today in this video i'm going to teach you a communication technique which is extremely powerful which i personally use almost every single day you can use it for oral communication for written communication for all different types of contexts such as internal team communication client communication or also for instance in job interviews it is a technique that i've seen extensively used in consulting but not so much in other industries or by other people working not in consulting so trust that this video once again can help in lifting the wheel and hopefully making these techniques available to everyone else out there as well independent from where you work so welcome back to another coffee break here on my channel firm learning my name is heinrich i'm a former mckinsey consultant and on firm learning i want to help you to become successful in the first years of your career so if you like this please like this video and also subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on all my content and now without further ado let's dive into it and i will use a little exercise to illustrate my point and this is a type of exercise that was quite commonly used in consulting onboarding programs like mckinsey bcg or bain because these are the situations that you will often face and i will you draw from an exercise that i already used to illustrate a point in one of my past videos on top down communication if you've not seen it yet i can also very much recommend you to check it out i will link the video somewhere above here so that you can click on it after you've watched this video so when i read the scenario here from my screen the situation is that you are part of a project team that is looking into market entry opportunities for new project line you conducted lots of interviews with internal and external experts on the topic you looked into data from the finance department from the marketing team and you have a first result that france likely would be a great fit for that product and indeed this is because you conducted consumer research and french consumers will likely appreciate the offering most you looked into the competition and currently there are no strong competitors yet involved in france and you also looked into distribution and warehousing capabilities where your company at the moment would be very well set up to serve the french market so so far so good same scenario as in the last exercise but my point that i want to drag out here is a different one because now the ceo walks in and she asks you hey what is going on what's the status with the project can you just summarize what your preliminary results on that are so how would you answer this and this time now i do not want you to think about the top-down communication concepts because we covered these already in this other video but i want to focus on a very specific different point so if you want feel free to pause the video now and think for an answer for yourself how would you reply to such a question but now let's look into a sample answer what could you have said in this situation and here let me just read this out our current hypothesis is that france would be the best fit for our product line we looked into consumer research and the french consumers will likely appreciate our offering most the competitive landscape is also important to consider and france would be the first with this offering what's also great is that we already have solid logistics and distribution capabilities in france so again feel free to pause this video and think about this answer is this a good answer is this a solid answer so what's the case for sure that this answer does comply with top-down communication this important principle that we introduced in the other video so is this really the strongest answer that you could give and my main point of criticism would be that this answer feels a bit random it's a more or less random list of points it lacks structure it feels like a clothe line like the result of a brainstorming where the person was just thinking about reasons why the french market would be the best to enter for the product line and maybe these were indeed all the relevant reasons why the french market would be the best but maybe the person also forgot to mention one or two other important reasons who knows right so this is at least not an answer that would give the recipient a lot of confidence that this person had it really all laid out really clearly organized and really knew exactly what the most relevant reasons would be so let's contrast that with the second example of what you could have had answered so our current hypothesis is that france would be the best fit for our product line this is based on three reasons first consumer research shows that french consumers will appreciate our offering second the competitive landscape in france has not yet developed we will be the first with this offering and third our logistics and distribution capabilities are way set up to serve the french market what do you think about this answer option is this a better way of answering this i would argue yes this is the case because this answer not only follows top-down communication but this answer also follows the so-called rule of three you are clearly starting your answer by saying that there are three reasons for that three points three main arguments and then you're mentioning them first second third and i hope you agree that this field's much more structured much more well organized than just randomly starting to talk about a first point and then later maybe a second point and then another one and another one and it all feels like brainstorming when you compare the answers next to each other they seem very similar what has been said is very very similar indeed but trust me that the choice in example number two will be perceived as much more structured much more well organized and this is true up to the point that in consulting this was so frequently used that it was considered almost a meme whenever a client or partner would be asking you a question you would likely always say something like yes for sure so let me mention three points on that or yes for sure let me mention three arguments why this is the case or this is my recommendation and this is for three reasons you would almost always try to find a way to structure your answers in the way that you could start them with introducing three distinct points and here the truth is in most of the cases you did not really had three points like that ready in your head when you just started beginning giving this answer you would in most cases just start with the first reason and then likely a second reason is what you would be able to easily come up with as well and then just on the way you would try to come up with a third point a third reason in my experiences if you practice this and do this regularly you will almost always be able to mention a point number three even though maybe this third point is not the most relevant the most important one that you could have said but i do know that the biggest fear that people have when answering questions like this is that they cannot come up with a third point on the way so let me share two things that you can almost always say the third point if you really cannot come up with anything else that is more content related on the way and the first suggestion is to talk about next steps so what you can almost always say the third point is what will you do next what are the next things you will look at when is the next meeting where you need to have this already talking about next steps is so easy because there's almost always a next step you're almost never completely finished with a piece of work on an analysis so definitely something that should be able to help you out here and my second suggestion would be to talk about risks or downsides or doubts that you still have so maybe you looked into something you are coming to a conclusion and you're talking about point one and point two of that conclusion but then in most cases there will be something where maybe you will need to look into further you're not 100 sure about or you see a certain risk a dependency where your progress is dependent on the work of another person maybe another colleague or another client so these are things that you should always be able to say as a point number three if you really cannot come up with anything else that would make sense this rule of three is really extremely powerful and very very often used in consulting by the way not only by associates or project leads so maybe the more junior consultants but especially also by the partners you will see partners and senior partners use this rule of three all the time both in team communication but also in communication to the clients so trust that this alone should be something that should make you think whether this isn't maybe worth at least trying for you for your drug routines this way but of course i would also be interested in your experiences what do you think about the rule of three did you already use it in the past where does it work well maybe doesn't it work that well let us know in the comments i trust this will be helpful for every single person in the firm learning community so if you took any value out of this video please destroy the like button for the youtube algorithm and also subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications to stay up to date on all my content big big thanks to all the members of firm learning you're really helping me out here on the channel thanks for that and feel free to also follow me on linkedin instagram tick tock or twitch you'll find links to my associates below in the video description i release videos every single saturday so see you again next week until then bye bye all the best to you this is jaime from firm learning