Every Update is a Story of Change

We’re three hours into a workshop, building the architecture that makes people believe something. The whiteboard’s full. The coffee’s cold.

A manager raises his hand.

“What if we don’t present to build belief, but we’re just giving an update?”

Fair question. He’s the first one all morning to ask it, and most people in most organizations are thinking it. His team reports on equipment. Initiatives. Community impact. Regular, scheduled, expected. Nobody arrives at those meetings expecting to feel anything.

He thinks he’s naming the exception. He’s naming the most common case there is.

“We’re Just Giving an Update”

Somewhere between the calendar invite and the meeting, that phrase turns into a permission slip. It excuses the material from responsibility. Nobody has to decide anything, nobody has to do anything differently, and the presenter gets to read numbers off a page and “hand back” a few minutes. Everyone leaves grateful.

It works, in the narrow sense that nobody complains. Still, most of us have sat through hundreds of these and can’t name one.

The Story was Already There

While you’re presenting, audience members in an informational update are actively running calculations, wondering does this change anything for me? Your responsibility, if you choose to accept it, is to answer that question by answering four others:

1. Where are we going? The destination, in their terms. What’s different for them, once this is done?

2. What’s standing in the way? Here’s where your list has the most potential to become a story. Something is in the way, or you wouldn’t be standing there talking about it. Name the obstacle.

3. How will we overcome it? The plan, the tradeoff, the thing you need from them. Most updates start and stop here, which is why they land flat. An answer that arrives before anybody feels the question is just trivia.

4. How will we know we’ve succeeded? The proof. What’s true in ninety days that’s false today?

Change is already the subject. These questions only stop you from leaving it out.

Somebody replaces equipment because something failed, or will. Initiatives launch because the current situation costs somebody something. Community impact is a number that moved, and people moved it.

Answer Question Two Out Loud

The obstacle is the change. Question two is where it’s been sitting in your update the whole time.

Naming what’s in the way means admitting something isn’t working yet, and most of us would rather present the plan and skip the part that made a plan necessary. So we open on the plan, and the update lands the way updates land.

Before your next one, answer question two out loud, as you rehearse, in the words your audience would actually use.

If nothing happens, you’re presenting a status.

If there’s an answer to that question, you have a story, and you should tell it. The manager who raised his hand had a story in every one of those meetings. He’d only been reading the last chapter out loud.

What’s on Your Calendar Monday Morning?

Look at the next update you’re scheduled to give.

• Does anybody in that meeting have to do something differently because of it?

• Can you say what’s standing in the way without checking a slide?

• And if you delivered the update as a story instead, would the audience feel, behave, or believe something differently?

Nobody’s Update Is Beyond Saving

Four questions on a page will only get you so far.

Question two stalls even the best presenters, and it will keep stalling you until you put it in front of people who’ll push on it. That’s a different exercise than thinking about it in the car.

That’s what the workshop is. Groups of about ten, working on the material you’re presenting next, until the right shape shows up.

Hit reply and tell me what update you’re dreading. I’ll tell you what I’d ask you about it.

🔥 Hi, I’m Eric, and every week, I share insights, observations and tools so you can ditch decks and light a fire in your high-stakes presentations. If you like what you see here, follow me on LinkedIn.