Big name consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG
all do one thing really well.
They create amazing presentations for their clients.
But it's not just the formatting and design that makes these
presentations so special.
It's the story they tell.
In this video, I'm going to teach you how to take your presentation and turn it into
a story with clear takeaways, compelling insights, and an engaging narrative.
I'll walk through each step of the storytelling process in detail and
show you a couple examples of what this looks like in the real world.
All that, and more coming up.
Hi everyone.
My name is Paul and I'm an instructor at the analyst academy.
We provide advanced PowerPoint, presentation, design, and data
visualization training to consulting strategy and finance teams.
So if that sounds like something you're interested in, make sure you
visit us at theanalystacademy.com
. When building a presentation, regardless of who the audience is, you have one
primary goal to make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand
what you're trying to tell them.
And this can be difficult.
Business presentations tend to have a lot of data and information, and
it can be hard for the audience to grasp the key insights right away,
especially if they're trying to also listen to the speaker and think about
what they're going to say in response.
So when building your deck, it's especially important to make sure
it's structured in a way that makes it clear, insightful, and engaging.
It's something top consulting firms do really well thanks in part to
two important concepts: the SCQA framework and the pyramid principle.
In simple terms, SCQA is just a framework for presentations that
allows you to craft a story around the information you're trying to present.
It stands for situation complication question and answer.
Every presentation is an answer to some question such as should we
acquire this company or how did this marketing campaign perform, or even
what did you find in your research?
And the SCQA framework just allows you to provide context for that answer.
Practically speaking, this means that your main deck is used to
show your answer and the situation complication and question are how
you provide context for that answer.
Let's consider an example.
Let's say you're on a consulting case for Disney The executives have asked
you to make a recommendation for where they should build their next theme park.
The main part of your presentation will be the actual recommendation
and all the supporting details, but then the situation complication and
question will form your introduction.
The situation is how things are right now.
The complication represents a change in that situation and is the reason
why the presentation's needed.
The question is what gets raised by the complication and what needs to be solved.
Then the answer is the resolution.
So here, the situation might be something like, disney is looking to
grow revenue by opening a new park.
The complication could be, they need to decide where to open this park,
which then leads to the implicit question, which is where should
Disney open its next theme park.
Then the main part of your deck answers this question and notice how
this brings the presentation to life.
It puts the presentation in context and it tells the audience why they should care.
Instead of just dropping them in the middle of your data you're leading
them along and creating a narrative.
Remember your goal is to make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand
what you're trying to tell them.
Consulting firms in particular do this really well.
Let's take a look at an example from BCG.
The presentation is for a nonprofit organization that invests in open
education resources or OER, which are basically education resources
that are made available to everyone.
And here's the introduction side.
Notice how they've titled it, context of the work, because
really that's what it is.
They're just giving context before diving into the presentation.
The first line says, since the William and flora Hewlett foundation began
investing in open education resources in 2012, the field has grown significantly.
The past decade has seen an influx of OER and increased awareness and adoption.
And notice how this just clearly and plainly explains a steady state
situation, how things are right now.
And this is our situation.
Then the next line says, however, and by the way, that should be your clue
that a complications coming the word.
However more work remains to push the OER movement from the
sidelines of mainstream education into the center of the classroom.
Okay.
So now we have our complication, things are looking good for
OER, however, more work remains.
And already you can see how this is setting up the presentation.
situation leads to the complication and the complication very naturally leads
to the question which is right here.
The foundation engaged the Boston consulting group in late 2012, to evaluate
the state of the current ecosystem in the United States, and to help understand how
to measure the movement's progress towards a sustainable mainstream end state.
Now, although they don't state the question explicitly,
you can see it in the text.
The question is what is the state of the current ecosystem in the U S and how
can we measure the movement's progress?
And now we have the right setup for the presentation, and
we're ready to hear the answer.
Everyone is on the same page and the audience is ready to go.
It might seem like a small piece of the presentation, but all the major
consulting firms use this framework to turn what otherwise might be a
dry presentation into a persuasive story, with a clear narrative.
So that brings us to the second important concept.
The pyramid principle, if you've watched our other videos or taken some of our
advanced courses, you'll know that we talk about the pyramid principle a
lot, especially as it relates to slide structure, but here, I'm going to focus
on how it applies to storyboarding and the presentation as a whole.
Put simply the pyramid principle is just a way of communicating information,
where you start with the main idea and then provide the supporting
details and data of that idea.
Going back to our Disney example, the main idea would be on top, then the two
supporting points would be below that if you recall, the question is where
should Disney build a new theme park?
Let's say that your answer is that Disney should build a new theme
park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Then two supporting reasons for that answer, might be that Rio is a major
tourist destination and that the Disney brand is strong in Brazil.
And if you wanted, you could continue creating additional layers to your pyramid
with more supporting details and data.
In a presentation, the way you would communicate this is from top to bottom.
And the reason why that approach is so effective is because you provide the
audience with context first, before giving them more granular detail.
Plus it helps the audience know exactly what you're trying to tell them and how
you've reached each of your conclusions.
Remember, your main goal is to make it as easy as possible for the audience.
If you were to turn each of these ideas into its own slide, you would
rearrange them like this with the highest level ideas coming first, then
the supporting details following each.
Then throw your introduction slide up front and voila
you've got yourself a story.
And this is the exact approach they use at every major consulting firm to build
client presentations that are incredibly clear, compelling, and persuasive.
Now it doesn't always look exactly like this in practice.
There are lots of factors that can influence the final version of a deck,
not to mention other slides that I didn't talk about like an executive summary
slide, next step slides or the appendix.
But generally speaking, this approach works really well.
In fact, did you notice it's the same approach I used for this video?
I started the video by stating the situation.
I said that when you build a presentation, you want to make it as
easy as possible for the audience.
Then I introduced a complication.
Business presentations tend to have a lot of data and information.
So making it clear can be difficult.
The implicit question then became, how can you make your data heavy
presentations, easy to understand.
Then I moved on to my answer, which was to provide a clear structure to your
presentation using two key concepts, the SCQA framework and the pyramid principle.
And I use this structure to then build out and explain my answer.
The end result.
I hope is a video that's clear, easy to follow and insightful, but
you'll have to let me know what you thought down in the comments.
If you think you or your team could benefit from learning how
to consistently build high-quality persuasive presentations for clients,
internal stakeholders or anyone else, make sure you check out our advanced
courses at theanalystacademy.com.
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So make sure you check those out as well.
Thanks again for watching and best of luck in your own side, making.