The working sessions that get a leadership team to agree, in writing, on what business it’s in.

Every company runs on unwritten rules: assumptions nobody voted for that decide what gets built, who gets hired, and which good ideas quietly die on the way to a decision. Most teams have never said theirs out loud.

In plain terms: short, intense working sessions with your leaders, out loud and in writing, on what business you’re actually in and where it goes next. Half a week of your leaders’ time, spread over one to two weeks to accommodate their schedules and commitments. Typically from $25,000, quoted before you commit. This page shows one engagement, start to finish, told as a story.

The shape, in one line: homework and a fixed-scope contract → working sessions with your leaders (a sketch artist drawing ideas live) → the direction rehearsed with supporters, then stress-tested by your skeptics → written instruments your team keeps.

“Nora” is a composite of several real clients; every event happened.

Where it started

Nora could see it. She just couldn’t spend anything on it.

She ran merchandising for a chain that sells high-end audio and home entertainment: the good speakers, the big screens, the streaming that doesn’t compress the life out of a recording, the remastered albums people play for guests. She had been right about things early enough, and often enough, that people had started forwarding her emails to each other. Not quite the person you call first. Close.

What she could see was that the company was selling the wrong thing. Not the wrong products. The wrong thing. She couldn’t put it in a sentence, which was why nobody would fund it.

why nobody funds a feeling

Hers is the ordinary situation, not the unusual one. Someone senior enough to see it, not yet senior enough to fund it. The gap isn’t conviction and it isn’t politics. Until the idea has words, nobody can fund it.

And why the composite: several clients’ confidences are in this story, so one name stands in for all of them.

Before session one

By the time we sat down, we’d already started.

A hand-drawn customer journey mural from a live Storyminers working session

A Storyminers working session — the sketch wall

Work like this arrives two ways. Usually a sponsor — someone who can fund it — brings me their Nora, and we work together directly. Sometimes Nora comes first and the executives follow. Here, Nora came first, so job one was turning her feeling into something her sponsor could back. He did.

I’d talked with him. We’d agreed who would attend, what the company would send me ahead of time, and what would happen if it didn’t arrive. I’d read their brand strategy and their business plan, run their competitors and my own questions through AI, and read up on every person who’d be there.

Then I rode along on two store visits and listened to what the staff said to customers when nobody was watching. In the second store, on a slow Tuesday afternoon, a salesman spent eleven minutes helping a man hear the difference between two amplifiers. He never once mentioned a specification. The man’s wife waited by the door with her coat on and didn’t seem to mind. I wrote down what he did. It came back the following week, out of somebody else’s mouth, and it changed the company.

what’s in the contract, and the list that stops engagements stalling

The contract, and the two things I insist on.

The contract described what she’d get, not the route we’d take. I don’t charge by the hour. There’s no value in time — only in outcomes. Priced on scope, where scope and outcome are the same thing, with specific obligations on both sides.

One of those obligations is a negotiated list: what the client supplies, by when, and what it costs them in delay if they don’t. It goes in writing because it’s the most common reason engagements stall.

The other obligation is about who shows up, and I learned that one the hard way.

Years ago I spent two months with the innovation team at a language-learning company. We got about ninety percent of the way. The sponsor had chosen not to attend a single session, despite repeated invitations and several status reports, and then arrived at the end and sank the whole thing, because what we’d come up with changed the status quo. He was entitled to. He was the sponsor. I was still completely blindsided.

Now the sponsor’s attendance is part of the agreement, not a hope. If the person who can say no won’t come to the sessions, I’d rather find that out in week one than in week nine.

The plan for the first session was a page: topics to cover, a checklist of things to think about, and a light sketch of the arc after it. Deliberately light. We work in modules so the sessions can follow where the client’s interest actually is, rather than a sequence I decided on before I met anyone.

The engagement

What actually happened, start to finish.

Session one

The sentence that had been running the company for nine years.

