Wolf&Grayson EditorialEvery large company has a strategy deck, and most of them are good. The slides are clean, the logic holds, the room applauds. Then the room empties, and the strategy stops moving. Gavin McMahon, author of Story Business, argues that this is the real failure point in corporate strategy, and that it is rarely diagnosed as such. Leaders treat the deck as the deliverable when the deliverable is a thousand people making decisions in the same direction without being told to. “The real test begins when everyone leaves the room,” he says. “Can the executive team explain the strategy in their own words? Can a manager use it to make a decision? Does someone on the front line understand what they’re supposed to do differently on Monday morning?” That is a measurement problem as much as a communication one, and it is the reason storytelling has been badly misfiled as a soft skill.
The Two Mistakes In The Boardroom
The first error McMahon identifies is a category confusion: leaders mistake the work of developing a strategy for the work of explaining it. Months of market analysis, competitor study, modeling, and argument get compressed into 40 slides, and the audience is expected to replay that entire intellectual journey in 45 minutes. “Nobody needs to see all the workings,” McMahon says. “They need to understand the choices.” The distinction matters more than it sounds. A strategy presented as evidence invites debate about the evidence. A strategy presented as a set of choices invites action on the choices. Most executive communication fails because it is structured like a defense rather than a direction.
The second mistake is subtler and more expensive. Leaders obsess over the story they intend to tell the market and ignore the stories the market is already telling. McMahon uses a plain example: a fast-food venture with a strong model, a good location, and a sharp campaign still struggles if the prevailing story says fast food is unhealthy and on its way out. The inverse logic applies to AI. “Now think about AI as a gold rush,” he says. “If that’s the dominant story, perhaps the smart strategy is to sell the picks and shovels.” He has started mapping what he calls the Narrative Constellation: the stories circulating in an industry and which of them are gaining ground. He compares it to “The Corporate Overton Window” in politics, a concept discussed by business author and strategist John Elkington, which describes the range of ideas that people consider acceptable. He sees the same mechanism operating in business, shifting what customers, employees, investors, and whole markets are prepared to believe. “You can have a brilliant strategy and still be swimming against the tide,” he says. “I’d rather know where the current is taking us before deciding how hard to swim.”
What An Engineer Sees In A Narrative
McMahon began his career as an engineer, working on submarines, artillery systems, and steel plants, and that background explains why he refuses to treat story as decoration. Engineering, he says, gives you a healthy respect for how things work. A design can be elegant on paper and still fail if the components do not fit or the tolerances are wrong. He applies the same test to organizations. A strategy is an idea about how a business will work, and turning that idea into reality requires thousands of coordinated decisions. Story is part of the mechanism that makes those decisions possible, and he describes it as the scaffolding that gives an organization both alignment and agency.
What follows from that framing is a demand for evidence. “The engineer in me wants to know whether it works,” McMahon says. “Can people explain the strategy? Does it influence decisions? Are teams behaving differently? Are we getting the results we intended?” Those questions turn narrative into something auditable. His teams run an exercise they call strategy karaoke, where executives stand in front of a shared picture of the strategy and explain it to one another. Everyone starts from the same image, and the exercise exposes whether they are singing the same song. The goal is what he calls aligned agency: enough shared understanding that people move in the same direction, with enough freedom to decide for themselves. He also rejects the sequencing most companies default to. “There’s a danger in treating storytelling as something you add at the end, once the serious strategic work is finished,” he says. “The process of building the story exposes the holes in your thinking. If you can’t explain the strategy simply, perhaps you haven’t understood it well enough.”
Why AI Makes Alignment Harder, Not Easier
Stalled AI adoption inside enterprises is routinely blamed on poor internal communication. McMahon reads the symptom differently. “Unclear communication and weak narrative are often symptoms of incomplete thinking,” he says. A chief executive officer announcing a $5 billion AI investment has made an investment decision, not a strategic one. The strategy questions sit underneath: how AI changes the business model, where it creates value, what becomes possible that was not possible before. Until leadership has wrestled with those, polish will not save the message. “You can’t put lipstick on a pig,” he says. Employees, meanwhile, carry their own stories about AI, and they are reasonable ones. Will it replace me? What happens to 20 years of expertise? Leave those unanswered, and people fill the blanks themselves.
The larger shift he sees arriving is a reversal in where strategic value sits. Gathering information, analyzing it, and building recommendations used to be the expensive part. AI is making that faster and cheaper, while doing nothing to make agreement easier. “As AI produces more information, more scenarios, and more competing explanations of the world, leaders will find it harder to create shared understanding,” McMahon says. Everyone gets their own analysis, their own assistant, their own defensible interpretation. Then try moving ten thousand people in one direction. He has been experimenting with AI tools that map the stories circulating a topic, tracking what people believe, what worries them, and how those beliefs shift. The human job stays where it was. Choose a direction, explain why it matters, give people enough context to decide without you, then get out of the way. “The ability to generate a strategy will become increasingly common,” he says. “The ability to get one to travel will become increasingly valuable.”
Follow Gavin McMahon on LinkedIn for more insights on leadership storytelling, strategy communication, and organizational alignment.
