How to Create Powerful Storylines in Business Like Top Consultants Do

Storytelling is a superpower anyone can learn.
It’s the ability to structure information that aligns with how the human mind works.
Information is like food. We can only digest it if it comes in a certain way.
Storytelling = Information in a format that makes the human mind want more of it, not less.
I gave some very bad presentations in my early career that made me learn the hard way: Your ideas are worthless if you can’t package and sell them.
Fast-forward several years, books, training, and projects. Today, I lead a team, own a business, and educate professionals on the power of communication in business.
Good stories in business follow the same structure as in movies: The hero’s journey.
Bring this into the business arena and combine it with the pyramid principle. That’s a good recipe to impress your listeners.
Here is how.
What is the Hero Journey?
Our minds are wired to follow a certain type of story structure. The so-called hero’s journey. Studies even suggest that we find more meaning if we see our life as a hero’s journey.
It always follows the same structure. Let’s use The Lord of the Rings as an example.

- A character: Frodo
- Has a problem: He inherits the ring with corrupting powers. Evil forces want it while he has to resist its corruptive influence himself.
- And meets a guide: Gandalf
- Who gives them a plan: Support, guidance, and fellowship
- And calls them to action: To destroy the ring
- To achieve success: Save the world
- And avoid failure: The dark villain Sauron gets the ring and rules the world in terror
This common pattern is found in almost all popular stories. Some add extra parts and details, but this basic structure is almost always present.
How Does the Hero Journey Relate to Business?
In business, we leverage the power of the hero journey.
We refer to it as the horizontal logic. Think of a presentation — one slide after another — that’s the storyline.

We call the business adaptation of the Hero’s Journey the Situation — Complication — Resolution (SCR) framework.

- We start with the situation the audience is in
- We highlight the business problem from their point of view
- We appear as a guide without saying it
- We give them a plan: our ideas
- We call them to action
- To achieve success and avoid failure: business value
As you see, we typically add one addition to the SCR framework: a call to action. After we get the listeners’ attention and interest, we place an ask.
This positions us as the guide in their own hero journey.
This is rule #1 for effective communication:
The audience is the hero in their own journey. You are the guide giving them a plan and calling them to action.
Situation
In the beginning, you have to achieve 2 things:
- Meet the audience where they are
- Ensure they understand why they should listen to you
Many miss these points.
If you don’t meet your audience in their world, they may not even start listening to you. They think you don’t understand them. If you don’t understand them, how can you help them?
It’s the same in blockbuster movies. The Lord of the Rings starts with the normal life of the Hobbit, Frodo, which we can relate to.
How to do this in business? By setting the context.
Let’s look at an example from a McKinsey case, The USPS Future Business Model.
You can find it and other cases here.

The first 7 out of 39 slides describe the context. Here are the titles of these slides:
- USPS is experiencing unprecedented losses
- Losses have been driven by volume declines, RHB pre-funding requirements, and limitations on cost savings
- Volume declines have been worse than expected when the current legal and regulatory framework was established
- The recession has exacerbated volume declines, but mail has reached an inflection point, with e-diversion now driving long-term decline
- Retiree Health Benefit funding requirements are a significant burden, equal to 12% of total revenue in 2010
- Recent reductions in workforce usage have been significant, but pieces per FTE still declined in 2009
- The USPS has been responsive to declining volume, but recent work-hour reductions will become increasingly difficult to replicate

These 7 slides give a comprehensive overview of the company’s situation. This is meeting the audience where they are and clarifying why they should listen.
Complication
In this section, you must convey why this situation is so bad and why the audience, i.e., the hero, must act now.
The situation showed us that things are bad and it’s relevant to listen. However, it left the audience with a slight “So what” feeling.
So after this section, your listeners should:
- Feel triggered and a little anxious
- Ask themselves: What should we do?
Let’s look at an excerpt of slides of the example case to highlight the complication.
- Four trends will affect postal economics going forward
- Volume will decline significantly over the next decade, driven by a steady decline in First-Class Mail, the most profitable segment
- Workforce costs continue to rise faster than inflation through 2020
- The combination of the trends will put extreme pressure on USPS given it is a largely fixed-cost network business
- The “Base Case” leads to a loss of $33 billion and cumulative losses of $238 billion by 2020

Wow. If we don’t act, we will lose $238 billion.
We have reached the pinnacle of despair. Now, it should be clear to anyone that they have to act.
But how?
Resolution
Here, the presenter, in the example McKinsey, positions themself as the guide who gives the struggling hero a plan.

