Deloitte Consulting Slide

Breakdown
by Paul Moss | Feb 27, 2021

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Deloitte Consulting Slide Breakdown

This slide from Deloitte shows the importance of slide

structure when it comes to communicating insights to
your clients, and how even small tweaks like color
choice can make a significant difference in the overall
readability of your slide. 

Deloitte has been a formidable player in the consulting industry

over the last couple decades. As one of the Big 4 accounting
firms, it’s often recognized as a global leader in Tax, Audit, and
Financial Advisory. But with its reputation as a strategy,
operations, and technology consulting powerhouse continuing
to strengthen, it has gained favor with prospective clients and
employees alike. 

By most accounts, it hasn’t quite reached the upper echelon of

consulting royalty, reserved for the dynamic trio of McKinsey,
Bain, and BCG (despite some online suggestions that it should be
“MBBD”). But in my experience, the firm consistently produces
high quality content, with presentations that meet if not exceed
the standards of an industry that demands PowerPoint
perfection. 
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In this post I’ll be reviewing a slide from a Deloitte presentation

called, “Consumer Privacy in Retail” (source). I’ll provide a
complete breakdown of the good and the bad, and I’ll try to
highlight principles that might apply to any slide building
situation. 
Full disclosure: the author of this post worked at Deloitte Consulting
from 2012-2015. However, all opinions are his own and do not
represent Deloitte Consulting in any
way. The presentation referenced in this article was released after his
employment with Deloitte, and was obtained through publicly
available sources (link below). 

Good: Solid title that summarizes the

slide
The title of the slide says, “Consumer businesses may have
historically had lower compliance costs than other major
industries; however, privacy regulations will likely change that
dynamic”. And the reason why this works so well is because it
provides a full description of the slide’s main takeaway.

If you’ve seen my other slide breakdowns you know that I talk

about this point quite a bit, which is that the title of your slide
should provide a summary of the main points of the slide so that
the audience can understand what you’re trying to tell them as
quickly and as effortlessly as possible.

The other reason is that you want the audience to have the

information they need to process the rest of the details on the
slide in the way you want them to. Notice how the title has the
largest font of all the text on the slide. This is because that’s what
they want you to see first. They want you to get the main idea,
then go into the details of the slide to find support for the main
idea.
The concept behind this by the way is the Pyramid Principle,
which is really just a way of communicating (often used by
consultants) where you start with the main idea first  then go
into the details. You can see this very clearly with this slide by by
reading the title first (the main idea), then reading through the
details of the slide layer by layer).

For more information the Pyramid Principle and why it matters

check out our full breakdown and explanation here.

Good: Clear insights and visual

connections
The slide is essentially broken out into two parts – the part on
the left that shows compliance costs for each industry, then a list
of regulatory compliance requirements on the right. The whole
idea of the slide is to connect these two charts and essentially
make the point that despite compliance costs being low for retail
(which you can see in the chart on the left) the difficulty of data
privacy regulations are going to affect the retail industry. And
what they’ve done really well is connect these two charts
together with various visual highlights and callouts.
First of all they have this box of text in the middle that very
clearly spells out the connection. And this is a great principle to
follow in general which is that you don’t want to make any
assumptions about what your audience understands about the
data and it’s connection to your message. You want to clearly
explain as many things as possible, and make it easy for them to
grasp the insights.

Would a smart person be able to understand that consumer

privacy laws are directly applicable to retail? Yes. Especially
someone that already has an interest in the topic. But with so
much information coming at them all at once, your audience will
need as much help as possible if you want them to understand,
and more importantly, be persuaded by your message.

Then the second thing that they’ve done well is the color
connection. Notice how the color of the pyramid matches the
color of the top bar in the bar chart. This is very subtle but it
definitely makes a difference in helping the audience see how
these two data points are connected.
I also like how with the bar chart on the right they only colorized
the important bar, and left the rest of them a subtle light blue
color so they don’t stand out too much. Again this helps direct
my attention to the parts of the slide that matter the most, and
away from the supporting details.

I would have liked to see the same thing on this chart here on the
left, with the main pyramid staying the blue color, but the other
colors both being something more neutral and less eye catching.
For example if they were both the same color as these other bars
on the bar chart I think it would have helped focused the
attention of the slide more on the data points that matter the
most – the retail pyramid and the top bar of the bar chart.

Good: Icons provide nice visual boost

Another thing about this slide that is important to notice is the
use of icons below the chart on the left. This is a small design
choice but I think it’s effective. Rather than just using simple
titles, they’ve added visual depictions of the industry to make it
that much easier to understand them quickly.

Anyone who reads the word “healthcare” knows what that

means, but having a small and subtle icon will just make it that
much easier to grasp quickly. Remember, the goal is to make it as
easy as possible for the audience to process and understand the
information on the slide, so small stuff like this makes a
difference.

Bad: Chart titles are lacking

Another thing that’s interesting about these two charts is the
choice of titles. Notice how they explain what’s in the chart but
they don’t call attention to the actual insight. For example on the
left the title of the chart is “Average Compliance Cost by
Industry,” which just tells me the type of information that’s in
there but doesn’t provide any insight.
There’s nothing that says what they want me to get out of the
chart. For example, it could instead say something like,
“Compliance costs for the retail industry are low.” That way I
don’t need to make my own interpretation of the data – I can see
what they want me to see. This is something that consulting
firms usually do pretty well – rather than leaving me to find the
insights myself, they spell it out for me really clearly.

So it’s not how I think the charts should be titled, but there are a
couple reasons why I think it still works to some degree. The first
is that both charts are pretty simple. Especially the chart on the
left – there’s not a whole lot of interpretation that needs to
happen. The data is pretty straightforward. Then the second
reason is that the insight is very clearly spelled out in the title,
which takes some pressure off of the subtitles.

Bad: Use of pyramids for the column

chart
Then one final thing I have to address is the choice to use
pyramids for the column chart instead of just regular columns. I
don’t feel like it adds enough to the slide visually to justify the
distraction that it is. Typically it’s dangerous to use
unconventional shapes for your charts because it makes the data
more difficult to compare (3D charts are a prime example).
However, I will cut them some slack here because in this case the
data is still clear. On top of that, the precise differences of the
pyramids don’t matter all that much; it’s the relative size of the
third pyramid that drives the point home. Again, it’s not my
favorite choice, but I don’t think it does any damage to the
readability of the slide. 

Final Thoughts
This slide from Deloitte does a great job of clearly
communicating a simple but powerful message. It provides a
great example of the importance of slide structure when it
comes to communicating insights to your clients, and how even
small tweaks like color choice can make a significant difference
in the overall readability of your slide. 

Source information:
Deloitte Consulting – Consumer Privacy in Retail. October
2019.

Report: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/consumer
business/us-retail-privacy-survey-2019.pdf

Presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/DeloitteUS/consumer-
privacy-in-retail
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