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Executives with excellent communication skills, combined with grand business narratives, are a powerful combination. An art that, with a personal touch, upends corporate messaging. But how do you create exciting narratives that stand out when everyone uses the same buzzwords to blend in?

What is new: Executives play a central role in shaping external communication, and can elevate the game when building around memorable stories.

Why it matters: In short communication windows, it is easy to end up with message stacking that is hard for audiences to remember.

📝 Executive communication situations where narratives are in play: Executives face several high-pressure communication situations, where the time available to get across their points is very short. Keynote speeches, TV interviews, fire-side chats, and industry panels, to mention a few.

Storytelling under these conditions is advanced. Your Executive must be able to memorize the story so they can convey it without visual support. It has to be crisp and clear. It must contain eye-opening facts and quotable language. A story framework that can evolve as new components evolve. The icing on the cake comes from making it personal, relatable, and exclusive.

The frame for your executive story is a set of anchors that define the conversations in your industry. Crafted as unique perspectives or reverse-engineered from the key buzzwords in your industry. See it as a significant opportunity to create excitement around these anchors, and do it in a personalized way.  

🔙 Begin with the end in mind: The final product for an executive narrative is two key deliverables. An executive presentation, possible to use in a keynote setting, doubling as visual cues for your Executive’s preparations. Second, an executive talk track with key facts and expressions. All laid out over 5-8 slides for succinct deliveries in 10-ish minutes.

These two assets are the materials your Executive will refer to whenever rehearsing the story before each high-profile communication situation. Aim to keep the order of your story blocks firm, plan for modular development, and rotate out building blocks that have lost their mojo. Pay close attention to staying on script for the expressions you want to drive or influence.

📖 The challenge for your creative team: The challenge given to your creative team is significant. Expect Executive narratives to be a stretched goal both for you and any of the agencies you work with. There are slim margins for Executives to goof on stage or for low-quality or low-impact deliveries.

Executives have different preferences for how to prepare and what visual support to use on stage. Some are verbal learners, depending on great bullets, and others are numerical learners, sticking to numbers. Visionary Executives anchor their stories in simple and memorable sketches. Audiences can be either verbal, numerical, or visual learners.

🖼 Frame the assignment on the key success factors: Expect available time frames for crafting Executive stories to be tight and start with loose high-level scopes. The sooner you get to a precise framing of the assignment, the better the odds for a successful delivery.

• A thought-provoking headline
• A clear view of the narrative contexts and building blocks
• An exciting sequence for the storyline
• Ideas on how each block represents a unique point of view
• Facts and quotes to carry the narrative
• Unique metaphors and associations to convey complex contexts
• Clarity on the Executive tone of voice you aim for – thought-provoking, middle of the road, or hedging risks.
• Unique insights matching the personality of your Executive

Failure to establish a frame upfront can quickly turn your project into a “spaghetti narrative”. The business storytelling equivalent of spaghetti coding, weak specifications leading to vague design, and brute force testing/editing to produce mediocre stories.

🔦 Framing the story in exciting visuals and language: Once the narrative is ready, you need to dress it up for prime time. Invest in the effort to find unique visuals and language for the final face-lift.

Pictures tell more than a thousand words. To capture the mind of your Executive and the audience. Many topics are abstract in nature, where pictures are needed to create the special associations and feelings. Consider a mix of photos and artsy visuals. Or icons that can enhance the visual impact.

Introduce keywords that represent a mix of excitement triggers and words your Executive loves. Exhilarating, rousing, and bracing adjectives beat duller versions with similar meaning. Rename a few industry terms with your own name, but make sure they are close enough for your audience to pick up. And skip acronyms as a whole. VFIACRTA (Very few, if any, can remember them anyway)

❓Key questions for you and your team

1. Which part of our Executive’s personality should we leverage for this narrative?
2. Which creative minds can we involve for the creative part?
3. What are the contexts and building blocks we build our narrative around?
4. In which order should our building blocks come in the narrative?
5. How can we redefine each building block for our narrative?
6. Which pictures and words will make the narrative stand out?
7. How do we make it fit in our Executive’s available preparation time?

Additional reading suggestions

For deeper dives into this subject, consider the following sources:

• Storytelling can make or break your leadership [ARTICLE] – by Jeff Gothelf, Harvard Business Review
• How to build an Executive Narrative [ARTICLE] – by Mark Bonchek, Harvard Business Review
• The Power of a Clear Leadership Narrative [ARTICLE] – by Douglas A. Ready, MIT Sloan Management Review
• The Power of Company Narratives [ARTICLE] – by John Hagel, The Marketing Journal

This episode came to life on domestic flights in the US when reflecting on what differentiates Executives’ deliveries on stage.