Speaker 1: When a company like McKinsey starts a project, their goal isn't to build a presentation that sits on a shelf and gathers dust. Their goal is to influence their clients to implement their recommendations. But how does a firm like McKinsey actually influence their clients? Well, there is this whole stakeholder management process that happens throughout the project. But ultimately, McKinsey 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 McKinsey create these storylines that influence, and we'll 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 is 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 SCR structure, as you can see here in one of their papers. But what I'll do is I'll walk through SCR, but I'll 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 SCR structure, we jump straight to resolution. But I want to touch on the Q 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 SCR structure 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 McKinsey used an SCR storyline in the 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 okay, 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 let's 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 the 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 it's 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 storylining, 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 and 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, running 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 redraft it, and you'll iterate on the storyline multiple times. And again, that's much easier to do in Microsoft Word. And thirdly, as McKinsey 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 three and on slide 19 when it's in PowerPoint. So the best place to do it is in Word. So when you're in Word 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 we're 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 in 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 9,000 to 11,200. And then between 2016 and 2018, the number of households experiencing homelessness at any point in the year grew from 20.7,000 to 22.5,000, which is a growth of 4.2% 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 that, we need to review it with our manager and make sure we've 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 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're going 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. So there's 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 understand the argument by just reading the action titles across all the slides. The 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 data or visualization in the slide body. Now, lucky for us, because we drafted our storyline in Word using a dot 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 titles 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 slide 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 executive ready consulting style slide decks, check out my course. There's a link in the description below.