Consulting's Most Important Takeaway

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

If you were to ask me what the most valuable part of my education was from a decade in Management Consulting, I’d tell you it was the ability to craft a story. That is, putting together a slide deck or telling a message that was logical, coherent and that clearly communicated its central message.

As I learned when I left Consulting, that’s not a widely available skill. It’s a bit of a rarity, actually, but it’s critical to the success of any initiative. 

If you can’t quickly, succinctly, communicate your message, it doesn’t matter how good your idea or recommendation is. No one’s buying it. 

And if no one’s buying it, you’re done. It’s as simple as that. 

Of course, learning how to tell a story wasn’t an easy task. It took years - plenty of hard graft, tons of arguments over messaging and lots of late nights working and reworking documents. 

All of this learning took place under the tutelage (overt and implicit) of a host of colleagues, to whom I made a point of listening and learning. Some of them didn’t need a deck - they just walked in and talked. Others used the slide deck as a launch pad. Still others were slaves to their slide decks. 

Some were fun to work with, such as the partner who walked me through his thinking and showed me (as a new associate) exactly how and why he wanted to say what he did. Some were frustrating, such as the partner who simply told me the end goal and left me to figure out how to get there. Still others were exhausting, such as the partner who spent 10 days (not kidding) with me and another colleague, going through his 20 page deck. Word by word, line by line, page by page.  For every one of those 10 days. Every. Single. Day.

But, I learned something from all of them.

All of them thought about the underlying story i.e. what they were trying to say. 

All strived for an economy of words (don’t include more than you need to). 

All thought about the flow - how does one message lead to the next? 

In fact, if there were only 1 piece of advice I could give, it would be to write out your headlines like a story - just 1 line per page. Once you’ve gotten those headlines to flow i.e. read line a coherent story, then build out the pages and the rest of the deck.

It’s worth putting effort into learning how to tell a story. It isn’t a gift - you’re not born with it. It’s practiced and learnt. It’s definitely a skill that’s well worth taking the time to acquire.