Your strategy has a story. Why can’t anyone else tell it?

The story that gets lost between the boardroom and the frontline.

Imagine asking five people in the same company what the new strategy means. You get five different answers. All five attended the town hall.

I’ve written about a version of this before, and it keeps coming back to me, so let me walk you through it properly this time.

Picture a CEO who has just finished the quarterly all-hands. He has walked the room through the new strategy. Three priorities, one slide each, big-font words: focus, speed, ownership. Heads nod through all of it. He opens the floor for questions. Nobody asks anything.

By any normal measure, that’s a successful launch. Everyone was there. Everyone saw it. Nobody objected.

Then he does something most CEOs never do. Over the next two days, he pulls five people aside, one at a time, from five different teams. He asks each of them the same simple question: “In your own words, what did I just ask this company to do?”

He gets five different answers. Not five ways of saying the same thing. Five different strategies.

One person thought “speed” meant shipping faster and cutting the review cycle. Another thought it meant resolving customer complaints the same day. A third wasn’t sure whether “ownership” meant individuals or whole teams, so she quietly decided it meant both and got on with her version.

Here’s the thing. Nobody in that room lied by nodding. They nodded because that’s what a room does when a slide sounds right and nobody wants to be the person who asks, “But what does this mean for me on Monday?”

The strategy didn’t fail to land. It landed as five different strategies, and each of those five people walked out sure they were the one who’d got it.

Seeing the deck isn’t the same as getting the story

We tend to treat strategy communication as a distribution problem. Did everyone get the deck? Did they attend the session? Did the email go out in three languages? Tick, tick, tick.

But a strategy isn’t communicated just because everyone has seen it. It’s communicated when people can explain what is changing, why it matters and what it means for their own work, in their own words.

That’s a very different bar.

And it’s a bar most strategy decks can’t clear, because most strategy decks aren’t stories. They’re lists. Three priorities. Five initiatives. Twelve targets. A roadmap with colour-coded swimlanes.

All useful, but none of it is a narrative.

A list of initiatives tells people what the company plans to do. It doesn’t tell them what is shifting, from what to what. It doesn’t tell them what’s at stake if the company gets it wrong. And it almost never tells them where they fit.

So, people fill in the gaps themselves. They take “speed” and map it onto whatever they already thought needed fixing. That’s not laziness. That’s how sense-making works.

Researchers who study narratives inside organisations make exactly this point. Stories aren’t just a way of delivering information from the top. They’re how people make sense of what’s happening around them. Which means your people will build a story about your strategy whether you give them one or not. The only question is whether it’s the one you meant.

The deck I never opened

I learned a version of this the hard way, though in a client meeting rather than a town hall.

I’d spent days on a 30-slide deck. Every slide polished, every chart labelled. I’d even fiddled with the transitions. I walked in, plugged in my laptop, opened the file, and before I could say a word, the client asked: “Before you start, can I just tell you what’s been keeping me up at night?”

So, I closed the laptop halfway and listened.

For 45 minutes, they talked. About a problem I hadn’t seen coming. About a team that wasn’t gelling. About a promise they’d made to their board, and how this project was tied to keeping it.

None of that was in my deck. I never opened it again that day, and it turned out to be the best client meeting I’ve had.

I think about that meeting whenever I see a strategy launch. The deck is where leadership explains the strategy. But understanding rarely happens in the deck. It happens in the conversation afterwards, when someone gets to say, “Here’s what’s worrying me,” and someone else actually answers.

Most strategy rollouts have plenty of deck and almost no conversation.

People understand by retelling

There’s another reason the conversation matters.

A while back, I was stuck on a pitch. I’d sat with it alone for days and got nowhere. So, I called a colleague, not because I had an answer, but because I wanted to think out loud. Halfway through a sentence, I stopped. “Wait, that’s it.” I’d found the answer while I was still talking. My colleague barely said a word.

A lot of us are like that. We don’t fully understand something until we’ve tried to say it ourselves.

Your employees are no different. They won’t truly get the strategy by listening to it. They’ll get it by trying to explain it, to a colleague, to a new joiner, to a customer, and noticing where their explanation breaks down.

So, if nobody in the company ever has to retell the strategy, nobody ever finds out they don’t understand it.

What it sounds like when it works

You’ll know a strategy has become a story when someone on the frontline can retell it without borrowing the CEO’s words.

Something like this, from a support lead: “We used to measure how quickly we closed tickets. Now the focus is on whether the customer has to call back. So, when I have to choose between closing fast and fixing properly, I fix properly.”

Notice what’s in there. The shift: from closing fast to fixing properly. The stakes: customers who keep calling back. And her place in it: the choice she now makes differently.

She never said customer-centricity. She never said speed or ownership. She didn’t need to. She’d turned the strategy into her own story, and that’s what made it usable.

A simple test you can run this week

Ask three people from different levels of your organisation to explain the strategy. Do it one-on-one, with no slide in sight.

Don’t listen for identical wording. If three people repeat the same phrases, they’ve memorised the deck, which isn’t the same as understanding it.

Listen for the common thread. Is the same shift showing up in three different vocabularies? Do they each know what’s at stake? Can each of them tell you what they’re doing differently because of it?

If the thread is there, your strategy has a story.

If you hear three different strategies, you don’t have a communication problem yet. You have a story problem. And the fix isn’t another town hall or a sharper deck. It’s working out the shift, the stakes and people’s place in it, and then giving them room to say it back to you.

The real test was never the nodding in the room. It’s the question two days later, one-on-one, when there’s no audience left to perform understanding for.

So, here’s mine for you: if you pulled five people aside today, how many strategies would you hear?