How consulting decks change over the years.
Same corpus, sliced by year. Watch action-title density drift, the vocabulary shift, frameworks come in and out of fashion, and decks grow shorter as consultancies learn to respect attention.
1. Decks per year in the corpus
How much material we have from each yearA natural skew toward recent years — both because recent content is easier to find online, and because consulting output really has accelerated post-2020.
2. Is the action-title discipline improving?
% of substantive slides with a declarative titleThe McKinsey convention of writing titles as insights (not topics) has been spreading across the industry for decades. Whether the corpus shows a real uptick — or just oscillation around 55–60% — is a genuine open question.
3. The composition of a deck
4 macro-categories as % of every year's slidesEvery slide falls into one of four roles: Wayfinder (covers, dividers), Wordsmith (prose, takeaways), Numbers (data, benchmarks), Showstopper (frameworks, cases, recommendations). The mix tells you what a typical deck looks like in each era.
4. The zeitgeist — words that rose and fell
Occurrences of charged terms in action titles and calloutsCounting how often these terms appear in titles and callouts reveals what consulting thought was important each year. "COVID" peaks in 2020, "AI" explodes in 2023–24. "Transformation" is the constant background hum.
5. What each era was obsessed with
Words overrepresented in one era vs the others (min 1.5× lift)Three eras, three vocabularies. Click a column to see the words that spike there — each more than 1.5× as frequent in that era as in the others.
6. Which frameworks endured
Top 12 named frameworks across the corpusSome frameworks have one great year and vanish (fads). Others stay around at low but steady invocation (classics). Only a handful spread over time.
7. Are decks getting shorter?
Average pages per deck by yearIf consultants have learned to respect attention, deck length should fall over time. The data says: kind of. Post-2020 decks hover lower than the 2014–2019 average.