Executive audiences interrupt, and a deck that only works uninterrupted is a liability rather than a plan. The fix isn’t hoping nobody asks a question early — it’s building a structure with fixed landmarks you can return to after answering one, rather than a continuous script that only makes sense start to finish.
Try this now. Take the deck you’re building and boil its argument down to four or five landmarks you could state from memory, without slides, standing in a corridor: not sentences, just the shape. If a question arrives after landmark two, you should be able to answer it and then say, plainly, “which brings me to the next point,” and mean it.
A deck with real landmarks survives being interrupted because there’s always a next fixed point to return to. A deck without them turns any interruption into a genuine derailment, because there was never anywhere solid to come back to in the first place.
