Hi there
'What just happened?' The CEO was incredulous as he left the board meeting.
'No idea,' his colleague replied. 'It never goes like that.'
The directors had left them both stunned, as the CEO told me a few days later.
He headed up one of the main divisions of a major bank. And the board meeting was usually a tense affair that seemed to come around with frightening rapidity each month.
Each board paper went through endless iterations, as his senior team struggled to convey critical data in a way the board could absorb and act on quickly.
Heated debate
Yet most of their allotted half-hour would be routinely lost to heated debate and endless requests for clarification. The bank's directors would challenge them on every minute detail of the business case they'd worked so hard to write.
'One time,' he explained, 'they spent 20 minutes arguing over what a single table in the report actually represented.'
Sometimes, they were lucky if any of their recommendations were adopted.
But this time, there were no arguments. The verbal tussle they'd been bracing for hadn't happened.
In fact, the board rubber-stamped their recommendations after a discussion of little more than five minutes.
They'd even thanked them for their insights. And the pair had left the meeting long before their time was up.
Two big differences
So what was different this time? Two things.
First, they'd dramatically reduced the energy the board needed to expend in order to understand the report.
They hadn't hidden their brilliant business case in pages of turgid Documentese that their audience struggled to read.
But they also did more than that.
They communicated through a compelling narrative.
Mind control
They didn't rely on endless bullet points that presented information with no commentary.
They didn't stuff the document with as much data as they could get their hands on, in the hope that some of it would stick.
They built a story that naturally led the directors to the same conclusion they'd reached themselves.
They controlled the thought process of each of those top executives, by literally synchronising their brains with their readers'.
I explain how in this week's article:
