8 steps Corporate Affairs can take to get a permanent seat at ELT
And the AI prompts to fast track you there
Corporate Affairs has three stages.
Do the thinking. Structure the strategic argument the same way the executives around the table do, using the consulting toolkit that produces tight, hypothesis-led thinking.
Figure out the message. Translate the strategic conclusion into a key message and supporting pillars. The Messaging House you already know.
Tailor the message for the audience’s beliefs. Shape how the message lands against what each stakeholder actually believes.
Most CA leaders skip stage one. They begin at stage two, with the Messaging House, and tailor the comms for the audience without ever having structured the underlying strategic case. Then they’re surprised the executive table treats them as a comms function rather than a strategic one.
This piece is about stage one. The next issue covers production (how the thinking flows into the slide pack) and audience tailoring.
The seat at the table
Every Corporate Affairs leader has heard a version of this from their CEO.
“We need Corporate Affairs to be more strategic.”
Then the same CEO walks into the executive session where the strategic decision actually gets made (the acquisition, the divestment, the project sequencing, the workforce restructure, the response to a regulatory shift) and CA is not in the room. CA is brought in after the decision is locked, handed the rationale, and told to communicate it. To make it land. To manage the reputational fallout. To handle the minister. To brief the journalists. To stand up the internal comms.
The polite phrase for this is “managing the announceable.” The unpolished phrase is the one CA people use among themselves: polishing a turd.
The frustration is real. It is also the wrong frustration to dwell on. The CA leaders who never get in the room blame the room. The CA leaders who eventually get in the room ask themselves a harder question first: what would I have to be able to do, in that meeting, to be worth a seat?
The executives in that room are not making a vibes-based decision. They are not weighing how the workforce will feel, in the soft sense. They are trading in dollars: NPV, capex, opex, cost of capital. They are trading in output: tonnes, megawatts, customer counts, throughput. They are trading in risk: regulatory probability, litigation exposure, schedule slip. The CA leader who walks in with reputational concerns expressed as feelings (”the community won’t like this,” “the media will be brutal”) gets nodded at, thanked, and ignored.
To be worth the seat, you have to translate your CA expertise into the same currency. Not by becoming a finance person or an operations person. By structuring the reputational, regulatory, talent, and social-licence case the same way they structure the financial and operational case. Top-down. Tied to value. Linked to the decision criteria.
That is a thinking skill. It is taught nowhere outside consulting. And it is what the rest of this piece is about.
The cost is real, and it hits the P&L
If you suspect the seat-at-the-table problem is something you feel but can’t prove, the data closes the gap.
The function knows it needs to change. The Oxford-GlobeScan Corporate Affairs in Turbulent Times survey (294 senior CA leaders across 51 countries, fielded February to April 2026) found that 17% believe the function needs radical revision and a further 57% believe it needs modest revision. That is three quarters of the function saying the current shape isn’t working. The function is aware of the gap. It just hasn’t closed it.
The business cost when CA is sidelined is the P&L, not optics. The Sandpiper Reputation Capital Scorecard 2026 (3,000+ C-suite executives across 27 markets, released at Davos in January) finds that, in the past 12 months, reputational weaknesses have impacted:
Trading and revenue: 78% of CEOs say so
Company valuation: 65%
Talent attraction and retention: 65%
Crisis recovery: 65%
Read those numbers slowly. They are not survey questions about how the brand “feels.” They are CFOs and CEOs reporting that reputation has moved the financial dial. The currency the executive table trades in. When CA is excluded from the strategic decision, the company doesn’t just risk a bad headline. It risks revenue, talent, valuation and recovery.
And the Australian seat is more contested than the global numbers suggest. Medianet’s State of Australian Corporate Affairs 2025 report found that 81% of CA leaders here say they have a voice on strategic direction, but only 58% are formally part of the C-suite. Forty-two percent of Australian CA leaders are, in Medianet’s phrase, the most influential people not in the room.
So this piece is for two readers.
If you’re one of the 42% who doesn’t have a formal seat: the way in is to demonstrate strategic thinking before you ask for the title. The rest of this piece is the method.
If you’ve recently been elevated: the way to keep the seat, and contribute meaningfully once you have it, is to bring tight, top-down strategic thinking to every executive conversation. This is the discipline that lets you do that.
The frustration of being told to be more strategic and then not invited in is not your imagination. It is also not the room’s fault. It is a thinking gap that you can close.
Three things that break before the meeting even starts
Three things break down inside the CA function before the executive meeting even begins.
First, nobody on your team can articulate what makes a good business decision. Look at your hiring history. The GR lead came from a ministerial office and knows policy. The media manager came from journalism and knows angles. The community lead came from social policy and knows stakeholder dynamics. The internal comms manager came from HR or marketing and knows the workforce. Each of them is excellent inside their sub-discipline. None of them was hired, or trained, to think strategically about whether the business decision itself is sound, and to test it against the company’s strategic priorities. They each have a prism, and the prisms don’t compose.
