Consulting Is All About the Story

Every time you're in a meeting or every time you're preparing a presentation or pulling together a roadmap or trying to design an overarching program, there needs to be a storyboard that you can guide the recipient along the journey.

Welcome back to the Notion State of Mind podcast. I'm your co-host, and co-founder of Notion State, joined by my co-host and co-founder Bryan Takayama. Did I say my name? My name's Josh Redd, and I am in a new background, new house, new office. Pretty excited about it. Maybe I'll give a sneak peek sometime in the future, but for now, this is what it is. And got some natural light in my life, which, you know, if I seem a little happier, there might be some correlation there.

Been stuck in a basement for months. I worked with you, Josh, for 7 months and when we were video chatting, I never saw you in daylight cuz you were working from the dungeon. So this is, it is quite nice. It was very shocking when you answered your first call from your new house. I'm like, oh my God, Josh on a daylight call. That's—

I, yeah, I worked in my basement and the nearest and only window was about this big and it was like, you know, 30 feet on the other side of the basement. So this is good.

Is this for the exclusive purpose of you being able to get out of the house if it caught on fire? And the exit was closed.

Yeah, that's, that's what it is on paper.

As you say, environment is everything. I think we talked about that in one of our episodes.

Yeah. Uh, all right. In today's episode, we're going to take an approach where I know what we're talking about, but not really. And Bryan has a strong opinion or strong thoughts, deep thoughts. I'll probably be able to, you know, learn some things along the way and maybe discover my own approach on this. But the topic is storyboarding. And with that said, I came from a video background and I should know what storyboarding is. And I mean, I kind of do, but we're talking about the consulting environment, experience, uh, profession. So that's what kind of gave me pause. It's storyboarding, but we're talking about consulting. So yeah, when we talk about storyboarding, why is it such an important concept to you and how does it actually apply to our role as consultants?

Not to just completely flip this back on you, but since you do have light experience with it, before I answer what it means to me and how I apply it to consulting and how we teach it to our team members and deploy it for our clients, what does storyboarding mean to you?

Well, to, uh, to be totally transparent, I did a lot of video, but it was not a lot of structured scripted video. So, storyboarding was not a sharp skill of mine, but video storyboarding is kind of You know, drawing out how you want the story to go, kind of envisioning it, seeing who's entering the scenes, who's exiting, kind of getting a, a good, I don't know, just like rough sketch of how is this story gonna play out? And you can kind of spot the gaps, you can spot the redundancies, things like that. Um, as far as characters and story arcs go.

Why would a director create a storyboard before trying to direct a movie? Or even a YouTube video?

Well, I mean, I guess, you know, to spot some of those, those problems, right? To shape it, to do it before, before you've committed, before you've gotten on set, before you've spent millions of dollars. You want to, first of all, get it right in your head, but then you also want to be able to present it to the people that are footing the bill, the executive producers, make sure that they're on board with it. So you're probably doing this early on before you've ever even gotten a contract signed. To do anything, but you're just shaping the path of the story and you got a foundation to work with, I guess.

Yeah. So now think about what we do for our clients and what it is that Notion State sells and the value that we drive. How would you then extrapolate what you just shared to what we do?

Teach me, master. You've got, it's funny, the podcast is the only time that I've noticed that you go into mentor mode. No, you tell me, what do you think? You know, and it's really good.

Earlier you mentioned that I have a strong opinion on it and strong opinions are something I like to build my identity around, even if I don't have a lot of experience in it. But when it comes to the concept of storyboarding, this is something that I, it's been a part of my entire professional career and it's been something that has learnings and mentorship. Everybody that I've met in my time at Deloitte, it was ingrained in me from, from all of that work. And it's the idea that every time you are in a meeting or every time you're preparing a presentation or every time you're pulling together a roadmap or every time you're trying to design an overarching program, there needs to be a storyboard that you can guide the recipient along the journey. And every component of a program or every component of a broader transformation is just another scene in that storyboard. And one giant program, a digital transformation for a company, might be one scene in a much larger relationship with this client. And what the job of the consultant is, is to be able to plot out what that journey is and then guide the client, who is the protagonist of the story, along this narrative.

Narrative.

