How to Run a Storyboarding Session Before Building a Consulting Deck

The most expensive mistake in consulting deck production is building before aligning. Teams that open PowerPoint before agreeing on the story spend days building slides they'll discard when the partner review reveals structural problems. A storyboarding session—two to three hours before the first slide is built—catches those structural problems when they're free to fix.

A storyboarding session is a facilitated meeting where the consulting team constructs the deck's narrative architecture using sticky notes, whiteboards, or digital tools—before any slides are built. When it's done well, everyone leaves the session knowing exactly what they'll build and why it belongs in the deck.

---

What a Storyboarding Session Produces

At the end of a storyboarding session, the team should have:

1. The governing message: One sentence capturing the deck's central finding or recommendation
2. The deck structure: A sequenced list of sections, each with a one-line description of its argument
3. Individual slide outlines: For each slide, the title (as a full argument sentence) and a brief description of the intended visual or content
4. Section connections: Explicit articulation of how each section connects to adjacent sections
5. Owner assignments: Who is responsible for building each slide or section

This output—typically a physical or digital board covered in organized sticky notes or index cards—becomes the ghost deck that guides production.

---

When to Run a Storyboarding Session

Before the main analytical build: The most valuable use of a storyboard session is at the start of a project, after initial data gathering but before the full analytical work begins. The storyboard creates hypotheses that the analysis will test.

After a major analytical milestone: When a significant piece of analysis—a market sizing, a financial model, a customer survey—produces findings that need to be integrated into the deck, a mini-storyboarding session ensures the new findings are incorporated coherently.

When the deck feels broken: If a mid-engagement partner review produces structural feedback ("the story doesn't hold together"), a storyboarding session is often the fastest way to fix the problem.

---

Facilitation: The Four Phases

Phase 1: The Governing Message (20 minutes)

Start with one question: "If the client remembers one thing from this presentation, what should it be?"

Each team member writes their answer on a sticky note. Display all answers. The differences reveal where the team has not yet aligned on the central argument.

Facilitate a discussion to converge on a single governing message. This requires real debate—push back on messages that are too vague ("there are significant opportunities"), too operational ("we should restructure the procurement function"), or too limited in scope ("the EMEA cost base is elevated").

A good governing message is specific, bold, and complete: "The company can recover €40M in annual margin within 18 months by addressing three structural cost drivers—without capital investment or headcount reduction."

Don't move to Phase 2 until the governing message is agreed. Everything else in the storyboard must connect to this sentence.

Phase 2: The Key Arguments (30 minutes)

"What are the three to five things we need to prove for the governing message to be true?"

Each team member contributes argument candidates on sticky notes. Display all candidates and group them by theme.

The goal is a set of three to five key arguments that are:

• Independently necessary: Each argument must be part of the case; removing any one of them weakens the governing message
• Collectively sufficient: If all arguments are proven, the governing message is proven
• MECE: Arguments should not overlap significantly

Sort the candidates into groups, identify the strongest representative argument for each group, and select the three to five that meet the criteria above. This is often the most contentious part of the session—analysts are attached to their analytical work, and arguments that don't make the cut feel like wasted effort.

The facilitation principle: arguments are chosen based on what the client needs to believe, not on what was most interesting to analyze.

Phase 3: The Slide-Level Storyboard (60-90 minutes)

With the governing message and key arguments defined, build the slide structure.

Setup: Create a physical or digital column for each section (key argument). Under each section column, place a card representing the section cover slide.

Section cover slides: Each section cover slide title should state the section's conclusion—not the section's topic. "EMEA Procurement Costs Are 35% Above Benchmarks Due to Fragmented Vendor Relationships" not "EMEA Procurement Analysis."

Building the slide sequence: Under each section cover, add cards for the individual slides that will prove the section argument. For each card:

• Write the slide title as a complete argument sentence
• Note the type of visual (waterfall chart, comparison table, interview quotes, etc.)
• Check that the slide connects to the section argument

Work through all sections. A typical 25-slide deck takes 60-90 minutes to storyboard at this level of detail.

The sequence test: When the board is complete, read the slide titles in order. Does the sequence tell the complete story? Are there logical gaps—places where the argument jumps without building? Are there slides that don't connect clearly to any key argument?

Phase 4: Integration and Assignment (20 minutes)

With the slide structure agreed, do two things:

Map the connections: For each section transition, write one sentence explaining how the previous section leads to the next. These transition sentences become the connecting language in the actual presentation.

"Having shown that the market is attractive [Section 1], we now need to assess whether the company can compete effectively [Section 2]."

Assign owners: Each slide gets an owner. Owners understand they're responsible not just for building their slides but for ensuring their slides connect coherently to neighboring slides.

---

Digital Tools for Storyboarding

Physical sticky notes on a whiteboard are the traditional format and remain effective for in-person sessions. For remote or hybrid teams, several digital tools work well:

Miro or Mural: Digital whiteboard tools that replicate the sticky note experience. Allow real-time collaboration and can be exported as images for the session record.

Notion or Confluence: Text-based tools where the storyboard is built as a structured outline. Less visual but easier to search and update as the deck evolves.

PowerPoint itself: Some teams build the ghost deck directly in PowerPoint during the storyboard session—one slide per storyboard card, with only the title and a one-line content description. This has the advantage of producing the ghost deck format directly without translation.

---

Common Storyboarding Pitfalls

Storyboarding without the governing message. Teams that skip Phase 1 and jump to slide-level structure produce storyboards without a spine. Every slide sounds reasonable in isolation; none of them hang together.

Letting the structure be driven by analytical effort. Analysts who have spent a week on a specific analysis want it in the deck. The storyboarding question is not "what did we analyze?" but "what does the client need to see to believe the governing message?"

Building individual slide structures without checking section connections. It's easy to build internally coherent sections that don't connect to each other. The transition mapping in Phase 4 is specifically designed to catch this.

Skipping the governing message debate. If the governing message debate feels uncomfortable—if people are visibly hedging to avoid disagreement—facilitate it more directly. A team that doesn't align on the governing message in the storyboard will produce a deck that sends different messages to different readers.

Not protecting the session from interruption. A storyboarding session requires two to three hours of focused, collaborative work. Meetings that get interrupted by client calls or reduced to 45 minutes produce incomplete storyboards that give the team false confidence in a structure that isn't fully built.

---

The Storyboard as a Living Document

The storyboard produced in the session should be kept current throughout the engagement. When findings change, when scope shifts, or when partner review identifies structural problems, the storyboard is updated first—not the slides.

This discipline prevents the most common mid-engagement failure: teams that stop maintaining the storyboard after the initial session find themselves building slides without a current structural reference, producing the disjointed deck that the storyboard was meant to prevent.

The storyboard is the source of truth for the deck's structure. The slides are the execution of that structure.

---

Related Resources

• Managing Multiple Work Streams in a Single Integrated Consulting Deck
• Hypothesis-Driven Storytelling: The McKinsey Way to Build Narratives
• Building a Client Story Arc: From Problem to Recommendation
• The 3-3-3 Rule for Consulting Slide Design: What Senior Partners Expect