Just to recap a little bit, and the title, we've said this many times. As far as I'm concerned, consultants are in the business of helping clients to break down problems and make very difficult decisions and ultimately create change. That's what we do. In order to do that, we have to appeal to the client's thinking as well as their motivation and really get them to actually take some action. Here at the very bottom. Many of you who work in a corporate setting would agree that large organizations develop inertia. Once they get used to not moving, they don't want to move. Imagine yourself on a Saturday night watching a movie, eating some popcorn, sitting on the sofa, you do not want to motivate. That's the exact same thing with a lot of big organizations. To get organizations to move it takes an enormous amount of energy, leadership and just, we have to get them off the couch. This is a story. A lot of words here. I don't expect you to read all of them. But the title of this Wall Street Journal article probably says it all. What they did is they did an experiment where they had different people actually listening to the exact same story. I think it was Jules Verne's Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. They had them listening to the stories by themselves in their houses. They actually checked their blood pressure. What they found was that depending on where they were in the story their heartbeat would actually speed up or slow down. In other words, as these people were listening to the story, their heartbeats started to beat in unison. What they said here is the story actually drives the heartbeat and that there was a linkage between the heartbeats and the narrative of the story, which is pretty phenomenal. You get a 100 people. They all listen to the same story and at the same parts of their story, their heartbeats go up and they go down. Here at the very bottom it says Marcel Proust poetically said that the heart doesn't lie. Basically, as we hear the same story, our heartbeats actually sync up. Here the title, humans, we are wired for stories and narratives. We certainly learn to talk and listen and hear long before we are able to write and read. I did a survey of some of my MBA students. You can see the word cloud here on the left in color. I asked them, what are the inputs, what are the ingredients to great storytelling? On the left-hand side, what are the great outputs? How do you feel? For inputs, you can see obviously knowing who is the audience, being very clear, having structure. You don't want to be random. We talked about the pyramid principle earlier. You want to be structured and you want to provide details. Because if it's generic than honestly it's not very appealing and not persuasive. If you have the colored inputs going well, what are some of the outputs that you'd like to see and expect? Well, you'd want to see some action. We're not just telling stories, to tell stories we're actually want the client to be motivated, both intellectually and emotionally and physically to take some action and have some connection and some memory of it. One indication that your presentation was persuasive and awesome is if six months later, the client or whoever was in the room still remembers it. When you think back on movies that you've watched some of your favorite shows, perhaps you still remember exactly what happened from scene to scene. Same idea. But in a professional setting, what I did was create this diagram. It shows a circle and several steps. You'll see one it starts and ends with storytelling. Then from there in the middle, you see different buckets, basically dividing it up into parts that are easy to understand and then analysis on the far left. Let's start with storytelling. Who's the audience? What's the purpose? Why does this even matter? Why are we here? From the pyramid principle session last time, we talked about putting the answer first. Don't force your client executives to guess what you're trying to say. Put the answer first and then you can always back it up with details later on. Buckets. Buckets is not a very fancy word, but it's the right word. It's the idea that you want to help the client to see something very clearly, to see the architecture, to see the pieces, to see the parts. Once they see that they understand, oh, that's the problem, here are the choices, here's the analysis we're going to do and then make it very easy to follow along. You're breaking down the problem, showing what your hypothesis, what you think the answer could be, putting that in there, and then describing it in a way that's very easy to understand and track. We want to show insights, not data and not analysis. What's the difference? Insight really answers the so-what? It's the aha, oh, I never thought about it that way. That's very clever. This is what that might mean. Sometimes the clients, sometimes they want to know, but a lot of times they don't. They don't want to see all the cooking that happens in the kitchen. They want to see the final dish of food. Definitely emphasize and be very sparing with the time of your clients. Show them the results, the recommendations, and the insights that are developed from the analysis. You don't have to show them all the math and all the homework. Frankly, a lot of them really don't care. One thing before I forget is at the top it says a really great presentation answers the client's questions before they're asked. When you're in the storyboarding process and you're thinking about, oh, we have 30 minutes, we have ten people in the room, we're trying to answer this and you think about how many pages you want to have, one exercise that's very useful is be your own devil's advocate. Write down the 10 toughest questions that you might get. Those are 10 questions ideally you want to answer even before they come up. Then finally, we started with storytelling, and we ended with storytelling. It creates some closure for the client because you put things into buckets and because the analysis was very targeted, and you show them the insights, not the data. There's a little bit of a sense of