And the storyboard, unlike a film, is going to change. It's not going to be a set piece, but you need to be able to adapt and be able to orient and organize the overarching narrative based on the new stakeholder that's added into it, or based on that new technology that was just created, or based on a department that just lost funding. And what you need to be able to do is create a journey and create a narrative for the client to be a part of. So the concept of storyboarding is, is basically being able to organize and orient your client along the broader vision and bring them along every step of the way so nobody feels lost. There aren't any plot gaps, there aren't any holes in the story. And it's my belief that good consultants excel in this and they're never surprised because the story is so well formulated from day one. But anyways, that was very, very quick and I guess meta into the concept. But with that, Josh, any questions or thoughts? What does that spark?

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're kind of playing the role of author as the story is unfolding, you know, guiding it, writing it as things come your way. And it reminds me of how my friends talk about writing. They write with characters in mind and they don't necessarily know what's going to happen to the characters, but they just follow the character and they're almost surprised by the way a character interacts with another character. You know, they don't have it scripted and that's real life, right? You can't script exactly how these engagements are going to go. You can't script the kind of POCs you're going to have or the kind of politics that are inside inside an organization. So it's your job to navigate those things almost as an author and kind of know your characters really well. And then when they come up against obstacles, be able to write your way through it in a way that's consistent and actually gets them somewhere they want to go. That's what sparks— you mentioned— so you mentioned that concept of like, it's not set in stone, it's always changing, and that's accurate, right? Because it's real life. But then you also mentioned having to have a really clear vision of that from, from day one. So what does that look like on day one? And that's what I kind of think of when I think of a storyboard. What does it look like on day one? How prepared do you come to an engagement in terms of storyboarding? And then how much does it change? How do you interact with those changes? Like, you know, even on a tactical level, maybe there's an example of like, we had this storyboard, we had these kind of expectations from day one, or what does that actually look like in a professional setting?

I think an important concept to bring into this is we're not writing the story from scratch every time, and that gives us the ability to understand what the general storyboard is going to be. Notion State has delivered 150 projects over the past 3 years. We have 150 examples of storyboards to pull from to really understand what we need to be designing and designing for. And if we think of a normal project, just in the way that we sell it, the storyboard follows. In the first 4 to 6 weeks, you're going to have a system that we design, build, and deploy. The next 4 to 6 weeks, we're going to be focused on change management and, and onboarding and learning and development. And then from then on out, we're going to focus on evolution and iterative backlog management. And even just along that, like, I guess, curated storyboard, we have a pretty good idea of where we're going to deviate, where we're going to have problems, where we're going to need to bring in specific stakeholders. And what the consultant's job is to do is understand and predict when those deviations are going to occur. So if you understand the flow or the normal path that you should be on in this journey, then you can start to get hints from your conversations, or you can pose challenges in your discussions to start to tease out what those deviations and those challenges are going to be. And I think that's a lot of the art in defining the storyboard in this engagement.

I'm going to ask, uh, for your confirmation or deconfirmation of something I just told one of our new hires. And it was something I just had to say out of what I believe is true, but not actually out of any experience knowing it's true in our work, but they were kind of, uh, maybe, maybe overwhelmed. That's maybe not the right word, but just felt like there was a lot of nuances for all the little types of decisions decisions that we make in our implementation. Like, this client is that way. Why did you make the decision to do it this way for them? You know, they want to know all like the, the, the, they kind of want to download the firehose of consultant experience. And my response was, maybe that's actually backwards. Rather than knowing all the little nuances and all the insights gained from, you know, probably, you know, at this point, years of doing it, understand the standard really well, like the back of your hand, almost like the CIA understands the dollar bill. They don't know all the fakes. They're not super familiar with, They probably are, but that's the way the story goes, right? It's like they don't actually try to memorize what all the fakes look like. They just know the true dollar bill or $20 or $100 bill to perfection, right? So that when the deviations do come, they're easy to spot. Does that correlate with kind of what you're saying? It'd be hilarious if you said no.

