4 Storytelling Secrets to Make Your IT Strategy Unforgettable

Traditional approaches to communicating the IT strategy are failing you.

4 Storytelling Secrets to Make Your IT Strategy Unforgettable.

As technology leaders, we focus too much on whether the business case is solid, the architecture is sound, and slides are packed with data to prove it. Yet, when you are done presenting your IT strategy, it becomes another slide deck, lost in your SharePoint libraries.

IT strategy often fails not because it is flawed, but because it fails to connect with the people who must approve, fund, and execute it.

Drawing from various research in behavioural psychology, four practical storytelling secrets inspire genuine commitment:

1. Stop informing. Seek commitment.

Don't settle for understanding; drive for commitment. This reframing is powerful because it shifts your focus from a one-way data dump to a two-way emotional connection. You stop being a presenter and become a leader who brings people along on a shared journey.

2. Every Strategy communication should follow a classic narrative structure

The classic three-part story structure never fails to deliver.  

1.      Find your hook and make a connection

2.      Show the problem strategy is looking to solve

3.      Show the solution

This structure works because it taps into a fundamental human need for narrative.

3. One Size Fits None: Tailor the Tale

The story that inspires your board of directors is not the same one that will motivate your engineering teams.

4. Be Interesting, Not Complete

Avoid the trap of covering every single point from your strategy to prove your thoroughness. Focus on your key messages in an interesting way. As one of the essential principles of communication teaches us, “it is better to be interesting rather than complete.”

Your strategy is sitting in a slide deck. What story will you tell to bring it to life?