Storytelling in PowerPoint: Learn McKinsey’s 3-Step Framework

when a company like McKenzie starts a project their goal isn't to build a presentation that sits on a shelf and gathers dust the goal is to influence their clients to implement their recommendations but how does a firm like McKenzie actually influence their clients well there is this whole stakeholder management process that happens throughout the project but ultimately McKenzie are building a slide deck that is designed in such a way that it persuades their client to take action and it looks something like this McKinsey were brought in by King County Seattle to address their homelessness Challenge

and what you're looking at is the output of the project but it's actually the storyline that underpins this deck that McKinsey uses to influence their clients so in this video we're going to break down this slide deck to understand how firms like McKenzie create these storylines that influence and will learn how to do it ourselves the storyline is the most important part of the slide deck a really good storyline will persuade the reader to act a really bad storyline it's going to fall completely flat and as you might imagine top consulting firms like McKinsey BCG

and Bain have turned storylining into an absolute science and they found a universal storyline structure that you can apply to any slide deck and it's called the scqa or scr framework it's actually very interesting because this storyline structure is found absolutely everywhere you can find it in films books plays cartoons poems TV shows absolutely everywhere so it's not a surprise that top consulting firms have taken the storyline and applied it to their slide decks so let's walk through the storyline structure to give you an idea of exactly how it works now scr and scqa are

used interchangeably and they're very very similar McKinsey actually prefers the scripture as you can see here in one of their papers but what I'll do is I'll walk through scr but I also reference the QA part as well to give you an idea of how it all fits together so let's start with the S which is the situation and this is really giving the reader the prior context or knowledge that they need to have to understand the rest of the story but more importantly it's introducing the topic or the problem and explaining why it's important

and why you should care about it so that's the situation next is complication so complication is now introducing the problem so you're saying this is the problem that arose but then you're also saying why the problem is such a terrible thing you're really setting the scene and telling the audience that you should really pay attention to it so in the pure scripture we jump straight to resolution but I want to touch on the cue here which is question so the question is implied it's not something that you actually need to say in your presentation you

don't need to ask any questions but the implied question is what should we do about the problem so now we jump to r or a in this case we're talking scr so we'll talk about the resolution the resolution talks about the specific Solutions or recommendations that you're making to address the problem so what you're saying here is here's the blueprint for solving the problem that I just talked about in the complication that's it that's the scripture in its entirety it's really really simple as you can see but it's also very effective and we'll look at

why so what I want to do now is I want to look at whether McKenzie used an scr storyline in their King County homelessness project so the first thing I'll do is I'll flip through the presentation and write out all of the slide titles as bullet points in word now there are about 15 slides here so even though I'm going to speed this up a little bit it might take a little while and AK so you can see I've extracted the complete storyline end to end so now we need to see if we can neatly

break them down into an scr structure so I'm going to work my way down the storyline and see if I can find each of the stages the situation the complication and the resolution so start with the situation I can see here that McKinsey is setting the context with the first two slides and they're really saying that homelessness is increasing in King County and as I read down I can see at the third slide yeah I've noticed that they've changed the focus slightly and they're now explaining why homelessness is a problem so before it was that

homelessness is a problem and now they're explaining why it's a problem they do that up to about slide 10 where they start talking about how to address the homelessness problem now I'm going to see if I can summarize that entire storyline into three sentences so I'm going to start with a situation and one way we can summarize that is something like homelessness is a problem in King County now for the complication it looks like overall what they're saying is the homelessness problem is getting worse because the cost of rentals is increasing faster than incomes and

then for the resolution the overall sentiment is investment in affordable housing would address the problem and is actually cheaper than the opportunity cost of homelessness so this is a great example of how top consulting firms like McKinsey BCG and Bain use the scr or scqa storyline in their slide decks it's not there explicitly and you have to go digging for it but they definitely do apply the structure now let me show you how you can write storylines just like this so before I teach you exactly how to write these storylines yourself it's worth mentioning where