Second, nobody agreed who feeds in what, in what order. The team’s sub-disciplines each see a different facet of the decision.
The media person sees the journalist angles. What story will run, what the alternative framing is, where the damage will land. A really good media person can see the story that is going to run before the announcement goes out, and neutralise it through extra framing or by altering the decision itself.
The government affairs person sees how ministers, policymakers, and regulators will read the decision, and where it creates risk for current or future approvals and government support.
The internal comms person sees whether the decision alienates the workforce, but they are almost always asked after the decision is made, when the workforce damage has already been baked in.
The community / social licence lead sees how the decision interacts with traditional owners, local communities, and external stakeholders.
The opportunity to shape any of this happens at the messaging stage, and really at the thinking stage upstream of it. Not in the cleanup phase. Because there is no shared frame, the sub-disciplines feed in late and in parallel, each making their own representation. The leader’s job is to bring it all together. You can’t do that on your own. You have to give your team a structure to feed into so that, by the time you walk into the executive room, you carry the best collective thinking your function can produce.
Third, the failure mode is one of two extremes. Either the leader does the strategic thinking solo, becomes the single point of failure, never develops the team, and leaves the function in the same shape it was in when they were promoted. Or the leader doesn’t structure the thinking at all, defaults to vibes, and gets treated like a service provider.
Neither extreme earns the seat.
Strategic thinking is not taught to CA
There is one structural reason this keeps happening: you haven’t been taught how to think strategically.
If you went through a graduate intake at BCG, McKinsey or Bain (or one of the next-tier strategy houses), you were taught SCQA and the Pyramid Principle, and you were drilled in them until they became muscle memory. BCG spent, and still spends, hundreds of thousands of dollars per consultant on that training. I went to New York and Singapore for it. The whole office would down tools once a quarter and do structured strategic-thinking workshops together. When you were promoted to project leader or principal, you sat with partners and reworked the thinking line by line until they were satisfied. And you did it for fifteen hours a day, every day, in your client work.
That training is the difference. Not the IQ. Not the polish. The discipline of structuring an argument top-down before the analysis starts.
CA leaders almost never go through that training. The career path runs through ministerial offices, agencies, in-house comms teams, lobbying firms, and journalism. Every one of those teaches you to write well and advise well within your domain. None of them teaches you to architect a strategic argument from the top down. There is a difference between writing well and arguing well. The executive table is judging the second skill, and CA leaders are usually exhibiting the first.
The good news is that the frameworks aren’t secret. They aren’t even hard. They are unfamiliar, and they take a few cycles of practice before they feel natural. The next two sections teach them.
Your Messaging House is the soft version of three consulting frameworks
You already know one version of a structured argument. The Messaging House. Roof, pillars, foundation. Every CA team has one in its toolkit, or should. It works. I’ve written about it in this newsletter before.
The Messaging House is the communications-friendly version of three frameworks consulting has used for fifty years.
SCQA (Situation–Complication–Question–Answer) frames the story.
Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto) structures the logic into pillars.
Storylining (Zelazny / McKinsey practice) sequences the argument for delivery.
Same shape, different vocabulary. The roof is your governing thought. The pillars are your Pyramid. The foundation is your evidence base. They map one to one.
The reason CA leaders need the hard version, not just the soft version, is that the executive table doesn’t speak Messaging House. It speaks strategy. When you walk into the room with a Pyramid, you are arguing in the room’s native language. When you walk in with a Messaging House, you are translating, and translations always lose.
The next section lays out the hard version properly.
How to actually do it: an eight-step procedure
This is the section CA leaders need most and almost never get. The frameworks are usually presented as a four-letter acronym on a slide and then abandoned. The acronym is the thumbnail of a method that runs eight steps deep. The depth is where the seat is earned.
Most secondary write-ups of SCQA and the Pyramid Principle stop at “Situation, Complication, Question, Answer, then three to five supporting pillars.” That is the picture on the box. It is not the procedure inside the box. The procedure inside is what BCG, McKinsey and Bain spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per consultant teaching, because the procedure (not the diagram) is what produces clarity.
What follows is the procedure, in eight steps, with one worked example carried through each one.
The case: the company operates four regional sites. Site C has run below its cost benchmark for six consecutive quarters. The board has asked the executive to bring a recommendation on Site C’s future by the next quarterly meeting. Two of our three nearest competitors closed comparable sites in 2024 and 2025, and both are now defending class actions, regulatory reviews, and ministerial scrutiny. Finance has the NPV case. Operations has the production case. CA has not been invited. You believe you should be.
If you follow the eight steps with discipline, you end the exercise with a one-page Pyramid that earns you the meeting.
Step 1 — Build the Situation
The Situation is the part of the world the reader already accepts as true. It is the shared starting point. Not analysis. Not problem. Not opinion. The world as it stands, in two to four sentences, written with enough specificity that the executive nods, recognises the world being described, and is ready to hear what’s different about it.
The Situation has three properties.
It is non-controversial. If a reader disputes the Situation, you have not earned the right to move on.
