Most advisory work in the world is delivered on slides. The slide deck is the standard unit of management thinking in almost every large organisation. The firm still, mostly, writes reports. There is a reason for that, and it is worth writing down.
Why a slide deck is the wrong vessel for a difficult answer
A slide deck is optimised for a ninety minute board room in which a presenter walks an audience through a story. It is a good vessel for a story. It is a bad vessel for a difficult answer. The slide deck rewards the author for putting the best line at the top of each slide and burying the qualification in the footnote. The reader who reads the document alone, two weeks later, almost never reads the footnote. The qualification is therefore almost always lost.
A written report makes the qualification sit in the same sentence as the finding. The reader cannot skim past it without noticing the missing step. The author cannot hide an uncertainty by putting it in smaller type. Every number has to live next to its source.
What a Dynmark report contains
- A one page summary that states the recommendation and the conditions under which it holds.
- A short section on the question that was asked and the question that was not asked, so the reader knows the scope the firm worked inside.
- The working. Every material claim is tied back to evidence. Where the evidence is thin, the report says so in plain language.
- A small financial model referenced from the text, delivered to the client in a format they can keep and edit.
- A short list of the decisions the firm recommends, written in the imperative, followed by a short list of the decisions the firm is not ready to recommend and why.
A working session with the team that will act on the recommendation is part of every engagement, and slides are sometimes built for that working session. The slide deck is a summary of the report, not a replacement for it. The report is the durable output. The slides are the conversation piece.