I'm going to say no. Because like there isn't a perfect project. There isn't a perfect roadmap and there isn't a perfect storyboard. The job of the consultant is to be able to understand the personalities and and understand the requirements and what defines success for this client and formulate the story from those. An example is one client might say, we have a really low risk tolerance to the proliferation of visibility into tasks. That starts to narrow what our pathways are to building out their operating system. Whereas another client might be, we want everything to be purely transparent other than our contacts list. And what our job is to figure out what are the tolerances across all of these different factors to ultimately define this is where the organization is going to be best suited. And along this journey, this is where it gets like character development becomes very important. Your core POC might have a really strong opinion on this, but their boss, it may not be in the picture. So if your core POC is more middle management and you have their strong validation here, your job is to figure out how closely does this align to that person? And then also while doing this, the head of product might be a really strong personality in the organization that's not involved in any of this. But has one key flag. So what your responsibility here is to understand how these characters all interact with one another to make sure whatever you pitch and propose is going to be adopted by the organization, because losing the product organization or losing the head of IT because your core POC is an IT manager means that your ability to take them down this journey is going to come to a roadblock pretty quickly. So I guess there's variations of what you're saying that's probably right, but generally speaking, everything becomes somewhat bespoke per client because we need to be accounting for all of these different opinions and feelings and personalities along the way. Hmm.

Yeah. No, I, I get what you're saying. What, and, uh, maybe we haven't landed on what is the, I guess, you know, if there was like a, you used the word perfect and I don't think I intended to come off with the perfect storyboard, but you do start with an original storyboard. And the consultant, you know, you have some sort of expectation. The more detailed it is, I guess the more prepared you are for what this engagement is going to be like, but also understanding that along that road, you never had a truly high fidelity picture of how it was going to go because you just can't tell the future. So you're going to end up hitting obstacles, but the more detailed your storyboard was in the beginning, or your expectation was, the better able you are to kind of get around those obstacles and divert. I guess that's what I have in mind is like, at least what your original expectation was and your ability to adapt through the project as these things come up is kind of, uh, I guess this skill of a consultant to be able to, you know, cause otherwise if it was just a perfect straight line, that'd be like 100% productized service and it'd be a commodity, right? We could just turn that into an assembly line, but it's, and even as much as we've tried, it just, it doesn't work that way, right?

It just isn't. And honestly, there is a world where you could have a purely productized Notion consulting service. And I think that we see that a lot, especially as people are trending towards AI services or people that lead template first. And that can work for a lot of people and teams and organizations, but it doesn't necessarily work for our clients. There's not a single client that we have, if we dropped a template in there and said, good luck and go on, that they would have the success that they had with our services. And I think that as productized as we can be, plus our ability to design the program for their organization with them and with the people in their organization is what differentiates NotionState from other consultants in the marketplace.

Yeah. I'm curious. Oh, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, there's another way that I think I could articulate this a bit better. And it's hilarious. I say I have such a strong expertise here and I'm struggling to articulate and explain it. But if you look at the atomic unit of a client relationship, it's an interaction. Every interaction is a component of the overarching relationship, whether it's a Slack message or it is a conversation or it is an email. Every single one of these contributes to the broader picture, not just what you're saying or delivering to them, but also what they're saying and delivering to you. And what becomes really important, or where a lot of the value lies, is how you start to curate and craft and organize every one of these interactions to inform the status update or to inform the deliverable or to inform the roadmap and how each one of those items starts system grow up into the overarching milestones or the quarterly business reviews and how each of these goes into the broader program, right? And understanding how each of those atomic units interacts with that bigger picture, I think, is more of the art that I'm speaking about. It's being able to identify how when the client mentions that X person had an issue with Y thing, how that might interact and interfere with the overarching program. And our job is to weave that into the overarching story and rectify that and get ahead of it. And that starts day one, and over time it builds into a much broader story, and your ability to see where the story's going becomes much clearer the longer that you're there and the more that you're organizing this.

Yeah, you mentioned scenes, right? Like every meeting or whatever can be a scene, but I guess the correlation to the atomic unit is more like a shot, right? Like every shot that you take. You know, multiple shots comprise a scene. They tell the story in different ways, and you can do the shot in many different ways to convey so many different emotions or whatever, and lighting and all that. When you break down a movie, your most atomic unit really is a shot. And if you just put it all together, it's like a whole movie, a whole story, or a sentence in a book, right? Making up paragraphs, making up chapters, making up maybe even parts to a book. I'm curious, when you think of, let's just We're using the term storyboarding, but I think the concept that's really emerging for me is that consulting is a story. Not necessarily like storyboarding as a tool, although that's fine, but what's really fascinating here is consulting as a story and every interaction, you know, is your atomic unit. It's definitely coming to clarity for me. I'm curious, when you approach a new engagement, a new client, let's call them separate books. I don't know. You talk about the clients being the protagonist, and if we're anybody, we're kind of like the authors I guess, uh, what's the main arc of the story that makes for a good story? And maybe to color it in, what makes for a bad story? Not in the sense that it had a terrible ending that you hated. Some movies end in tragedy, but that didn't make it a bad story, right? Uh, what makes it like badly written where you're just like, this deserves, you know, a really low rating cuz it was just poorly executed?