It is factual and specific. It carries numbers, names, dates, structures. “We operate four regional sites” beats “we have a portfolio of operations.”
It establishes the stable state. It is the world before the disruption. If you find yourself writing “however” or “but” inside the Situation, you have already drifted into the Complication. Stop and split them.
A test that works. Imagine you are emailing the Situation paragraph to the CEO with the subject line “Just to make sure we have the same starting point.” If the CEO would write back “yes, that’s the picture” without any qualifications, the Situation is right. If the CEO would write back “well, actually,” even on one word, your Situation has hidden a Complication inside it.
Common ways CA leaders break the Situation:
Front-loading the problem. They write “Our regional sites are struggling.” That is a Complication, not a Situation. Strip the verb of distress.
Hiding analysis as fact. They write “Site C is unsustainable.” That is a conclusion, not a Situation. Replace with the operational fact: “Site C is the highest-cost producer in our portfolio.”
Sprawling. They write five paragraphs of context because they are nervous the reader will miss something. Discipline yourself to the smallest set of facts that earns the right to ask the next question. Everything else goes in the appendix.
Step 1 output — Site C Situation:
Our company operates four regional production sites. Site C has run below its cost benchmark for six consecutive quarters and is the highest-cost producer in our portfolio. Two of our three nearest competitors closed comparable regional sites in 2024 and 2025. The board has asked the executive to bring forward a recommendation on Site C’s future by the next quarterly meeting.
Four sentences. No verbs of distress. No analysis. No conclusions. Just the world the executive table already shares.
Step 2 — Pin the Complication
The Complication is the change that makes the Situation untenable. It is the reason a decision is required now. It is the disruption (the new fact, the new pressure, the new precedent, the new constraint) that means the stable state cannot persist. It is what makes the Question worth asking.
The Complication is the single most under-developed element of the SCQA in the work I see from CA teams. Most CA leaders write the Complication as “things are getting harder” or “there’s been a regulatory shift.” Those are background trends, not Complications. A Complication has urgency. It points at a date. It changes the cost of inaction.
A useful BCG trick for finding the real Complication: watch for contrast words. When you write the Situation and then start writing what follows, the moment you reach for however, but, unfortunately, or the problem is, stop. The sentence after that contrast word is your Complication seed. Develop it.
The other technique that separates strong from weak Complications is first-, second-, and third-order thinking. Every top consulting firm uses it. The cp-scqa-analyzer skill I built into my own toolchain codifies the BCG version.
First-order Complication. The direct, surface-level problem. “Site C is losing money.”
Second-order Complication. The downstream effect of the first-order problem if untreated. “If we close it badly, we trigger the same workforce, regulatory and community fallout our competitors did.”
Third-order Complication. The strategic implication. “A botched closure at Site C contaminates the approvals environment for Site D’s expansion, which we need within 30 months. The cost of getting Site C wrong is not the cost of Site C.”
The Complication that earns CA the seat is almost always second- or third-order. Finance sees the first-order Complication clearly, because that is their job. CA’s contribution is to extend the same Complication two orders deeper, into the reputational, regulatory and licence-to-operate consequences that finance does not naturally see and that move the same dollars finance is counting.
Common ways CA leaders break the Complication:
Staying at first order. Writing “Site C is unprofitable” as the Complication. Finance already knows. CA’s job is to extend the Complication.
Generalising the disruption. Writing “the regulatory environment is more demanding.” Too vague to compel action. Be specific. Which regulators. Which precedent. What change.
Writing the Complication as opinion. “We think the community response will be hostile.” That is a forecast, not a Complication. Replace with a fact: what happened to a comparable company that did this.
Step 2 output — Site C Complication:
Both competitors who closed their regional sites in 2024 and 2025 are now defending class actions from workforce groups, regulatory reviews of their consultation processes, and ministerial scrutiny over the speed of their community transition support. One of them has had the environmental approvals on an adjacent expansion project slowed by 11 months as a direct consequence, a precedent that, applied to us, would delay Site D’s expansion timeline beyond the window the board has approved. A closure decision at Site C that addresses only the financial case, without simultaneously addressing the workforce, community, regulatory and political pathway, therefore risks an outcome that is materially worse than the status quo. The downstream cost of a botched closure now exceeds the cost of continuing operations for at least two years, and it threatens an approval pipeline that is worth more than Site C is.
That is a Complication that earns CA the seat. It quantifies the cost of being wrong. It cites a competitor precedent. It threads the reputational consequence directly into the financial consequence the executive table is already worried about.
Step 3 — Force yourself to one Question
The Question is the single question the executive needs answered. Not three questions. One. The discipline of forcing yourself to one Question is what produces clarity. If you have three questions, you have three articles, three meetings, three Pyramids, and the executive will only sit through one of them.
Most CA leaders skip past the Question entirely. They jump from Complication to recommendation and never test whether the recommendation answers a coherent Question. That is why their advice gets nodded at and then ignored. There is no Question on the table for it to answer.
