Most Leaders I meet are holding a first draft they mistook for a finished story. I came up in television, where a story that wasn't ready never reached the air. I ask the questions a writers' room asks, until you find the story you actually meant to tell.
A writer and a network were both certain they agreed, and neither was talking about the same show.
The gap that costs Leaders the most forms before anyone performs a word. It forms when the story you think you are telling is not the one you want to tell. Delivery coaching cannot fix that, because the problem is upstream of delivery. The performance only shows what was already there.
In development, no one cared how well a pitch was delivered until it had survived these. They sound simple, and almost no Leader has been made to answer them out loud.
Not the room you are standing in, but the person who has to carry the story next and act on it. Most Leaders name a group. They have never described a person.
Not the topic, but the one sentence that remains when everything else is removed. If you are still talking after the first period, the story is not finished.
The thing you want that audience to believe, feel, or do, and the reason they would care. It is usually smaller, braver, and different from the point you have been making.
I use these as excavation tools. The work is not to polish what you brought in. It is to find out what you meant, and then to perform that.
I take on a small number of Leaders at a time, by design.
A conversation in which I ask the first of the questions and listen for where your story stops holding. You leave with a clear view of what is missing, whether or not we ever work together.
A working engagement for a Leader or a small leadership team with a story that has to carry something real: a strategy, a transition, a board, a hard decision. We run the interrogation until the story is one you chose and not one you drifted into.
I am in the room before the important story is told, asking the questions while there is still time to change the answer. For the few Leaders who want that as a standing part of how they lead.
A writer came in to pitch a new series. The network loved it and the deal was moving, and I stopped it. I was certain that what the writer thought they were selling and what the network thought they were buying were two different shows.
I told them that when the script arrived, the network would be disappointed in what it got and the writer would be disappointed in the reaction. They were using the same words and describing different shows.
I could hear it because I had sat in both chairs, first buying shows as a network executive and then selling them as a studio executive. Then I spent years testing the idea in other rooms, running a state agency and developing clients at a Big Four firm. The gap was always upstream, and it was always the same gap.
Most strategy does not fail in the market. It fails upstream, when the story a Leader thinks they are telling is not the one they want to tell. This talk shows how to hear that gap before it costs you, drawing on television, public service, and the Big Four.
As a series development executive, I learned that a potential hit depended on a writer's ability to say what the series was about in one sentence. If the writer reached the period and kept going, the idea was too complicated to succeed. The same test applies to any Leader launching an idea, a product, or a service.
A Story Audit costs nothing and carries no obligation. I read every message myself and reply personally.