That's a wonderful question. It's the story arc, I guess, and what drives to a good story or not is being able to deliver value. What makes it a good story is the organization seeing that value and being able to attribute it to their operations. So a simple positive arc would be we're working on a task management workflow where today they copy and paste all their tasks into an Excel document, but what we want them to do is be able to automate the tasks from their transcription software and automate the pull of tasks from Outlook into one centralized database. And the positive arc that would occur here is them being able to see things are really challenging today and there's going to be a change management journey that we need to go on. But being able to get to this point is going to drive X value for the organization and being able to get them through that arc and have organization-wide adoption would be a positive one. A more often story that you'd probably see is Everyone sees the value and then 20% of the people continue to do the new method that takes place, and that's an average success. And then a bad one is they paid to see the value and they never saw it. So you never got to that last phase.

And specifically in like Notion consulting, what is the value that people are actually looking for? If you had to put it into words, it's like Notion, they all say they want Notion, but what do they really want?

I don't think anybody really cares about the software other than the maxis. What the organization is looking for is the solution to their problems, and their problems are silos of knowledge and fragmentation of information and time spent self-servicing or looking for information or having to make decisions and find information on calls. And everyone's looking for the solution to that. And today, I think that lives across numerous software or in disconnected Google Docs. And people come to Notion because all of their issues could be solved if they did Notion. Correctly, not all of them, but many of them. And I think that's why people come to Notion.

Is it fair to say that their problems could also be solved in their other software? Because I think—

I don't think so.

They come to Notion though, and they recreate their problems in Notion, which is why they ultimately—

It's because old habits die hard, right?

Yeah.

And their habits exist because they had to learn the rigidity of the existing softwares and work within their bounds. And that is the row in Excel spreadsheet is the project. And that is the folder in Google Drive is the repository of information and it's the Slack channel is the communications. But in Notion, you could do all of that in one page or one ecosystem of databases that you built.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess in my mind it's like when you use old software altogether, it's like an old house that just has hallways and rooms and walls and you got to navigate around them to do things. And with Notion, it's like you got open floor plan, but the problem is people just end up creating those walls and stuff anyways because of old habits. So just because the tool removes those walls and opens up those capabilities doesn't mean that you're automatically going to know how to use it right.

And this is honestly, this is where like Storyboarding, I think, comes to a really big play because the journey you're trying to take 1,000 people on is where their muscle memory has existed for the past 15 years of work. And you're trying to teach them into a completely new, not just a new software, but a whole new way of working and a whole new way of operating. And this means getting the characters right that are going to be able to drive this sort change the organization and getting the characters right to be able to define what is going to work for this organization and then taking them over the very long journey that is transformation and then adoption and then evolution. And our job is to be able to wrangle all of those different personalities and perceptions into this one arc that is their digital transformation.

Hmm. I think you just added like a little bit of a little bit of sparkle to an otherwise like corporate feeling topic. Yeah. Which is consulting. No offense. Well, maybe a little offense. But like, yeah. Especially for me, especially as like a creative background, that actually resonates so differently. I actually see our work a little bit differently. And if anything, I just imagine you speak about like leading a company, leading 1,000 people through change management, like a journey. It's like, Who's gonna captain the ship to take people across the Atlantic and get them there safely and manage the entire ship of all the staff and all the people making sure everybody survives and has a good trip and actually gets to where they're going. Yeah, it's actually a pretty good, I think, metaphor, analogy. I don't know.

I was gonna say it's a good movie, but—

Good movie. Well, there is a movie, but it has a tragic ending. It's a good story, but a tragic ending.

True. I think A really interesting point that I just want to push on on this is a lot of time the person you're talking to isn't the right person to lead that journey. They might be one piece of it, but our job is to be able to understand that and then help them come to that realization on their own and then start to build that team within their organization that is responsible for doing that successfully. And it's really, it's a really challenging thing to do and it takes time, but that's all part of the, the, the story here.