Five of them, two of us. Laptops open, two screens, a whiteboard, and a recorder running so nobody had to take minutes. The coffee was bad. Somebody’s phone buzzed for the first forty minutes until they gave up and turned it over.

I thanked them for being brave, asked them to leave the politics outside, and said the thing I say every time: this isn’t a decision day, it isn’t a bash-an-idea day, and it isn’t a pity party. Then one more thing, because most people have never been told it. It’s very rare that anyone gets to pick the future they live in, and you’re being asked to.

Then I asked why they’d joined the company. What customers told them. What customers complained about. What they’d wanted to do for years and never been allowed to.

I’m listening to the answers. I’m also watching how they arrive: who defers, who hedges, who lights up, where it goes quiet. That tells me how strongly these people actually hold their views and how they work together, and both of those matter more to what happens next than any single answer does.

Here’s the part I’ve never worked out. Somewhere in most of these sessions, one or two people turn out to think more deeply, or more broadly, or more strangely than anyone in their own company knew. It’s usually not who you’d guess. After 30 years I still can’t predict who it will be or when it will surface, and I’ve stopped pretending I can. If I could see it coming I’d build the whole day around it. As it is, I try to be paying attention when it happens.

Ninety minutes in, the VP of stores said the sentence that explained everything I’d seen in that second store: “We make sure our clients get the best gear.”

It sounded like customer focus. It was the opposite, and it had been running the company for nine years.

what that sentence was really doing to them

It puts every ounce of expertise on the seller’s side of the counter. The customer’s job is to be told. Nobody in that company would have said that out loud, and all of them were running on it.

Taking the sentence apart, word by word.

I wrote the sentence on the whiteboard and pulled lines away from the words. We. Make sure. Best. Under each one, what it does to the person hearing it.

It takes about forty seconds, and the conversation is never the same afterward.

Then Nora said the thing she’d been unable to say for a year. It was the salesman’s move, out of somebody else’s mouth: what their best salespeople actually did was let someone hear the sound they wanted, in their own words, before spending a dollar. The customer left able to describe it. Confident. Certain it would sound at home the way it sounded in the shop.

They weren’t in the gear business. They were in the experience business.

They’d been describing the wrong business. Same stores, same inventory, different company.

Getting there took one more thing, and it wasn’t a conversation.

Session one, drawn live

Drawing the idea while people talk.

When the sketch artist is with us, she draws what people describe, live, onto the screen: the store, the moment, the customer’s face.

The point isn’t the drawing. It’s that ten people describing the same idea are picturing ten different things, and none of them know it.

why ten people nodding are picturing ten different things

Say it out loud and everyone nods at their own private version. Draw it and the disagreements surface in ten seconds — while fixing one still means changing a drawing, not changing a build.

I call it seeing what you say. It takes the idea out of everybody’s separate mind’s eye and puts it in one place, so there’s far less confusion later about what was actually intended.

The drawings do a second job too. They’re how the direction reaches people who weren’t there. A sketch travels into the next session in a way that minutes never do.

Session one, the last hour

I showed them how I’d spend that night.

I pulled up the transcript of the conversation we’d just had, put it on the screen, and asked it questions in front of them.

Where do these five people agree? Where don’t they? Which part of this business is changing fastest?

what came back in under a minute, and who asked to see it again

Then: has anyone else in this category landed on the same idea, and how long are they taking to move on it?

Answers came back in under a minute, built from their own words, in front of them. One of them said “do that again.” I don’t do that for the analysis. I do it so they can watch how fast a thing moves once it’s been said clearly.

We closed the session the way we close all of them. Each person said what they’d appreciated, what they’d learned, and what they were looking forward to. Then who owed what, by when. Then I summarized the whole session out loud, on the recording, so the transcript would be usable rather than merely complete.

Nothing was finished. That’s honest for a first session: not concrete yet, but hopeful, and worth coming back for. The best sign wasn’t anything they said to me. It was what they affirmed to each other on the way out.

Then everyone went home, and the least glamorous part of this work began.

That night

The unglamorous part.

