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Editorial illustration of a long training module being recut into a shorter version

A training module, shortened on demand

Two production runs in the first month — MacKay CEO Forums' CHRO session and Alberta Health Services' APL team. Same cutting protocol, two very different pipelines.

CoachingOurselves publishes 93 peer-learning modules — 60 to 90 minutes each, built for a small group of managers and a live conversation. Occasionally a client needs a shortened version for a specific event. Shortening one by hand is a full day of concentration you cannot interrupt without losing your place. I wrote down the rules, turned them into a script, and in the first month the tool ran twice: a 35-minute Mintzberg module for MacKay CEO Forums and a 45-minute culture session for 140 people at Alberta Health Services.

I decided which sections should be cut. The machine handled cutting them and everything downstream of that decision.

Before-and-after page count — 90 minutes of module trimmed to 35 minutes, with the cut sections marked

The mundane part: every kept page has to be relabeled and its progress bars redrawn at the new scale.

Progress bars at the top of each page redrawn to match the new total length, with elapsed and remaining minutes recalculated

The agenda spread gets rebuilt from the kept-section list. The numbers have to add up exactly.

Agenda spread rebuilt from the kept-section list with the exact sum of page times

Eleven rules. The rules are reusable; the script is what makes the rules fast.

The eleven cutting rules, from never cut the cover to sweep for orphaned references

Two production runs in one month. Same protocol, two completely different pipelines into it.

Two pipelines: one driven by a written work order, the other by a Teams transcript where Phil briefed his Claude in real time during a client planning call

The second run was more automated. Alberta Health Services needed a shortened culture module for 140 people. A week before the event, I held a 23-minute planning call with their OD team. The call was transcribed. I dropped the transcript into my workspace and Claude read it end-to-end — including the moments when I addressed Claude directly, out loud, while the client was on the line. My counterpart said, "It's so interesting. I'm like, who's listening?" From that single transcript, Claude wrote the content plan, applied editorial judgment to a cut suggestion the client had brought, edited the IDML XML, and generated two companion deliverables — a facilitator slide deck and a fillable takeaway worksheet.

If you publish training or editorial content that has to be recut for different formats without losing its structure, drop me a line and we'll figure out what it would take.

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