The Question must do three things.
It must flow logically from the Complication. If the Complication is reputational and regulatory, the Question must contain those words. If the Question is purely financial, the Complication didn’t earn it.
It must be specific and bounded. “What should we do about Site C?” is not a Question. “Should we close Site C?” is not a Question either, because finance has already implicitly answered it. The Question is “Given the closure case is sound, how do we deliver it without triggering the second- and third-order costs?”
It must be answerable. You should be able to imagine the one-sentence Answer that would resolve it. If you cannot imagine an Answer, the Question is malformed.
A BCG test for the Question. Read the Situation, read the Complication, read the Question. The Question should feel inevitable, the only reasonable thing to ask given what came before it. If the Question feels like it came from a different conversation, the SCQA is broken. Rebuild upstream.
Common malformed Questions in CA:
The labelled non-Question. “Risk management on Site C.” That is a topic, not a Question. Add the interrogative.
The double Question. “How do we close Site C and protect the brand?” That is two Questions joined by and. Pick one. The other becomes a pillar in the Pyramid.
The unbounded Question. “How do we be more strategic on Site C?” Means nothing. Make it concrete. Bounded by the decision, the timeframe, the constraint.
The opposing-counsel Question. “Should we close Site C at all?” That is the wrong Question if finance has already done the NPV. You are not in the room to re-litigate the closure. You are in the room to make it succeed. Mis-framing the Question this way is exactly what gets CA marked as a blocker rather than a partner.
Step 3 output — Site C Question:
How do we close Site C in a way that delivers the financial case the NPV depends on, without triggering the workforce, community, regulatory and political costs that have eroded the equivalent decisions at our competitors and that would now threaten Site D’s approval pipeline?
Long Question. Deliberately. Every clause in that Question is doing work: naming a constraint, anchoring to the prior financial work, scoping the consequences, linking to the deeper strategic prize. A Question this fully specified almost answers itself, which is the point. By the time the Question is right, the shape of the Answer is visible.
Step 4 — Draft the governing-thought Answer
The Answer is the single sentence that resolves the Question. In Minto’s vocabulary it is the governing thought of the Pyramid. It is the thesis. It is what every pillar, every analysis, every slide downstream exists to support.
A well-formed Answer has four properties.
It directly answers the Question. If the Question is “how do we close Site C without triggering second-order costs?”, the Answer must specify how. An Answer that re-states the Question or evades it (”Carefully”) is not an Answer.
It is contestable. A reasonable executive should be able to disagree with it. “Manage the closure well” is not contestable, therefore not useful. “Close Site C over an 18-month transition sequenced through three parallel workstreams” is contestable. Someone might want six months, someone might want six workstreams. That contestability is what makes it a thesis worth defending.
It is specific. It contains nouns and verbs and numbers, not adjectives. “A robust closure plan” fails. “An 18-month transition with a public covenant of conduct” passes.
It carries the shape of the Pyramid inside it. A good Answer previews the structure of the argument that supports it. “Three parallel workstreams (workforce, community, regulator)” tells the reader exactly what the three pillars will be. The Answer is doing two jobs at once: resolving the Question, and forecasting the Pyramid.
Two BCG tests for the Answer:
The lift test. If you and the CEO got into the lift together and you had thirty seconds to deliver the recommendation, would the Answer be what you would say? If the lift version differs from the written version, the written version is wrong.
The “so what?” test. Read the Answer. Ask yourself “so what?” out loud. If the Answer survives the so what, meaning a reasonable executive can immediately see what they would do with it, it is a recommendation. If the Answer dies on the so what, meaning the executive would respond “fine, but what would you have me do?”, it is not yet a recommendation. Push it harder.
Step 4 output — Site C Answer (governing thought):
Close Site C over an 18-month transition, sequenced through three parallel workstreams (workforce, community, regulator), each with a named senior owner, hard quarterly milestones, and a public covenant of conduct signed by the CEO before the closure is announced. This protects the NPV the financial case depends on, pre-empts the second- and third-order costs that derailed our competitors, and preserves the approvals environment Site D requires.
That single thought is contestable, specific, action-bearing, and it previews the three-pillar Pyramid that follows. It is the kind of sentence you can imagine the CEO repeating back to the chair the next morning. That is the test.
Step 5 — Decompose the Pyramid horizontally
The Pyramid is the MECE expansion of the Answer. Each pillar is itself a sub-thesis that, taken with its siblings, fully supports the governing thought. MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) is the Pyramid’s only structural rule, and it is the rule that separates a real Pyramid from a list with a title.
Mutually Exclusive means no two pillars cover the same ground. If you can move an analysis step from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 without anyone noticing, your pillars are not mutually exclusive. Recut them.
Collectively Exhaustive means the pillars, taken together, fully resolve the Answer. If a reader can ask “what about X?” and X is a real consideration that no pillar addresses, your Pyramid is not collectively exhaustive. Add a pillar, or fold X into an existing one.
