how to pull your team into the future
A CEO can often see exactly what their company needs to become.
The next chapter is obvious. The market shifted; the old way of winning is dying.
But when they stand up at the all-hands to lay it out, it doesn’t land. The people who built the company over the last 10 years hear something else: the thing they poured a decade into creating is now what’s holding everyone back.
The harder a CEO pushes, the harder a team digs in.
That’s the real problem with change. Not the strategy. It’s that the people living in today can’t yet see the tomorrow that’s obvious to you. The people whose buy-in you need most are often standing inside the very thing you’re trying to change. From where they sit, the new story isn’t an exciting new future. It’s a verdict on the past that they’re still attached to.
Thankfully, there’s one move that can fix this. And it fits on a single slide.
Old Story / New Story
You put where the company has been alongside where it’s going.
Two columns, side by side.
Not to argue that the new way is better, but to let people see the shift at a glance and connect the dots themselves.
For that CEO, it looked like this:
Product → Platform
Feature → Foundation
Bought once → Built on daily
Three lines, and their whole bet was legible.
The company that sold a product is becoming the platform other companies build on. You can feel how that lands differently than 10 slides of strategy. The bigger the story, the more room there is for people to find themselves inside it.
The best pairs stick because they’re built for: parallelism, a little alliteration, a rhyme you can’t unhear. Feature to foundation. People don’t just read them, they repeat them.
And whoever sets the frames that stick owns the conversation.
Why people stop fighting it
The frame works because it never makes the old way wrong.
It names the old as where you honestly were, the product that earned the company the right to become a platform, and the new as where it was always heading. Same conviction, next chapter. Nobody has to have been wrong for everyone to move. Take that away, and people reject the new story the way a body rejects a transplant it didn’t ask for.
Leave it in, and the thing they built becomes the foundation of the thing they’re building next.
It’s already happening, in worlds nothing like yours
A team I worked with inside a life-sciences company had spent years as the function everyone treated as the brake, the people who slowed the science down to keep it safe. They didn’t argue for more respect. They redrew the map.
Gatekeepers → Enablers
Risk management → Opportunity management
Following the rules → Rewriting the rules
Same standards, new altitude. The brake became the hand on the wheel: someone is going to write the protocols for how AI enters their business function, and it should be the people who know a thing or two about compliance, regulators, and quality.
A strategy leader inside a large software company did the same with a data bet the company kept shelving. Inside the building it read as overhead. So they stopped pitching a fix and went back to the company’s origin story, the data model that let it scale in the first place.
Overhead → Infrastructure
Cost center → Growth engine
Agents run the data → Data runs the agents
They named the asset, “ownable data,” and what read as a cost started reading as the company’s next platform. Same DNA, carried forward. End result? A blank check from the CTO with unlimited engineering headcount.
Build your own in 10 minutes
Take a piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle: two columns.
On the left: where you’ve been, in your people’s own words, the version they’ve lived. On the right, where you’re going, one line for each line on the left, each pair built to echo the one beside it. Three rows carry most of it: the promise, the shift, and the one thing that never changes. Then read it back to someone still living the old story, and watch their face. When they nod, you’ve built the bridge. The change that needed a deck now fits on one slide.
One VP I taught this to called the technique, “worth its weight in gold.” They now include a contrast frame in every business case and slide presentation. And their decision-making influence has grown alongside it.
Why people start moving toward it
This move doesn’t just simplify the change. It pulls people into it.
The hardest thing about any transformation is that the people standing in today can’t see the tomorrow you’re describing, let alone want it. A strong contrast frame closes that gap. It shows people who they get to become and the future they get to inhabit. A future people can see themselves in is almost impossible to reject. You stop dragging people toward the change, and they start walking toward it on their own.
For years this lived in my client workshops and advisory work. And this is one of the first skills going into Storied AI, a Claude plug-in that you can call on in the flow of work. All you have to do is describe what’s changing, and it creates the frames that win with investors, executives, and B2B buyers.
I’m now releasing the first narrative stack for tech operators, and opening it to a small group to pressure-test before it opens to everyone. It’s free for this first group, and I’m keeping it small so I can work with each tester.
Want in? Reply “Storied AI” and tell me the change you’re trying to land.
Michael
P.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help CEOs & operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote speaker, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk