Struggle with slide-making?
Slide-making is the most fundamental skill in consulting. If consultants have friction there, it may tank their performance. But most consultants have huge misconceptions about slide-making...
A McKinsey consultant shared that slide-making was his main problem.
He asked: “Could you share some tips and tricks, useful shortcuts, cool templates, and beautiful icons?”
But I told him that he was focusing on the wrong things.
In fact, that was NOT what he actually needed!
A lateral hire, post-MBA, 6 months’ tenure. His journey started rough. He had a couple of tough projects. Received lots of negative feedback.
As a result, he concluded that he needed to produce much more beautiful slides. He believed that if he fixed that, all his problems would go away.
And I can understand how he came up with this conclusion. His partners always comment on his slides:
“Make the title clearer.”
“Make it easier to digest.”
“Use a conceptual slide.”
But there’s something more. Something invisible that he doesn’t see yet. Much more important than slide beautification.
It’s the thinking behind the slide that is important.
Here's how it works…
Partners can only react to the visible outputs. They cannot see how he thought, framed the problem, analyzed issues, found insights, and decided what mattered.
But in reality, if the slide hasn’t landed, that means the problems originated much earlier in the working process, long before he touched PowerPoint.
Because an impactful slide is not about fancy design, cool layout, or beautiful icons.
It’s about the substance and insightful messaging.
Yes, you can learn the formatting rules and produce decent, even beautiful, slides. That’s somewhat helpful. But it’s not enough. Otherwise, MBB firms would be full of graphic designers.
Partners will still be unhappy because the underlying thinking is missing.
For them, it will look like a child's cosplay. Yes, you look like Batman, but you're not one.
For you, it will feel like a moving target. Today one thing, tomorrow another.
That is why learning slide-making feels so hard.
I often see this situation. By months 12-18, consultants can produce stunning slides.
But why are they still struggling? Why are they still average? Partners are still not excited, not ready to support, advocate for, and promote them.
So, in essence, consultants are chasing the symptoms without addressing the real root causes. They waste a lot of time focusing on the wrong things.
Why is that? What’s missing?
The missing ingredient is problem-solving.
To be precise, it's the absence of a systematic problem-solving process.
Because if consultants work in an ad hoc, haphazard way, they make careless mistakes, forget important things, don’t find unique insights, and produce trivial outputs. And there’s no way to catch those mistakes.
Then, all of that will translate into slides. And partners will feel that something is missing. It doesn’t have that wow effect they want. And consequently, they will provide negative feedback on the slides.
Here, I won’t expand too much on exactly how that works. I suggest you read two of my detailed guides on these topics:
GUIDE 1: How to Create Great Slides
GUIDE 2: The Ultimate Guide to Problem-Solving
You need to read both guides in sequence because they work together as a system. One leads into the other.
Okay, this is all good, but if you are an MBB consultant, I know you have a more pressing and tangible question:
How to learn slide-making and problem-solving?
And how to do it quickly, not through months and months of a painful trial-and-error process, countless reps, mistakes, negative feedback, rework, and iterations.
In my coaching program, the MBB Performance Accelerator, we developed a protocol that reduces this process from months to weeks. And completely removes the negative experience from it.
This process was created, tested, and improved through working with dozens of active MBB consultants in my coaching program. And now it’s the fastest way you can learn slide-making and problem-solving.
Let me explain this exact protocol…
Bear with me. It may become a bit technical, but if you are serious about improving your performance, I am sure you’ll appreciate the systematic approach.
You learn through practice…
Consultants must learn through practical exercises. We know that learning just through theory is not effective.
They are given realistic consulting problems, very representative of what they usually face in their day-to-day work. They have to solve these problems and produce slides communicating their ideas.
I review these slides myself. And because I worked at McKinsey for 9 years and coached dozens of consultants, I can spot mistakes and unhelpful behaviors.
But I don’t just find visible mistakes. I point out the exact root causes, how these mistakes originated, and what happened upstream, from accepting the task, conducting research, and problem-solving to actual slide-making.
This way, we ensure that consultants address the real root causes, not just chase random symptoms.
Once the root causes become visible, the solutions become obvious and actionable. This way, we eliminate whole classes and types of mistakes. This prevents them from happening in the future.
To make it more tangible, let me share some common mistakes consultants make:
- Misunderstand the problem or miss an important piece of context
- Make implicit assumptions or draw illogical conclusions
- Don’t structure issues and don’t explore them deep enough
- Communicate solutions without taking the audience perspective
- Don’t do final quality control and make minor mistakes
All of these mistakes will end up in slides. And partners will tell you that your slides are not so good. See how easy it is to confuse all these different mistakes with a mere slide-making problem?
Once you start addressing these root causes, the slide-making process becomes more streamlined. The number of mistakes decreases. You become much more productive. Partners start liking how you work.
You do multiple exercises…
Because doing one exercise is not enough. Usually, it takes 2-3 exercises to see a step change in performance.
