Why Decks Matter

Decks have become the butt of all consulting jokes. For consultants it’s considered the thief of joy (PlsFix trauma is real), for ex‑consultants it’s a continued source of nightmares and for non‑consultants it’s been a timeless source of schadenfreude (“you get paid millions just to make powerpoints”). In the midst of this skepticism, it’s rarely realized why the consulting process actually revolves around this obsession.

Contrary to popular belief, a deck isn’t a set of over‑iterated pretty pages where partners assert corporate dominance over their underlings. A deck is to strategy what GitHub is to software development. It’s where analysis gets captured, merged into the main storyline, and rebalanced for impact every time new information lands. It’s a living document that serves as the central point of collaboration for its team members. It’s the documentation, the workspace, and the final product - all at once.

That’s what makes it so non‑trivial. Every page is a negotiation between logic, persuasion, hierarchy, transparency, consensus and buy‑in. Every change ripples through the argument, sometimes shifting the entire direction of the recommendation.

The irony? Consultants, ever the overworked low‑on‑bandwidth specie, solve process problems for thousands of clients but often ignore themselves. While engineers have GitHub and designers have Figma, consultants are still pushing boxes around on PowerPoint slides, manually versioning files called FinalFinal_v37b.pptx. The deck remains our most important yet least evolved tool.

Until now…