You’ve been in that room.
Presenting an idea months in the making. The research is solid, the idea sound. Yet, by slide four, you sense the energy fading.
Nobody walks out. But nobody’s leaning in either.
You leave wondering what went wrong. Many misdiagnose it – blaming the deck, timing, or a distracted CFO.
It wasn’t any of those things.
The idea was solid. The story fell short.
The problem most leaders don’t see
Strategic storytelling is the core leadership skill for effective alignment – not just a communication tool.
When an initiative stalls, when a stakeholder presentation falls flat, when a project loses momentum despite everyone technically being on board – the instinct is to fix the process. Add another governance layer. Schedule more check-ins. Build a better deck.
But after 18 years observing this pattern, Adriana Tica is direct about what’s really happening.
“Most alignment problems aren’t about process at all. They’re about incompatible stories.”
Different stakeholders interpret risk and value through entirely different frames. For example, the CFO is looking for efficiency and cost control from a financial perspective, the head of sales aims for increased revenue and sales growth, the CTO prioritises technical feasibility and scalability, and end users or customers are focused on solutions that relieve their specific pain points.
When you try to tell one story to all of them simultaneously, you end up with something vague enough to mean nothing to anyone.
Jargon dressed as strategy. A roadmap everyone has signed off on and nobody actually owns.
The story isn’t fuzzy because your idea is unclear. It’s fuzzy because nobody agreed on what the story actually was in the first place.
Adriana Tica is a marketing strategist, trend analyst and founder of Strategic AF. She has spent 18 years helping founders and business leaders build sustainable, strategy-led businesses – without the manipulation, the hacks, or the bro marketing.
Her newsletter, Strategic AF, is read by thousands of practitioners who want to grow without selling their soul. She is also a contributor to Innovation in Action, where her case study anchors the Sticky Stories tool in the Resourcing chapter.
Fix the story inside before you fix the story outside
This is where most leaders get the sequence wrong.
The instinct is to focus on external messaging – the pitch, the presentation, the stakeholder update. But Adriana’s first move is always internal. Before anything goes outward, the team needs to agree on what they’re actually building and why it matters.
“If the story inside your team is fuzzy, everything outside is chaos dressed as hustle.”
Her approach is simple: strip everything back. Just three questions – who is this for, why are you building it, and what does it make possible that wasn’t possible before?
When a team can answer those questions in plain language, something shifts. Decisions become easier. Priorities get clearer. The project stops feeling like it’s being pushed uphill.
This sounds simple, but it is rare in practice. Many teams never do this together. They assume alignment from shared meetings, but often, they’re telling themselves different stories about the same initiative – unnoticed until problems arise.
Start there. Everything else is downstream of that conversation.
Same story, different dialects
Once the internal story is solid, the challenge becomes translation.
The job of a leader, Adriana argues, isn’t to repeat the strategy until everyone gets it. It’s to tell the same core truth in the language each person in the room actually speaks.
“The CFO talks numbers. The CEO talks about vision. The team talks survival. Your job is to translate and to tell the same story different ways so everyone can see how their part fits.”
This matters especially when you’re seeking buy-in across a leadership team.
The mistake Adriana sees most often is leaders pitching to the CEO and treating them as the sole decision-maker. In reality, the CEO will turn around and talk to the CFO, the CTO, and everyone else in the room. If those people weren’t spoken to directly, if their concerns weren’t acknowledged, the idea stalls at exactly the moment it should be gaining traction.
The core story stays the same. What changes is the entry point, the hook that resonates with each person.
It requires knowing what each stakeholder cares about before you walk into the room.
Test words before you build anything
Most innovation practitioners think of testing in terms of prototypes. Build something. Put it in front of people. See what happens. But Adriana makes a compelling case for testing much earlier than that.
“Messaging is the ultimate prototype. You can use words as the fastest way to test resonance – and you’re not just testing whether someone clicks. You’re testing demand, urgency, trust, and category fit. All through language. Before you build a product, you should be able to build a sentence that people respond to.”
She proved this with one of her own clients – a solo founder who had built a genuinely good business systems course. Useful. Well-structured. Practically zero sales.
The name? Something like “The Entrepreneurial Operating Method.”
“It sounded like a McKinsey consultant trying to sell something to people who are just trying not to forget their calls. If what you’re selling sounds like homework, people treat it like high school algebra. They ghost it.”
Adriana went back to the customer. What did they actually want? What were they saying at 11 o’clock at night when their brains were fried?
They wanted to know things wouldn’t fall apart if they took a day off.
One reframe: “A repeatable system to run your solo business, even when you’re offline.”
The product didn’t change. Sales jumped. People started replying to say they’d experienced exactly that problem the day before.
That’s what a sticky story does. It puts the reader inside their own problem and then immediately shows them a way out.
Practitioner Insights
The next time a project stalls or a presentation lands flat, resist the urge to fix the deck.
Work through these three questions first:
Is the internal story solid? Can everyone on your team describe the problem you’re solving, who you’re solving it for, and why it matters – in plain language, without the jargon? If the answer is anything less than an unequivocal yes, start here. Nothing external will stick until the internal story does.
Are you speaking the right dialect? Before your next stakeholder presentation, map the room. What does each person actually care about. For example, the CFO may prioritise efficiency, the head of sales may focus on revenue, the CTO may seek risk reduction, and the CEO may be driven by vision? The core story stays the same. The entry point changes for each person. Prepare for the room you’re actually walking into, not the one you wish you were walking into.
Are you testing words before you build? Your next prototype doesn’t have to be a product. It can be a sentence. A landing page. A cold email. Put plain language in front of real people and watch what they do. If it resonates, you’ve got something worth building. If it doesn’t, you’ve saved yourself months of work and you’ve learned something more valuable than any focus group could tell you.
The goal isn’t a clever story. It’s a true one, told clearly enough that the right people can see themselves in it.
When that happens, alignment follows. Momentum follows.
Want to go deeper? Here’s how you can build on the practical strategies above.
Watch my full conversation with Adriana on YouTube – where we get into zero-bullsh*t messaging, how to read a room before you’re in it, and why most founders wait too long before talking to their customers. Watch the interview here.
Thank you to Adriana for a conversation that was as generous and fun as it was practical. Her human first approach is exactly the kind of thinking this book is built around.
Q: Is your story fuzzy or are you just hoping nobody notices yet?
See you next week,
Vaughan