we are in the project by the time you're story lining you will have completed all of your analysis all of your synthesis and you will have come up with some conclusions or recommendations for your client so the storyline process is all about packaging the conclusion that you already have in a way that's really persuasive for your client so with that in mind let's jump into how to write it so the biggest mistake that people make when they've finished their analysis is that they jump into PowerPoint they start building slides but instead of doing that you

should jump into word and the reason why we work in word is because that's the best place to storyline and here's why so firstly it's easier to read a storyline when it's on a single page in word as opposed to across multiple slides in Powerpoint secondly writing a storyline is an iterative process so you'll write your first draft you'll give it to your manager they'll have feedback you'll re-draft it and you'll iterate on the storyline multiple times and again that's much easier to do in Microsoft Word and thirdly as McKenzie say PowerPoint is not a

very good tool for highlighting logical connections and ensuring that your storyline is bulletproof it's really hard to find contradictions on slide 3 and on slide 19 when it's in PowerPoint so the best place to do it is in word so when you're Inward and you're writing a storyline there's actually a framework or a structure that McKinsey use and it's called the dot dash structure now it's very simple but very very powerful dots are bullet points and the bullet points refer to the key statement in the storyline then under each of the bullet points you'll have

dashes and the dashes reference the supporting data that justifies the statement above so hopefully that makes sense but if it doesn't don't worry because I'm going to show you an example of writing the storyline itself so as an example let's imagine that where storylining for the King County homelessness project and we're doing it for the first time so in this example the slide deck hasn't been built so the first thing we would do is we would distill and synthesize all of our analysis and figure out what it's saying and come up with conclusions we then

draft up the storyline so when we do that every statement in the storyline is a DOT and all the dots have supporting data as dashes let's start with the first statement of the storyline and the statement says though the King County point in time count dropped in 2019 homelessness continues to increase so that is the dot in the dot dash storyline and the dashes are the supporting data which is something like between 2008 and 2019 the homelessness population Grew From 9000 to 11 200 and then between 2016 and 2018 the number of households experiencing homelessness

at any point in the year Grew From uh 20.7 000 to 22.5 000 which is a growth of 4.2 percent per year and then we continue with the rest of the storyline and end up with something like this so basically this is the draft storyline and once we've done on that we need to review it with our manager and make sure it captured the argument well and positioned it properly for the audience and there's no changes we need to make generally there will be changes so we'll iterate with our manager and refine the storyline over

time it is important however that we make all of the refinements now before we start building slides because it's much easier to make changes here in word at this stage and any changes that we make later in PowerPoint are probably going to mean that we rebuild slides so we want to avoid that as much as possible and finalize the storyline in Word so once the storyline is finalized and we're happy with it it's finally time to open up PowerPoint now finally in PowerPoint and we're going to build our slide skeleton this is actually two important

parts of any Slide the first one is the action title and this explains the so what of the slide and then we have the slide body and that contains all the data and the visualizations that support the action title and related to these two things there's actually two Logics or flows that you need to be aware of in your slide deck the first one is the horizontal flow and this means as you flick through the slide deck and read the action titles they tell a complete story without you having to read the slide bodies so

it means that you can you can understand the argument by just reading the action titles across all the slides second is the vertical flow and it says if you do read the slide bodies they fully support the action titles and this means that there's nothing set in the action title that isn't justified by some kind of data or visualization in the slide body now lucky for us because we drafted our storyline in word using a dash structure it's very simple the dots are the action titles and the dashes turn into charts that sit in the

slide body and support the action title so if we're lucky we'll be able to Simply copy the dots in our storyline and drop them in as action tiles in the slides but in reality there's probably some level of refinement you need to do to make the action titles work for your slides but nonetheless we should end up with a slider that looks something like this so the storyline is complete the action titles are written so all that's left to do is to build the slide bodies and as a side note I've quite a simple methodology

for translating data into visualizations for your slide bodies so if you want to learn that I can do another video on it so please just drop a comment in the comment section below so here's a bird's eye view of everything we learned in this video if you want to take a screenshot please do but also if you want to learn more about building uh executive ready Consulting style slide decks check out my Course There's the link in the description below