The number of pillars matters. Three to five is the workable range. Two pillars is suspicious (almost everything decomposes into more than two) and usually signals a hidden third pillar you have not seen yet. Six or more pillars is a sign you have not consolidated. Some of them belong together as sub-pillars under a parent. The discipline of three-to-five is not arbitrary. It is the executive’s working memory. Beyond five, no one in the room is holding the structure in their head.
The four MECE patterns the firms teach. When you sit down to decompose an Answer into pillars, you reach for one of four common patterns.
Structural decomposition. Cut by component. (Workstream A, Workstream B, Workstream C.) Best when the Answer names parallel parts. The Site C Answer uses this pattern.
Time-based decomposition. Cut by phase. (Pre-decision, decision, post-decision. Or: 0–6 months, 6–12, 12–18.) Best when the Answer is sequential.
Stakeholder-based decomposition. Cut by audience. (Workforce, community, regulator, investors, board.) Useful for CA work, though watch for overlap, because most CA decisions touch every stakeholder group.
Degree-based decomposition. Cut by magnitude. (Minimum-viable response, mid-case response, expansion-case response.) Useful for option papers, less so for recommendation papers.
You pick one pattern and stick with it inside a Pyramid. Mixing patterns at the same level is the most common way Pyramids lose their MECE rigour. (”Pillar 1: Workforce. Pillar 2: 18-month timeline. Pillar 3: Regulator.”) The reader feels that something is wrong without being able to articulate it. The thing wrong is that the pillars aren’t cut on the same axis.
Common ways CA leaders break the Pyramid horizontally:
Listing without decomposing. Writing “five things to consider” instead of three sub-theses that build the Answer. A pillar must itself be a claim, not a topic.
Smuggling overlap. “Workforce” and “internal stakeholders” as separate pillars. They are the same set. Pick one.
Hiding gaps. Decomposing into three pillars and quietly omitting the regulator because the GR work hasn’t been done yet. The Pyramid then fails the exhaustive test, and the executive table will find the gap inside thirty seconds.
Step 5 output — Site C Pyramid (governing thought + three MECE pillars):
Governing thought: Close Site C over an 18-month transition, sequenced through three parallel workstreams, each with a named senior owner, hard milestones, and a public covenant of conduct.
Pillar 1, Workforce transition. Six-month notice, voluntary redundancy pathway, a regional re-skilling partnership with the state training agency, retention payments for critical-skills staff through the final close date, named senior owner reporting weekly to the CEO. Reduces class-action risk, protects employer brand for the future hiring cycle, and meets the moral test the workforce and the media will apply.
Pillar 2, Community covenant. A multi-year commitment to local economic transition, including supplier wind-down support, an indigenous engagement protocol where relevant, a community fund tied to measurable outcomes (not optics), and a public covenant signed by the CEO before the closure is announced. Pre-empts the regulatory and ministerial scrutiny that slowed our competitor’s adjacent approvals by 11 months.
Pillar 3, Regulator and political pathway. Pre-decision briefings with the state and federal ministers, the relevant regulator, and the local member; an environmental closure plan that visibly exceeds the statutory minimum; a public commitment to publish progress quarterly against the plan. Maintains our standing for the next approvals cycle, which Site D’s expansion will need within 30 months.
Three pillars. Structural decomposition. Each pillar a claim, not a topic. Each pillar with specific actions, named owners, hard milestones, and a stated so what tied to the governing thought. The Pyramid fits on one page.
Step 6 — Build the Pyramid vertically (the Q&A descent)
The Pyramid is not only horizontal. It is also vertical. Every pillar is itself the Answer to a sub-Question, and that sub-Question, when properly framed, decomposes into its own MECE pillars one level down. This is the recursive property of the Pyramid. It is what takes a one-page recommendation and lets it expand to whatever depth the engagement requires.
The Minto method for descending the Pyramid is what consultants call the Q&A descent. Each box on the Pyramid generates the question the reader will naturally ask next. The level below it is the answer. The level below that is the support for the answer. You descend by following the executive’s mind.
Let me demonstrate by descending Pillar 1.
Pillar 1 reads: Workforce transition through six-month notice, voluntary redundancy pathway, regional re-skilling partnership, retention payments for critical-skills staff, named senior owner.
The executive’s next question, read straight off the page, is: “Why those five things? Why not three? Why not seven?” That is the Q the next level answers. Decompose Pillar 1 into sub-pillars MECE against that Q.
Sub-pillar 1.1, Pre-announcement readiness (T-30 to T-0). Establish workforce consultative committee under the workplace relations framework. Pre-brief the relevant unions confidentially. Have the redundancy package modelled, costed, and Board-approved before the announcement.
Sub-pillar 1.2, Notice-to-transition period (Months 1–6). Six-month formal notice. Open voluntary redundancy programme. Stand up the regional re-skilling partnership with the state training agency, funded for two years post-close.
