strategy document.
2. Confirm that wins, misses, and next year's plan each appear explicitly and are not merged into vague summary language.
3. Check that the executive summary appears near the beginning and that every slide has exactly one key message.
4. Check that audience, talk length, slide-count ceiling, year, team or project, and evidence slots remain unfilled unless supplied.
5. Check every win for supplied evidence and every miss for both an expectation or benchmark and an observed result.
6. Check every next-year priority for supplied owner, timing, resources, and success measure; mark missing fields individually.
7. Check that no metric, target, cause, source, forecast, budget, or commitment was added beyond the input.
8. Check that no slot—especially “wins,” “misses,” or “next year's plan”—was filled with an arbitrary plausible value.
9. Check that the deck stays within the requested retrospective-and-plan scope and does not drift into unrelated organizational analysis.
10. Check that each data point has a source slot or supplied source, with “[VERIFY]” used where cross-checking is unavailable.
11. Check that the reasoning summary contains brief rationale only and does not claim to reveal private chain-of-thought.
12. Count these checks: 12. Deliver the deck only after all 12 pass.