Control the project narrative before it controls you
There’s a Carl Jung quote I stumbled upon recently that works as a good intro to this post:
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
Everyone needs to know their story — how they explain themselves to the outside world.
The consulting corollary here is that every project also needs a story.
Let me share an example to explain what I mean.
I’m leading a GenAI program at a large company. There is a lot of hype about GenAI overall and the company is really excited about its potential. As a result, there are a lot of very, very senior people directly involved and even more are interested in what’s happening. There are also a lot of really excited employees. And there are also employees with a moral and ethical opposition to AI of any kind — or they’re just scared it will take their jobs. All this puts a spotlight on this program in a way that’s very different to a “regular” project.
Everyone wants to know what’s coming, when it’s coming, what the team is doing, etc. This usually happens with any big, highly visible project.
It’s all good stuff, but here’s the catch: if senior stakeholders don’t understand the story of your project, they’ll start to make up their own version. In that version maybe they need to get involved more, or maybe they need to tell you what to do, or maybe things aren’t going well.
In an information vacuum, they start projecting. By the time it gets surfaced to you there could be a whole story spun up that isn’t accurate at all — but good luck putting that genie back in the bottle.
This is bad. You want to control the narrative.
You want those senior people to feel that as big and exciting (and, perhaps, scary) as this is, the team has thought things through and has it under control.
A good narrative is a key part of any good stakeholder management plan.
To help tell the story I’ve literally created ‘narrative slides’ for big, high profile initiatives. They cover the what, why, and why now questions that people are thinking about even if they aren’t articulating them.
They are no more than a few slides. They are not text heavy. They keep it simple. They’re easy to remember. Ideally they visually stand out from the typical templates used.
A narrative is not a:
Project plan
Status slide
Some other standard project artifact
Here’s an example for a Salesforce rollout (note these are dummy slides to illustrate the concept):
Slide 1: What are we doing and why
Slide 2: When are we doing it
Slide 3: What’s in it for me / why do we care
Compare these to how a slide 1 might typically look:
There’s nothing wrong with that slide for certain audiences, but overall it’s pretty forgettable. The narrative has just a few items on each slide: easy to remember — and they’re visually unique so the brain can better retain what it saw.
This will be the most re-used artifact your project uses outside of your project team because:
You need to explain to leaders what’s happening, so you use the narrative.
Leaders want their teams to hear what’s coming, so you get invited to present at various company forums. The narrative will likely cover 80% of what you’ll need to cover.
With any buzzy project, random employees will ask project team members what’s going on. Those team members have the narrative to respond consistently. Sometimes projects are so charged that saying the wrong thing can set off a chain of events and become a big problem — by telling people to refer to the narrative, you help minimize that risk. (More involved Talking Points are also good in this situation, but that’s a post for another day.)