Almost every professional needs to give a presentation from time to time. But many people are terrible at it, wasting the opportunity to make an impact.
How do you easily turn a business presentation into a clear, compelling story?
The Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) Framework provides a structure for clearly defining business challenges and outlining strategies and solutions. The SCR Framework, developed by McKinsey, offers a simple and effective reasoning approach. Although designed for consultants, the SCR framework can easily be applied to other roles and industries.
In this article, you will learn about the SCR framework and how to use it. You will also see how top consulting firms have applied this framework to several real-life strategy presentations.
Every Hollywood film, every book, and essentially every memorable tale you've ever heard follows the so-called 'classical story arc':
Take Disney's "The Lion King" as an example:
If you simplify this further, every story has three parts: Situation, Complication, and Resolution.
At its core, SCR is simply this three-act story structure:
An example:
When crafting a presentation storyline, first outline the Situation, followed by the Complication(s), and then present your suggested Resolution(s). This is the SCR framework.
In a business setting, unlike a Hollywood screenplay, you should keep the Situation and Complication sections as clear and short as possible. Your audience is more interested in solutions than extended narratives, so the Resolution section should account for most of your slides (ideally structured according to the Pyramid Principle).
Back in 2010, McKinsey applied the SCR framework to the United States Postal Service (see the full deck here). The story elements are as follows:
Situation: USPS is experiencing unprecedented losses due to (1) volume declines, (2) growing retirement funding requirements, and (3) lower-than-expected effect of cost savings.
Complication: Unless we do something, things will worsen due to market trends, growing costs, regulations, and competitive forces.
Resolution: USPS must do four things: (1) Grow volume through new products and services, (2) Find aggressive productivity improvements, (3) Increase workforce flexibility, and (4) Reduce costs by improving efficiency and procurement.
In 2014, McKinsey applied the SCR framework to the global steel industry (see the full deck here).
Situation: The global steel industry is not financially sustainable, as evidenced by (1) negative cash flows among market operators, (2) increasing debt levels, and (3) deteriorating EBITDA margins.
Complication: Unless we do something, EBITDA margins are expected to be even lower going forward, which is unsustainable for the industry.
Resolution: An extensive restructuring is required. Global capacity needs to be reduced by 300 million tons.
SCR stands for Situation, Complication, Resolution. It is the storyline framework McKinsey uses to structure presentations: the Situation describes the current state factually, the Complication explains why action is needed, and the Resolution presents what to do about it.
A real McKinsey example from 2010 concerns the US Postal Service. Situation: USPS plays a central role in the American economy. Complication: volumes and revenues are collapsing. Resolution: a four-part program covering volume growth, productivity, workforce flexibility, and cost reduction. Another example structures a 2014 analysis of global steel overcapacity around the need to remove roughly 300 million tons.
Keep the Situation and Complication brief and weight the deck toward the Resolution. The audience already lives in the situation. What they need from you is the answer, structured with the Pyramid Principle.
SCQA adds an explicit Question between the Complication and the Answer. The logic is identical. BCG expresses the same idea as approach, findings, implications. When the audience already supports your solution, flip the order and lead with the Resolution.
The storyline-first approach is universal at top firms, whatever the label. Having worked at McKinsey and Bain, we saw the same structure applied to proposals, progress reviews, and final reports. It survives because it matches how decision makers actually process a case for change.
No, you don't explicitly state which of your presentation components are the S, C, and R. Instead, it is implied through context.