Transcripts cleaned. The session pulled apart. Every insight filed where it would be used rather than dumped in a folder called notes — what the business is for (the Reason for Being), principles, emotions, customer experience, brand.

Then the next session designed against what had actually happened.

the overnight work, and what’s replacing it

Plainly: today this is hand work, done at night. We’re building the version where the sorting and the drawing happen live, while people are still talking — including the ability to open any version of a statement and compare it to the others on the spot. It isn’t finished. When it is, the sessions get shorter and the second ones get sharper. We’d rather tell you that than describe a machine we’re still making.

Session two

We started by reading back what they’d already decided.

We do that every time, and it looks like a waste of ten minutes until you watch what it does. The Reason for Being goes back up. The principles. The feeling a customer seeks. We read them out, slowly, even when they were settled weeks ago.

Two things happen. Somebody always says “that’s not quite right yet” (it’s rarely the same person twice) and the sentence gets stronger. And every person hearing it again is quietly building the same picture as everyone else. Agreement doesn’t arrive in one sitting. It builds, out loud, by repetition.

By the end of that second session they had a Reason for Being they’d argued over and kept, the principles underneath it, the experience design elements that customers sense consistently, regardless of channel, and the start of a map of who was accountable for which part of the promise.

They also had something that doesn’t show up in any deliverable. They had the stories of how each of those got made — who fought for which word, what got thrown out at four in the afternoon, the version everybody liked until somebody read it aloud. Two years from now they’ll still be telling those. And every one of them can say they were there when it was written, which is a different thing entirely from having it explained to you afterward.

half a week of their time — here’s the arithmetic

Half a week of their time, spread out as fast as the calendar allowed. Four or five of their people. Two of us. A sketch artist on one of the days.

The real price for a leadership team isn’t money. It’s attention, from the people whose attention costs the most. Not much else they do that month matters as much.

After the sessions

The Friendlies, then the Skeptics.

The direction went to a wider group next: not for approval. To find out how to say it.

the day people rehearse, and the day people push back

The Friendlies were the people already inclined to like it. Taking it to them is a rehearsal, not a review. You learn in an afternoon which sentences travel alone and which need someone standing beside them, and you learn how to bring people in rather than announce at them. The sketches from session one did most of the work.

The Skeptics came after, and they were exactly who you’d expect: the longest-serving people in the company, the ones who have watched three of these come and go. They said no. They wanted to know how. They put a finger on every part that was still soft, and they were right about most of them.

They were also the only people in the building who knew what this would actually take, which shift it would strain, which system would have to be rebuilt, which supplier would need a year’s notice. Getting that out of them was the whole point of the day, and it took most of the afternoon. It is not comfortable and it is not meant to be. But somewhere around four o’clock the objections stop being reasons it can’t work and start being a list of what it needs, and once that happens the rest of the company can finally move.

Friendlies before Skeptics, always. You strengthen an idea before you ask anyone to break it.

Who did the work

Six disciplines, and the client’s own people.

Over those weeks the work drew on story, strategy, brand, AI and technology, experience design, and alignment — usually two or three at a time, never all six at once.

six one-line answers, and why we keep no bench

Story. So your team can explain the direction without you.

Strategy. So the big choices get made on purpose, not inherited.

Brand. So what you promise, what you deliver, and what customers actually get are the same thing.

AI/Tech. So the tools serve the direction you chose, not the other way around.

Experience design. So people can walk through the future before you pay to build it.

Alignment. So the direction survives the meeting where it was decided.

And on who “we” is, honestly: it’s me and AI, plus whoever the work actually needs. After 30 years in one market, I know who’s the best. I don’t keep a bench: a bench is expensive, and worse, it tempts you to staff a job with whoever’s free instead of whoever’s right.

Some of the best people on Nora’s engagement worked for Nora. Part of the plan was always to staff it with her own team where we could: it cost her less, they learned more, they steered me around politics I’d never have seen, and it moved faster because they could tell me how the company actually worked.

What she kept

The instruments she kept, in her own language — and in use.