I think I know the answer, but it's worth asking. On this journey, who's the captain of the ship?

The client.

Really? Yeah.

We're the guide. We're, we're not, we can't own it. If we own it, there's too much dependence on us and we don't have enough authority in the organization. We're not prevalent enough in the organization. We don't have the years of experience of being a part of the organization. We don't have the authority. We have the objective third-party opinion that carries a considerable amount of value for the captain to use as their ammunition or their backing or their clout to make decisions. But we don't have the authority to be the captain.

Is this because when I think of captaining the ship, I definitely don't think of captaining their company, right? Obviously they're the ones with authority, but as far as the digital transformation journey, that's where I'm like, who, I guess, who is the captain? Are they, you know, obviously you're gonna have a first mate who you trust to like make these things happen and they're the ones that are gonna delegate, but you're gonna be the one to keep it on track and ultimately accountable for the success of the journey. And that's where I think the question comes from in my mind. Would you still agree with your previous statement given that context?

I still would. Yes. Okay.

My last thought, which I more of just an appreciation is The idea of like, there's the story of the client journey, but then you, you kind of spoke about it in a way of like each interaction, yes, is atomic, but each interaction is almost like its own story. So you've got stories within stories within stories, right? Totally. Um, just like systems, you know, systems within systems. Uh, you got a system of systems. We got a story of stories. What's the biggest story? What's the biggest relevant story I guess around what we do, where does it end in your brain? I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer here. I just, more curiosity.

It doesn't end. That's, I think, the really interesting part and where it kind of deviates from the concept of a storyboard. Like, it doesn't have the, the, the, you don't close the book or you don't, uh, you don't roll credits. The organization continues to evolve and thus the story needs to. And that's honestly where I think the, the navigation guidance that we provide is, is invaluable is if we're there for the entire journey, Employees are going to come and go or POCs are going to come and go, or you're going to jump to other functions in the organization. And our job is to curate that story. And every time a new technology comes into play like Claude or ChatGPT, the story changes drastically. And our job is to help reorient the organization and make sure that we're staying on the rails but continuing to drive towards the value.

Yeah, somewhat relevant just because you mentioned it, but like that concept fascinates me, organizations. Like an organization that's been around for 100 years doesn't have anybody left that started the organization, and yet it still goes. It changes its goals. Like it's almost like a living organism that's just like, it just, it exists to survive and it exists to thrive. You know, it's going to do whatever it needs to do, hopefully to stay alive. And that sometimes that's a big pivot. Anyways, that's, that's kind of a tangent, but yeah, fascinating. I guess in my mind, and this is probably more, I could have maybe phrased my question better. 'Cause I, yeah, I agree. Our success is that the story keeps getting written 'cause we keep providing value and we stay with our clients as partners. But as far as stories within stories, you know, you've got meetings and then you've got themes or I don't know, and then you got quarters, you've got, you know, Client A. And then when we start talking about Notion State, you've got Client A, B, C, D, E, you know, that's kind of a story. And then ultimately it's like, what's the Notion State story? Our organization's story has some sort of an arc., and our story is very dependent on other stories. Um, then we've got our own personal life stories that's driving Notion State. Uh, so it's—

everything is a storyboard. This is what I mean.

Everything. Life is a story.

And on that note, it's a crazy topic, but I think it's an incredibly valuable one. If you start to think of things in this way, like every email, every meeting, every deliverable, every proposal, if you start to think of how it impacts every downstream item, that's where you start to be able to drive a lot of value that you otherwise would've never seen.

Yeah. It, to me, it also, I think redeems what can often turn into just like boring, mundane, if not like, you know, hated sometimes work. People see these things as just obstacles or friction or whatever. But if you kind of see it as like, ah, this, these are the obstacles that we're working within. These are the tensions that we work within because of current politics or current technology or whatever. What's the best story we can create given the constraints— I think constraint is absolutely key to real creativity and a good story. Uh, when you see it working that way, kind of redeems some of those interactions and things that you have to do.

And constraints were a key topic that I did want to talk about that we didn't touch on, but you got there. It's like time, hours, materials, uh, people at the organization. All of those things also impact how the story is going to be able to, to flow.

So on the next episode, actually it won't be the next one, but we'll have to talk about it in another one. All right. Signing off. Bye.