From Endless Notes to Narratives
1. From Endless Notes to Narratives
Early in a consulting project, when you're still synthesizing raw research data, AI can help you extract research narratives to organize findings prior to analysis.2. Research Narratives
Research narratives are crucial because insights are useless without coherence: a research narrative connects facts, patterns, and implications.3. Research Narratives
It also accelerate decision-making: we need concise, structured stories that highlight what matters for our clients.4. Consulting Frameworks
Consulting frameworks like the Pyramid Principle, MECE, and SCR are often applied to ensure that narratives are clear and compelling, and they can be used to guide AI systems as well!5. Generic Prompt
When creating a research narrative, we could start with a generic structured prompt that includes context, goal and style instructions, like this one here. This gives us a solid starting point; however, guiding the model with specific consulting frameworks often produces stronger results from the off. Let's update our prompt to apply the Pyramid Principle framework.6. Pyramid Prompt
Here, we just need to update the goal section to explicitly request that the research narrative is constructed using this framework. The model will then leverage its prior knowledge of the Pyramid Principle using examples that it saw during training. Let's send this prompt to Copilot!7. Prompts for Research Narratives
A pyramid requires a clear top line - a single sentence that summarizes what the data is saying - followed by supporting points that explain and justify that message. The model has done a pretty good job here.8. Prompts for Research Narratives
If we look closely, we can see that it's also applying the MECE principle to structure the supporting points, even though we did not ask for it explicitly.9. MECE
Applying MECE to the supporting points of a pyramid means that each point covers a different idea without overlap or repetition, and that together they fully explain the top line with nothing essential missing.10. MECE
We don't need MECE to build a pyramid, but strong pyramids often use it to create a clearer, more rigorous structure. The model already knew this and applied it automatically!11. SCR
The good thing about leveraging the model's knowledge is that you can apply this strategy to any consulting framework. During the exercises, you'll have a go at generating a narrative using the SCR framework. The model will identify the Situation, Complication, and Resolution to tell the story of our data. This simple approach—one prompt and one narrative—is perfect for the research phase when you need to quickly organize raw data.12. The Finishing Touches
It's also important to remember that AI systems can make mistakes, so we need to double check AI-generated narratives before moving forward. Question the model's output if the narrative feels unclear or hard to follow, if the tone is too formal or academic for internal team use, if the storyline does not match the chosen framework, or if key insights from the sources are missing or incorrectly emphasized. There is one last cue that might sound simple, but it really helps: if you cannot easily turn the text into presentation slides, it's a sign that the narrative flow is not yet stable. In these situations, continue iterating!13. Let's practice!
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