Consultants accumulate the critical mass of improvements. It clicks for them, and they radically change how they work.
But if needed, there are up to 10 different exercises to practice. Each exercise focuses on different problem-solving skills, like research, analytical, conceptual, modeling, storylining, structuring, and others.
This way, I can see if consultants have well-rounded skills that can be applied in a variety of consulting situations.
You can see what great looks like…
To make the learning experience even more effective, I show consultants the best output for the same exercise they just completed.
It just hits them differently when they see what outstanding slides produced by fellow consultants look like.
Some consultants say: “It’s the first time I saw what great actually looks like.”
If you think about it, consultants don’t get to see that. Every task they do is unique for them. They produce hundreds of slides, but they never see how they could have been done in the absolute best way.
It’s hard to improve without knowing what is expected of you. It becomes constant guesswork, not a reliable, objective process.
But in the coaching program, we can show the benchmark. Not just good outputs, but absolutely the best, which can impress any partner.
And consultants are smart people. If they are shown clearly what the ultimate expectations are, they get it. They learn it very fast. It’s not rocket science.
It’s just hard to do because expectations are always ambiguous and unclear.
You calibrate your performance…
But we don’t stop here.
To further improve the learning effectiveness, I help consultants calibrate their performance against the global group of MBB consultants in my program (~100 consultants).
I share all the slides that were created by other consultants for the same exercise. They are grouped by the scores I assign: 10 out of 10, 9 out of 10, etc.
This way, consultants know exactly how good or how bad they are. It’s not someone’s subjective opinion. It’s not their partners’ or managers’ opinion, not even mine.
It’s objective. It’s evidence-based. They can see it themselves. They can stress test the logic. They can make up their own opinion.
And it’s highly actionable. Consultants can see what specific gaps they have compared to higher tiers and what specific things they need to do to improve.
You build stronger pattern recognition…
Additionally, I don’t just show consultants slides. I ask them to review them and then compare their review with my feedback for each slide. I’ve marked every slide myself.
By comparing their assessment with mine, they build stronger pattern recognition for what makes a bad slide and what makes a great slide.
In the AI world, it’s called ‘supervised training’ with a marked dataset. Basically, I train consultants like AI models, feeding them the quality data to build new neural connections and pattern recognition.
You prepare for an EM role…
One of the main challenges new EMs experience is reviewing consultants’ slides. They just don’t see what can be improved compared with their own work.
But if you practiced reviewing hundreds of slides before, this builds the right pattern recognition and confidence, so you can do it much faster and more precisely. That’s what your managers and partners have, and you don’t have it yet.
You practice the right micro skills…
In the exercises, we identify which specific micro-skills in problem-solving and slide-making they lack.
It can be top-down communication, formatting, structuring, analytical thinking, issue analysis, logical reasoning, and others.
The reality is that these skills take time to build. You can’t fix them on the spot just because you became more aware of them. You must rewire how your brain works.
It’s the same as with muscle building. You don’t do it overnight. You need to apply stress to your muscles regularly to make them grow.
In a way, your brain is also a muscle and needs quality reps to become stronger.
For this specific reason, I created bite-sized, interactive exercises to practice specific, isolated problem-solving skills.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s take structuring. It’s a fundamental consulting skill. You need it in almost everything you do, from how you think to how you communicate.
Now, let’s think about how you learn it in your job.
How many structuring reps do you get per project? Maybe a few. That’s far from enough.
Do you get quality feedback? Do you see what best practice looks like? Hardly. At best, you get vague feedback after 2 months. By that time, you forget what caused that feedback.
But in the coaching program, you can practice structuring through interactive exercises using realistic consulting scenarios.
You create your own structures, submit your answer, and get AI-powered personalized feedback immediately. Not in a few weeks, immediately.
Surprisingly, AI is amazing for these specific types of tasks. It's precise, consistent, and insightful. I also calibrated its responses using hundreds of examples from my clients, active MBB consultants.
The feedback shows your mistakes, explains why they happen, and gives you the best answer for this exact scenario.
That’s how you get instant quality learning.
Your learning loop becomes much faster. You compress it from months to minutes.
Now imagine you do 10, 20, or 30 reps in a row. You strengthen your pattern recognition. You start seeing subtle nuances. You develop much stronger skills. You learn much faster with less stress in the process.
It’s like going to a gym and building your muscles.
You get all this practice, and that’s how we hack your slide-making and problem-solving learning process.
That’s how we accelerate your learning. It’s the unfair advantage you needed so much.
The only thing you need to bring is your desire to learn and do the practical exercises. The impact will follow very quickly.
If you are an MBB consultant and you want to radically improve your performance, I would like to talk to you and discuss if the coaching program is a good fit for you.
BOOK A FREE 1-1 CONSULTATION CALL
We will discuss your pain points, challenges, and aspirations. No strings attached, just straight answers to your biggest questions.
If you want to learn more about my coaching program, read this post:
The coaching program for MBB consultants.