Here are some of the slide’s titles that lead the path to the resolution to achieve success and avoid failure:
- USPS can pursue two sets of actions to address the challenge
- The “Actions within Postal Service control” case includes product and service initiatives above the baseline to grow volume
- Aggressive productivity improvements in the “Actions within Postal Service control” case are worth ~ $10 billion
- Increasing workforce flexibility and improving procurement add ~ $1B in the “Actions within Postal Service control” case
- “Fundamental Change” that increases USPS flexibility will be required to close the remaining gap
- USPS will need to pursue multiple “Fundamental Change” options to close the remaining gap
- Products and services opportunities for USPS

So, there seems to be a way out after all. Phew…
Did you notice how this horizontal logic takes the audience on a journey?
- Starting at their tricky situation: losses, volume decline, recession
- Through a peak of despair — the complication: dangerous trends, further volume decline, workforce cost, extreme pressure, $238 billion in losses
- To hope: a potential resolution if we act and follow the plan: two sets of actions, drive revenue, control costs, workforce flexibility, fundamental changes, product and service opportunities
Stories like this trigger the listener’s mind to produce dopamine — a neurotransmitter responsible for wanting more.
It engages the audience to listen and look for more.
And surely McKinsey will be willing to give more to a thirsty audience…
How to Use the Pyramid Principle to Structure Each Part of the Story
With SCR, we have established the horizontal logic of your communication — the storyline.
But how do we effectively communicate each part of the storyline?
That’s what we refer to as vertical logic. Here, we use the Pyramid Principle, which structures information in easy-to-follow packages.
Why is structure so important?
Because the mind speaks in pictures. People can better understand and remember ideas if organized around a logical structure.
For example, stars.
For thousands of years, humans have viewed the stars close to us not just as points of light but as shapes forming figures. This perception of patterns helps us remember constellations more easily.
The same is true for ideas.
This is why Barbara Minto wrote the Pyramid Principle — a top-down communication structure.

How to apply the Pyramid Principle
When you present, follow these 3 steps:
- Lead with the answer: Make your main point right away
- Support the answer with facts at a high level
- Back up facts with detailed explanations, data, and analysis
To do that, you have to build it from the bottom up. This means that you have to:
- Aggregate your findings into arguments
- Group your arguments
- Summarize to create the leading argument

Let’s look at an example from the McKinsey presentation.

Let’s break it down.

The main point is right at the top:
Without aggressive management cost-cutting, work hours will remain flat with volume decline countered by more delivery points
We call this the action title, as I will explain later in this article.
Support:
- Work hours 2009
- Mail volume reduction
- Increase in delivery points
- Reduction in PO locations
- Reduction in overhead
- Work hours in 2020
Backup:
- Mail volume reduction: 1.5% per year drop (27B fewer mail pieces)
- Increase in delivery points: Increase by 0.8% per year (12M new delivery points)
- Reduction in PO locations: Reduction of 800 PO’s (2% of base)
How to Make Presentations More Effective With Action Titles
Action titles are the most important elements. They bring the storyline to life.
They ensure that the reader gets the most important point right from the beginning without needing all the details.
We call this receiver-focused communication.
An action title condenses the main point of the slide to an actionable takeaway in 1 complete sentence
People are often too busy for all the details. They should be able to understand the main points just by quickly looking over the document and reading the titles.

4 Steps to create good action titles
Firstly, identify the Key Message. Define the slide’s core message by considering the following:
- Who is the audience?
- What information is most relevant to them?
- What is the key takeaway or “So What” of this slide?
Secondly, summarize the key message. Craft a concise summary using active verbs such as “increase,” “reach,” or “decline” to highlight actions or changes.
Thirdly, be concrete: If relevant, use specific data points, like “Increase Sales by 20%,” to catch attention.
Finally, ensure consistency: Ensure your titles’ style and tone are uniform throughout the presentation.
For example, all slides mentioned above use action titles. This one here is the best:

- It summarizes the most important point relevant to the audience (USPS managers)
- It’s active tone
- It’s concrete with the numbers
I explained action titles with more examples here.
Key Takeaways
Attention has become the most scarce resource.
Storytelling is the science and art of delivering information in line with the wiring of the human mind.
The hero’s journey gives us a blueprint to create a storyline. In business, we name it the SCR (Situation, Complication, Resolution) framework:
- Meet the audience where they are and highlight the relevance
- Create tension
- Solve the problem and call for action
The Pyramid Principle gives us the structure for communicating each part of the storyline:
- Start with the most important point
- Support it with arguments
- Back arguments up with data and facts
Develop the communication from the bottom up.
I wonder how many great ideas never got implemented because whoever had them couldn’t communicate properly.
Don’t meet the same fate.
What’s your big idea?