Somebody Else Is Telling It Now

I’m in a hospital bed at a leadership summit for a large healthcare system.

Gown on. Blanket over my knees.

A nurse takes my vitals while a physician walks the audience through a decade of change, from the bedside. On the monitor behind us, a live demo runs while they talk. The whole scene was the nurse’s idea. He wanted the audience to watch care happen.

Neither of them helped build the story they’re telling. The physician joined the system years after we built it. The nurse grew into the voice of his team only in the last year.

They carry it anyway.

Eight years ago, I helped shape this story. Today I’m lying in it.

Nobody Retells Slide 23

In 2018 the system sat two years into a ten-year vision. That’s an awkward spot for any large organization. The plan is good. The people who wrote it can explain it. Out in the field, among tens of thousands of employees and the leaders who guide them, many are still waiting for it to make sense.

At that stage, a strategy usually lives in documents and decks, so it only exists while someone presents it. That works for approval. It fails in the hallway. A ten-year plan has to survive a decade of hallways: new hires, reorganizations, and the long middle where people wonder if it’ll ever be finished.

A vision people can only tell through slides has a shelf life of exactly one meeting.

Let People Find Their Own Work

We started with the unglamorous part. We gathered hundreds of initiatives from every corner of the system and laddered each one up to the strategy’s three pillars. Then we wrote the whole thing as one narrative, and drew it as one picture.

A story built to travel.

The moment a frontline worker spots their own work on that ladder, the vision stops sounding like company speak and starts describing changes they’re already making, in how they work and how they care for patients. People retell a story they can see themselves in, because retelling it means telling their own.

For four years, our team worked alongside theirs. Shaping the narrative, building it into how they communicated, so the story kept its shape no matter who told it.

Build It From Their Own Words

The summit has a complete shape. Leaders start by remembering what healthcare looked and felt like in 2016. Three stations, each led by a pair of presenters, walk through a decade of proof. Then the tables turn toward what comes next.

Past, proof, future.

We wrote and coached those three stations. I interviewed each presenter first, then built their presentation from what they said. Every one of them told me the same thing when they saw the draft: it was cool to hear their own stream of consciousness come back stitched into a story.

Two of the six were my clients in 2018. They tell it tighter now. Prouder. More conversational, the way you’d describe a vivid memory. The other four picked it up along the way, and they carry it like it belongs to them.

It does.

One of the senior leaders closes her station with a graphic, the one we drew together in 2018. Her point fits in two lines: here’s what we said we’d do, and here’s how well we did it.

The audience applauds an eight-year-old graphic.

Slide decks are built for a moment. Stories are built for momentum.

It takes what it takes. Sometimes that’s ten years.

Building Something That Has to Last?

Could anyone else explain your vision without you, and without the deck?

Could they tell it in a hallway in under a minute?

Would you recognize it if it came back to you secondhand?

And in year ten, in whose voice will it be?

Tell Me About Your Year Two

Most of my work happens early, while a big plan still lives mostly on paper and a leader needs other people to believe in it.

Monday, I got to see year ten.

Sometimes the work is one leader and one presentation that has to land. Sometimes a whole organization decides this is how it will tell its biggest ideas, and we spend years at its side: finding the narrative, coaching the people who carry it, and building it into everything they say.

If you’re in year two of something big, hit reply and tell me what you’re building. I’d love to hear 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.