Executive Storytelling

The more you showed them,
the less they saw.

Coaching for managers presenting to directors and above. How to structure an argument so the decision is obvious, and so it still works for the person who only skims it.

Discuss a Session
The Gap

Competent people lose rooms by showing all their work.

You built the model, ran the analysis and checked it twice. Then all of it went into the deck, because leaving things out felt like hiding something, and because six weeks of work seemed worth showing.


A director with fifteen minutes and four other decisions does not read that as rigour. They read it as a pile they now have to sort. Every slide you add moves the job of working out what it means from you to them, and the person who was meant to decide something spends the meeting doing your interpretation instead.


The fix is almost always subtraction, which is the hardest edit to make on your own work.

Where It Goes

Four ways a good analysis gets lost.

Each of these is a failure of arrangement rather than of analysis, which is why they keep recurring until somebody names them, and why they are fixable in an afternoon once they have been.

The conclusion sits at the end

You build towards it, because that is the order you arrived at it in. The room needed it at the start to make sense of everything that came after.

Everything found is in there

The research took six weeks, so all six weeks are in the deck. The meeting is fifteen minutes and the decision turns on about four slides.

The options are never put on the table

There is a recommendation in there somewhere, but nobody is asked to choose between named alternatives, so nobody chooses and the item returns next month.

It only works while you narrate it

Decks get forwarded to people who were not in the room. Yours stops making sense the moment you are not standing next to it explaining the joins.

The Method

Four moves, in this order.

The sequence matters more than any single move. Most people start at the slides, which is the last place the problem lives.

Move

01

Decide what the room has to decide

Not what you want to tell them. The single decision you are asking for, written as one sentence, before a slide exists. Everything else either serves that sentence or leaves.

Move

02

Cut to the minimum that carries it

Each piece of evidence earns its slide by changing whether a reasonable person would agree. If it does not change that, it is background, and background belongs in the appendix or nowhere.

Move

03

Order it so the conclusion is unavoidable

The ask first, then the reasoning beneath it, grouped so that each group answers the question the one above it raises. By the time the room reaches the end, agreement is the only place left to go.

Move

04

Test it against a skim

Read the slide headlines in order and nothing else. If the argument does not hold up that way it will not survive being forwarded, and a good number of decisions are taken by people reading it forwarded.

Done properly the deck gets shorter, the discussion opens at the decision rather than at the background, and it still makes sense to somebody reading it three days later without you in the room.

Two Ways In

Pick the one that fits the timeline.

Option One

Single Session

Ninety minutes  ·  One presentation

For the presentation already in the diary. We work through the audience, the argument and the running order in one sitting, and you leave knowing what you are going to say and why it is in that order.

  • Who is in the room, and what each of them needs to hear
  • The decision you are asking for, stated in one line
  • The running order, with the ask at the front
  • The three questions most likely to derail it, and your answers

Option Two

Structure, Build and Rehearsal

Three sessions  ·  Three weeks

For a presentation that carries more than most, or for a manager who wants the method rather than one good outcome. The same work, plus the building and the rehearsal that almost everyone skips.

  • Session one: the audience, the argument, and what they will resist
  • Session two: the argument built out, with your slides worked on alongside it
  • Session three: rehearsal against the hard questions, out loud
  • The structure written down, so you can apply it without us

Heads of function commissioning training, induction material or a presentation standard for a whole team: that work is scoped separately. Tell us the audience, the volume and the deadline, and we will come back with a proposal.

Fit

Worth being direct about who this suits.

This is a working engagement, not a production service. It asks for your time and it does not suit every situation.

This fits if

  • You present to directors, executive committees or boards, and the outcome affects your objectives.
  • The analysis is done. The gap sits in how it is argued, not in the underlying work.
  • You want to learn the method and use it again, rather than receive a file.
  • You can send us the material and settle the argument inside the timeline.

This does not fit if

  • You want slides designed and returned without your involvement. A presentation agency is faster and better at that.
  • The presentation is a formality where nothing turns on the argument.
  • The analysis is unfinished. Structure cannot rescue a conclusion you have not reached.
  • You need brand-standard visual design, illustration or animation.
Modupe Sanda

Who Does The Work

Close to two decades where the presentation was the deliverable.

Modupe spent close to two decades in FMCG marketing, much of it in roles where a decision depended on how well a case was put. He became the person the Marketing Director and the Area Director came to before any presentation that mattered, which is a position you are given by being right about structure more often than you are wrong.

As Area Information Manager for West and Central Africa he set the standard formally: he established how insight-led executive storytelling was done across the function, and ran the Insights and Foresights training that taught it. He has since built and delivered training material to users across ten business units in multiple time zones, where a deck has to hold up without its author in the room.

"The numbers don't always speak for themselves. Someone has to explain what they mean and what the implications are."

Practical Detail

What working together involves.

Sessions run online, or in person in London by arrangement. The work happens on your own material, in your own words. Nothing is rewritten into a house style you then have to defend to your brand team.

On confidentiality

Commercial material stays with you. Nothing you share is reused, referenced or shown elsewhere, and a non-disclosure agreement is signed before the first session wherever you need one.

Formats

A single ninety-minute session, or three sessions over three weeks

Sessions

Ninety minutes each, online or in person in London

Lead time

A week for a single session, three weeks for the full package

You provide

The analysis, and the decision you need from the room

Fee

Priced on enquiry, based on format

Tell us about the room.

Who is in it, what you need them to decide, and when you present. If a design agency would serve you better, we will say so.

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