What is story boarding and why is it important? If you've been consulting just for even a couple of weeks, I'm sure you've heard this phrase. Story boarding comes originally from the movies. It's the idea that you would have like kind of a simplified sketch or a cartoon of frame by frame scene by seeing what is happening. Okay. You can see an example here on the right, you can see the link to Youtube and to Disney's website where they show you how they storyboard at the top. A very simple sketch. You can see that it's a big burly mustache man and there at a table with three, it looks like monkeys or kids. [LAUGH] It turns out those aren't monkeys, they're actually kids in the movie. The benefit of this approach is pretty simple, right? You want to convey what's going on provide the perspective where's the camera lens going to be? And it's also fast and inexpensive, right? You don't have to spend a lot of money doing this kind of thing. So same idea with consulting presentations, right? It's not the finished product, it's not the fancy power point. It's just a sketch. So let me show you what that might look like in the consulting world. Well, even making this coursera class and specialization, you can imagine, I have many power point slides just like this one. Right? So I do this too. I story boarded out. A lot of times I write out the titles, what do I want this page to say and sometimes there's nothing on it. It's just the title that way. I know this is the type of outline that I want to have now. You want to be able to move things around so it tells the right story. And another benefit of it is the titles should the pages should be at the same level of granularity, big idea, big idea, big idea. It should be the same level. It'd be silly to have a big idea. Super small details, super small detail, big idea. Right? You wanted to be kind of at the same level. So here is a screenshot of this particular coursera specialization. I actually did this myself. What I'd say with any storyboard is of course that he should be fit to purpose a managing director that I know at a consulting firm, that's what he always says, it should be fit to purpose. Don't put in extra pages if you're not going to use them. Everything should be there for a reason. So, who are we talking to and where are we going to be presenting? What are we talking about? And what's the so what what are the implications of that? Right. So who's the audience? How many people are going to be in the room? How much time do we have? And what's the setup? Is it a stand and formally present like this where we're projecting it on a screen or is it a couple of people sitting around the table and I'm going to give you handouts? Right. One very important reason is that the font size matters right. If you're going to be projecting to a lot of people in a very big hall and 100 people are sitting there, you better not have very small font where they can't read. Okay. What so what then, what you know, what's the purpose of this Meeting? Is it a 15 minute update or is it a 3hour workshop? Those are very different. And so the storyboard, right. How you map out what's going to happen will vary accordingly. Also, what are the chances that you're going to be able to pre wire or name a washy this content with the audience or is the audience are they new to this idea? Is it the kind of thing where you need to start from the very beginning, explain the introduction, introduce yourself, describe the process and get them up to speed. Right. These are all variables that you need to know ahead of time and perhaps the most important thing is here at the bottom. When this is all said and done when you're all finished with this? How do you actually want them to feel, do you want them to be excited about what you're doing or do you want them to be curious? Right, these are all variables that you want to think about to really make the presentation great. But then also think ahead of time when you're putting together the storyboard. You've seen this before that during the course of the project, the confidence level generally it goes up but there are setbacks as well. Right? Same thing with the quality of your storyboard. When you start off number one, basically your storyboard is a bunch of blank pieces of paper with topics on it, right? They're just kind of placeholder slides. They just tell you generally what the topic will be and then over time as you get the data, you do the analysis, you do the interviews, you create hypotheses, you start creating good stuff. And you start populating it right, you might have a great bar chart and you drop it into one of the pages. So when you're at two at this point you have a story board, it may have changed a little bit here and there and it's starting to take some shape. There's some that are not blank, there's actually stuff on there. Right? But it's still a little bit of a placeholder, it's still not perfect. When you get towards the end of the project, what you'll find is the storyboard is still moving around, that's fine. Moving around is fine. But it's 90% complete and this helps you and it's kind of a sanity check. Right, what are we missing? You might have some parts that are really good, some parts that are very thin, right? Where should we be focusing our attention and what's really important. I will say [LAUGH] you need to become a little bit used to things moving around. That's still okay. Right. It's all in service of telling the story. Perhaps you want to highlight this page. Super important. And here's why a story board like a good movie. Each scene should be compelling. So that means each power point page should make sense by itself. If I just took that one page, ripped it out of the power point deck and showed it to somebody, it should make sense. It doesn't need to, it doesn't have to depend on the previous slide to explain it. So they're stand alone. Number two, the different parts of the page need to work together. So in this particular case the title needs to be related to the bullets, needs to be related to the graphic and the takeaway of the slide. We've all done that before. Right? So we write a title, we create a slide and then later on we're like, ho this part doesn't match this part. When that happens, you need to change it. Right? So make the slide internally consistent. In addition to that, even though each one of these slides can stand by itself. So this slide, this number two slide, if I took it out, it makes sense by itself. And If I read the titles, one after the other, they should make sense too. So sometimes what you'll find is consulting partners. What they'll do is they'll take your power points and they'll hide the actual content and they will read just the titles and as they read the titles, it should tell a story. Okay, so once again I told you very important page, right? The slides need to make sense by themselves and they also need to work together when you're creating storyboard, it doesn't have to be super complicated. One question that I often hear from students or new consultants is how do I get good at this [LAUGH] making storyboards? What I would say is just think about it like putting things into buckets right? When we break down problems for clients, we typically put them into buckets to stay organized and a lot of times the story board are those buckets. So for example, if you were on a project around improving revenue, there's only a couple of drivers. Typically it's pricing the volume and the mix of products, right. Because you have more expensive products and cheaper products and the mix, how many of the expensive ones, how many of the cheap ones are you selling? So many times the buckets that you define very early in a project becomes often times a bit of the structure that you have in the presentation. Right? A couple of other reasons for that if you have a revenue project like this and you're breaking into three buckets more than likely. Those are different work streams, you've got a pricing guy, a volume guy and a mixed guy and they're all studying different data sets, doing analysis, working separately and then bringing them back all together again later on. Okay, so once again storyboard very simple way to lay out all the pieces and start to organize them. Right. And with that it allows you to kind of communicate very clearly because you want the pricing person to to know how the volume analysis is going to fit in. Right? And by reading through all of these different slides explain the narrative but then also understand kind of the tone and the meaning that you're trying to give this presentation. So for takeaways, the first thing I'd say is this will start much earlier in the project then you would think I've started on a story board on like day two of a project. I mean you just got there to the client site. You sent out the data request and you haven't even received it yet. Right. But you want to kind of organize and a story board is a way to organize, organize yourself a little bit visually. Okay, also this is for new hires, the green caps, be flexible, You're going to have five different managers and you'll find that they storyboard differently. Right? So there's not just one way to do this, there's many ways to do this. I had one senior manager who storyboard on a piece of paper on an airplane and he wrote down all the storyboard and handed it to me when he saw me at the client site, it wasn't on power point, it was actually just on a piece of paper. Right? You'll have some managers who want a storyboard basically every day, so be a little bit flexible. You part of your job is to match the rhythm and the tempo of the lead of the project. Okay. Similar advice I have for people who are internal blue ladders here. I would encourage you to storyboard more often. Many times people internal to a company. They're used to doing very similar analysis and so their presentations are a little rigid, right? You've done it before, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and I understand that right? We're not trying to create more work but it's also a way a low risk way for you to get input and try out different ideas with your boss. If you're presenting the exact same template in the exact same narrative every month, be willing to step out a little bit, experiment pilot, try new things as well with story boarding