Sub-pillar 1.3, Critical-skills retention (Months 1–18). Identify the 25–40 staff whose departure before close would compromise the closure itself (safety, environmental, asset-care). Retention payments tied to a specific close-date milestone, with a confidential individual outreach programme. Reports up through the named senior owner.
Sub-pillar 1.4, Governance and accountability. Named senior owner: the General Manager Operations, not HR. The seniority of the owner signals the seriousness of the workforce commitment. Weekly reporting cadence to the CEO until close. Independent ombudsperson channel for workforce grievances.
That is one level down on one pillar. Four sub-pillars, MECE against the Q “why those five things in the workforce stream?” Each sub-pillar is itself contestable, specific, and action-bearing.
You can keep descending. Each sub-pillar can decompose another level. What does “six-month notice” actually involve operationally? What does the redundancy package look like by award classification? What is the union pre-brief sequence by site? You keep going until you reach the level of granularity the engagement requires.
The discipline that BCG drills into you is knowing when to stop descending. You stop when the next level down would be implementation rather than thinking. The Pyramid is the thinking, not the project plan. The project plan is a downstream artefact.
A test that works. If the next level down feels like a Gantt chart, you have descended too far for the executive document. Pull back up to the level above it. The detail belongs in a workplan, not the recommendation.
Step 6 output — Pillar 1 expanded one level. Four sub-pillars, MECE against the question “why those five workforce moves?”, each contestable and specific, each able to descend another level if the engagement requires it.
The recursive property is what makes the Pyramid scale. A one-page recommendation can become a sixty-page proposal without losing structural integrity, because every box on every page is doing the same job: answering the Q one level above and asking the Q one level below.
Step 7 — Stress-test the Pyramid
Before the Pyramid leaves your desk, run four tests. Each is a discipline the consulting firms teach explicitly, and each is the reason their work survives the executive table.
Test 1: The MECE test, ruthlessly applied. Read your pillars together. Try to move a sub-pillar from one pillar to another. If it moves cleanly, your pillars are not mutually exclusive. If you can imagine an objection the executive could raise that no pillar addresses, your pillars are not collectively exhaustive. Fix both, or you will be caught in the meeting.
Test 2: The traceability test. Take your governing thought (the Answer). Underline every noun and verb in it. Can you point to the pillar that delivers each? If “public covenant of conduct” is in the Answer but no pillar contains it, you have a traceability gap. Either fix the Answer or fix the Pyramid. One of them is lying.
Test 3: The “so what?” cascade. Walk down the Pyramid asking so what? at every level. Governing thought → so what? Pillar 1 → so what? Sub-pillar 1.1 → so what? Every “so what?” should have a clear answer that ties up to the level above. If the so what fails anywhere in the cascade, that is the place the executive will find weakness. Fix it before they do.
Test 4: The first-/second-/third-order pressure test on the outcome. This is the test that separates CA-grade Pyramids from finance-grade ones. Take each pillar’s expected outcome and project it forward in three orders.
First-order: what happens immediately? (Workforce announcement lands. Community covenant signed.)
Second-order: what happens next as a consequence? (Class-action risk drops. Adjacent ministerial relationships hold.)
Third-order: what is the long-term strategic effect? (Site D’s approvals environment is preserved. The company’s social licence is reinforced.)
Pillars whose first-order outcomes look fine but whose third-order outcomes are negative are pillars that will look good in the meeting and trammel you afterwards. The CA contribution to the executive table is precisely this: thinking three orders ahead on the soft factors the financial model treats as zero.
Step 8 — Sequence the Pyramid into a storyline
The Pyramid is the logic. The storyline is how the logic is delivered to the executive. These are two different artefacts. They are easy to confuse because they look similar (both pivot off the Answer, both use the pillars) but the order is different, and the difference matters.
The Pyramid is built top-down. Answer first, then pillars, then sub-pillars. This is how you assemble the thinking.
The storyline can be delivered in any order that fits the audience. Three patterns the firms teach.
Top-down delivery. Lead with the Answer, support with the pillars. “We should close Site C over 18 months through three workstreams. Here is why each workstream is right.” Most appropriate for executives who have asked for the recommendation and want the bottom line first. The default for CEO and board work.
SCQA delivery. Open with Situation–Complication–Question, then deliver the Answer, then walk the pillars. Most appropriate for audiences who do not yet share your view of the problem and need to be brought through the why before they will accept the what. The default for a sceptical executive committee, or for the first meeting on a topic.
Inductive (option-comparison) delivery. Walk the pillars first, then arrive at the Answer. Most appropriate when the audience holds a strong prior view that contradicts your Answer; you need to lay the evidence before the conclusion or they will reject the conclusion on sight. Use sparingly. It asks the audience to hold suspense, which is expensive.
The action-title rule. Whichever delivery pattern you choose, every section title in the document or every slide title in the deck must do three things, every time.
Be a complete assertion, not a label. “Workforce transition: six-month notice with retention” works. “Workforce” does not.
Carry the so what. A reader skimming only the section titles, top to bottom, should follow the argument. The titles alone, in sequence, should be a coherent story.