satisfaction from actually having watched this presentation. You can really work with your client and figure out, if that's true and I agree with you, what are the next steps? What should we do next week? How much do you think this would cost? Those are all buying questions that show you that the client is on board, and they are actually thinking about ways to deliver this project and what the next phase could be. In summary, great storytelling makes it easier to follow. There's a mental schematic, a blueprint of where we're headed. You actually proved everything to the client by sharing the insights and not dwelling too much on the individual data and then bringing it back to storytelling. If you do that successfully, what does that look like? Here, I'd say it's not easy to do. In a perfect world, you would have them intellectually there, emotionally there and practically motivated to take some action. You'd want green, green, green, is what you'd be targeting. Not so easy. Sometimes when it doesn't go well, it looks like this. It might make intellectual and logical sense. Good analysis, good use of data. That's very cool, nice graph, smart consultants. But emotionally there's too much risk. They're not convinced that it's really needed. They may want to postpone it for awhile. Then also maybe they're not enough details about how in the world they would do it. It's daunting. The type of reaction that I've gotten in the past when we weren't successful, they might say something like, oh, smart, good idea, let me think about it, yeah, we thought about that before, good job. But in reality, nothing's going to change. Another version of not great. You can see here the green checkmark is emotional. Maybe your presentation was a wow. Maybe you did some audio visual, maybe you really painted a picture for them. They are so jazzed about it. They're smiling, they're engaged, they're patting you on the back. They're hyped up. But they're not going to do it. Because one, even though it was exciting, intellectually, I don't want to do this. I don't want to lose my job. There's not a lot of data backing this stuff up. You just gave me a very inspirational sermon. But I'm not convinced intellectually that it makes sense. Then I certainly don't have practical tips on how to make this happen. A third version of not great, looks like this. Maybe you gave them a huge checklist of 15 things that they can do tomorrow, to do this. It's like a recipe. It's beautiful, very detailed, project plan. You're ticking and tying everything and frankly, it's just add water and it should work. But you skipped a couple of steps. One is, there are a lot of details, but intellectually, is it worth the risk? What were the other options? Is this really what needs to happen? You really didn't bring the client along and so they're not intellectually ready to commit yet. Frankly, this little checklist of stuff you gave them; pretty boring. They are not intellectually engaged and they're not psychologically there either, you just gave them a practical checklist of stuff. Ideally, and I'm not saying this is easy, this is hard, this is also why consultants make a lot of money; is you want to satisfy this part, this part, and this part. You really want them all in. What that looks like when it's done well, is the client, they're actually on your side of the table. I mean, they are saying they're actually more excited than you are. They're saying stuff like, "Wow, I can see this. We always had a suspicion that that was true, but you really convinced us." I think it's the right thing to do for the patient, for the customer, for employees. There's a little bit of risk involved, but I think it's worth it. Then finally, it's not them listening to the honeydew list that you gave them but they're actually taking some initiative. They're saying, "Hey, instead of doing that, let me make a phone call right now. Let's talk to them," and they're jumping in to the bridge and getting stuff done. A couple of takeaways, and this is incredibly important. We, me and you, we're all wired for stories. That doesn't mean that you work for Disney and you're just painting a beautiful picture. No, it's way more than that. Yes, we're dealing with Excel, yes, we're dealing with analysis and all these things that can be fairly mundane, but when it comes time to really motivate people to take action, it's more than just selling the vision. Two things. One is, there's a lot of homework that has to be done before the presentation. So way before you even go to the room itself, clearly knowing who's in the room, in terms of audience and then also pre-wiring the presentation. We talked about it a little bit; talking about it again. Before you go to a very important presentation, you should have shown that presentation to the key decision-makers in advance. You want no drama in this situation. No drama. That could mean maybe you have one person, let's say his name is Billy, Billy is a little bit of a detractor. Billy's a little bit cynical, Billy has seen consultants before, Billy has not been on board yet. Before the final presentation, you definitely want to share with Billy. "Hey, Billy. In the final presentation, we're going to recommend a couple of things. Does this sit right with you?" You want to give Billy a chance to give feedback or sometimes even attack your recommendations privately. The last thing you want to do is embarrass Billy or put Billy in a bad situation, or give Billy the opportunity to create a scene at this final table. Here you can see, it's not a typo, I actually put it in multiple times. A presentation done really well, involves a lot of editing and a lot of practice, more editing and even more practice. I'll say here, unlike storytelling that you might see on Netflix or Hulu, you want zero drama. Consultants help clients break down problems, make tough decisions, and implement change. Drama has no place in that. Here on the left-hand side you can see it says, answer first, using buckets, giving insights not data, giving options and prioritizing them, and then finally, getting the client to act.