What the business is actually for — its Reason for Being.

How decisions get made when nobody senior is available.

What they collectively believe, what they’re building, why it matters.

The direction told as a story, built backward from the destination, specific enough to argue with.

Who’s accountable for which part of the promise, including where people and AI each belong.

All of it distilled into text that travels into their tools, their meetings, and their AI — so the thinking stays with them wherever the work happens.

What they learn as they go, and why each decision went the way it did.

Our names for these, if you hear them in a session: Principles, the Worldview, the Future Story, the Promise Map, the Captain’s Log.

The next part is the one we’re building.

Today these arrive as documents — good ones, in her language. But a document still has to be found, opened and remembered, and that is where most strategy quietly dies.

So through 2026, in stages, we’re making them installed instead: living inside the systems her people already open every morning, and inside the AI they’re already asking questions of. The difference matters most eighteen months out, when someone hired long after the sessions ended inherits the thinking instead of guessing at it.

It isn’t finished.

After the story: your AI projects

If you came to us today, we’d look at your AI projects first.

If Nora’s company had come to us today, I’d have asked to see their AI projects first: not because we’re a technology firm. Because sprawl is the quickest way to see misalignment from outside.

three teams, one problem, three answers

Three teams solving the same problem three ways. Pilots nobody can bring themselves to kill. Tools bought to answer a question the company never agreed on. That isn’t an AI problem. It’s a business that never settled what it’s for, or who owes what to whom.

Which makes it a fast way in — it’s the job our AI Clarity Assessment does. Two to four weeks of looking at where a company has pointed its AI says more about what’s actually agreed than a quarter of interviews. What comes back is what those projects say about where the business is heading, and a project list that’s been through the questions — some efforts combined, some re-timed, something missing added, or the confirmation you were pointed right all along.

After the story: the guarantee

We guarantee the work gets delivered.
We can’t guarantee you’ll use it.

The first half I’ll put in writing.

The second half belongs to you, and it should. Whether a company lives by what it decided comes down to what its leaders do on the Monday after: who they tell, what they stop doing, whether the plumbing behind the promise can carry it. No outsider can promise that.

What we can do is not leave you alone with it. That’s what the Leadership Alignment Workshop and Strategic Advisory are for: the first gets every leader saying the same thing in their own words, the second keeps a hand on it through the decisions that come after. Both exist precisely because that gap is real — to keep pushing results along and get the thing actually taken up rather than merely agreed.

After the story: when to call

Come to us before things are clear — not after they’re decided.

A sketch artist draws a leadership team’s ideas live on a wall-sized mural during a Storyminers working session

A Storyminers working session — the ideas, drawn as people talk

Nora called while it was still a feeling she couldn’t fund. It was also the cheapest moment to change course she’ll ever have.

Change a direction before it’s announced and the cost is a conversation. Change it after, and you’re paying to unwind things: the plan already circulated, the hires already made against it, the systems already configured for it, and the standing of whoever announced it. None of that is a disaster. All of it is avoidable, and none of it comes back.

“If your team needs you in every room, the strategy isn’t clear enough.”— Mike Wittenstein

The working sessions that get a leadership team to agree, in writing, on what business it’s in.

Nora could see it. She just couldn’t spend anything on it.

By the time we sat down, we’d already started.

The contract, and the two things I insist on.

What actually happened, start to finish.

The sentence that had been running the company for nine years.

Taking the sentence apart, word by word.

Drawing the idea while people talk.

I showed them how I’d spend that night.

The unglamorous part.

We started by reading back what they’d already decided.

The Friendlies, then the Skeptics.

Six disciplines, and the client’s own people.

The instruments she kept, in her own language — and in use.

The next part is the one we’re building.

If you came to us today, we’d look at your AI projects first.

We guarantee the work gets delivered.We can’t guarantee you’ll use it.

Come to us before things are clear — not after they’re decided.

Book a free hour with Mike — no pitch.

We guarantee the work gets delivered.
We can’t guarantee you’ll use it.