Stay under fifteen words. If the title needs more, the thinking is not yet tight enough. Recut.
For the Site C work, the action-title sequence reads:
Close Site C over 18 months through three sequenced workstreams to protect both the NPV and the approvals pipeline.
Workforce transition: six-month notice, voluntary redundancy, regional re-skilling, owned by the GM Operations.
Community covenant: pre-announcement public commitment signed by the CEO, with a measurable transition fund.
Regulator and political pathway: pre-decision briefings, environmental plan above statutory minimum, quarterly public reporting.
Three competitor case studies show this approach pre-empts the 11-month approvals delay that derailed adjacent expansion.
Recommended next step: 30-day pre-decision sprint to lock the workforce, community and regulator design before the board paper goes up.
Read those six lines in sequence. They tell the story without slides. That is the test of a well-sequenced storyline. The titles are the argument. The slides are the evidence.
That is the procedure. Eight steps, top to bottom: Situation → Complication → Question → Answer → horizontal Pyramid → vertical descent → stress test → storyline sequence. Run it once and it takes a day. Run it ten times and it takes an hour. Run it fifty times and you will not consciously think about the steps any more. You will feel when a Complication is at first order rather than third, when a Question has two questions hiding inside it, when a Pyramid’s pillars are cut on different axes. That is what the BCG training builds. That is what most CA leaders have never been given the chance to develop.
The good news is that the eight steps are not BCG-only knowledge. They are written out. The frameworks are documented. The AI tools available today will run any of these steps with you if you set them up properly, including pressure-testing your MECE, descending the Pyramid one more level, or stress-testing the third-order outcomes. The skill that matters is no longer access to the method. It is the discipline to actually do the steps. The last section of this piece covers how to use AI to accelerate that discipline without skipping it.
One discipline note before we leave the procedure. The Pyramid is the thinking, not the slide pack. A good Pyramid usually fits on one page. The slide pack is downstream. It is the production stage, covered in the companion piece. Many CA leaders confuse the two and produce a twenty-five-slide pack as their “Pyramid.” That is not a Pyramid. That is a Pyramid smeared across twenty-five slides because the thinking wasn’t disciplined enough to be one page first.
Why I’m telling you this
I learned this discipline the hard way, and I resented it.
I came into BCG from Corporate Affairs. I had been at head-of-function level. I had been in the room with very senior ministers and heads of government departments on policy. I had drafted documents that mattered for the company externally. By any CA measure, I had been senior, and I was good at what I did.
I arrived at BCG and was taught the top-down pyramid system. My mental position was: I’ll learn this once, demonstrate I’ve mastered it, and then get back to the work. I was completely wrong. BCG made you use the system every single day. Every deck. Every email. Every workstream. Every team handover.
I remember one particular weekly meeting. Every consulting case team sat down each week with the partner and walked the partner through the thinking. We had a deck. The partner, calm, methodical, not unkind, took us through it point by point and reconstructed the entire argument from first principles using the SCQA Pyramid structure. The discussion went for about 45 minutes. I hated it. I hated being judged in front of my peers. I felt the conversation was exposing problems in my thinking, and I read every clarifying question as a reflection on my performance. By the end I was quietly miserable.
When the meeting broke, I went to the partner and half-apologised, something close to “I’m sorry we had to do that.” He looked at me genuinely surprised, shook his head, and said:
“There’s nothing to apologise for. We needed to do the thinking. The thinking is the thing that matters and will move the client. Take this new version, write up what we just discussed, and ask the client whether it’s clear and whether everything ties together. Then come back and tell me what they said.”
I did. I took the rebuilt argument to the client. I asked the question. The client read it slowly, looked up, and said:
“This has taken account of every single thing I could have possibly thought of. The financial implications. What operations are going to have to do to make it happen. Our people, our processes, our activities. If you hadn’t been here, Richard, I would have left so many of these questions open, and this thing we’re paying you millions of dollars to do would have failed.”
I went back to the partner. He nodded, and said something I have carried since.
“That’s the job. That’s what you need to do when you want to be in the room. That’s the level of thinking you have to bring to every engagement.”
I have. Every day since.
What I have come to find, having spent the years after BCG layering this discipline back into the Corporate Affairs work I do now, is that strategic thinking is the precursor to CA thinking, not the replacement. When you have done the structured strategic work (the Situation, the Complication, the Question, the Answer, the Pyramid) you are not advising on what the minister might think. You are not advising on what the media might write. You are not advising on what the traditional owners or the communities or the workforce will feel. You are advising on how all of those perceptions will influence the business, and how the decision being made can be made to succeed by accounting for them. That is what the executive table is starved of. That is what earns the seat.
How to do it this week
You don’t need to go to New York and Singapore for a month every year to use this. You don’t need a partner walking you through every deck. The barrier to entry has collapsed because the same discipline now has AI as an accelerant.
Here is the workflow.
Record the meeting where you and the team work the issue out. The Board prep call. The crisis sit-rep. The community-incident debrief. The pre-ExCo huddle where five people argue across each other about what the story is. Use Otter, Fireflies, the Teams transcript, whatever you already have.
Draft your own SCQA in the prompt, badly. Don’t try to make it good. Write the Situation in three or four sentences. Write the Complication as one paragraph that names the disruption. Write your best-guess Question. Write your best-guess Answer. The point is not accuracy. The point is that the AI now has your angle, and the transcript has the team’s collective input.
Feed both into a structured thinking tool. Paste both into Claude with: “Here is a meeting transcript and my draft SCQA. Produce a MECE SCQA and a 3 to 5 pillar Pyramid that answers the Question. Flag any logical gaps. Highlight where my draft Question was the wrong question.”
Edit the output. Hard. The first AI version is never right. It will get you 70% of the way to a sharp Pyramid. The last 30% is human judgement on what matters, where the MECE breaks, and which pillar deserves the most weight.
Walk the one page into the room, or into the pre-read for the room. Get sign-off on the thinking before any slide is built, any message is drafted, any audience is tailored to.
This is where the seat-at-the-table problem gets solved. Not by demanding the seat. By bringing the thinking the seat is reserved for.
AI helps at every stage of this, including the upstream research that informs the Situation and Complication. It is excellent at sourcing comparable case studies (the competitor closures, the regulatory precedents, the workforce-transition benchmarks). It is excellent at pressure-testing your Pyramid for MECE breaks. It is excellent at stress-testing your Answer against the executive’s likely objections. What it cannot do is the leap from “we talked about this for an hour” to “here is what we are arguing.” That leap is yours. That leap is what makes you worth a seat.
Try this week
This piece argued that what separates a CA contribution that earns the seat from one that gets nodded at is the discipline of a properly structured SCQA. Here is a 13-minute diagnostic that uses AI to score your most recent paper against the four tests in this piece, then rewrites the weakest section.
The SCQA Order Diagnostic (13 minutes)
Step 1 (1 min): Pull up the most recent Board paper, ExCo paper, or briefing note where you were the CA contributor. As you skim the first page, mentally rate the Complication you wrote: is it at first order (a financial or operational problem the room already knows), second order (a downstream reputational, workforce or regulatory consequence), or third order (a strategic prize at risk)? Hold that number in your head.
Step 2 (6 mins): Paste the paper into Claude or ChatGPT with this prompt.
“You are a BCG partner stress-testing this paper for an executive table. Score it 0-1-2 against four criteria, with one-line evidence for each score:
1. Situation — non-controversial, factual, no verbs of distress, no hidden Complication. 2. Complication — names a specific date, a specific dollar, a specific precedent; is at second or third order, not first. 3. Question — a single bounded interrogative that flows from the Complication, not a topic label or a double question. 4. Answer — contestable, specific, action-bearing, and previews the structure of the Pyramid that supports it.
Then identify the single lowest-scored element, name what is wrong with it in one paragraph, and rewrite it to a 2.”
Step 3 (4 mins): Read the AI’s scores. Compare its Complication score to the number you held in your head from Step 1. The two often disagree. When they do, the AI is usually right. Read the rewritten section. Edit it for your specific organisation, your specific minister, your specific competitor precedent. AI gets the structure right and the specificity wrong. Your job is the specificity.
Step 4 (2 mins): Save the rewritten section. Before your next ExCo or Board meeting on a decision where CA has a contribution, send that one paragraph to the CEO or CFO ahead of the meeting with one line: “This is the reputational, regulatory, workforce and community case on [decision]. Happy to walk it through if useful.”
What to look for: Most CA leaders discover that the paper they thought was strategic input is scoring a 1 on Complication (first-order, financial — finance already knows) and a 1 on Answer (a topic label, not a contestable recommendation). The gap itself is the insight. The fix is mechanical, not magical, and AI shortens the loop from days to minutes.
If you want to go deeper: Run the same diagnostic against the three most recent papers you’ve contributed to. The pattern across all three is your function’s strategic-thinking signature. That is the version of this diagnostic the EAE Sprint runs in full, against every CA artefact the function produces. Reply and tell me what you found.
Close
Strategic thinking is the precursor to CA thinking, not the replacement. Learn the precursor, layer your reputational, regulatory, workforce, and community expertise on top of it, and you become the person the executive table wants in the room, because you are the only person bringing both layers integrated.
The next issue covers stage two of the pipeline: how the Pyramid you build flows into the slide pack, the email, the briefing, the work plan. The production layer. The issue after that covers stage three: tailoring the message for the audience’s beliefs.
The thinking comes first. Everything else is downstream of it.
If this is useful, the scqa-analyzer and pyramid-builder skills I use to run this procedure are available in my Claude Code repo. DM me and I’ll send you the prompts and the worked examples.
Richard Wilson is the MD and Founder of Transformation Partners, a boutique management consultancy helping Australian corporate affairs leaders get a seat at the table. He is a former Principal at BCG and a former Head of Corporate Affairs at a Nasdaq listed energy company.