Strategy gets remembered when it gets told as a story. Not announced. Not cascaded. Told. With characters, with stakes, with a moment that makes the listener stop and think, that could be me.
Story is the oldest form of communication we have, and somehow the one organizations consistently underuse. We default to slides and frameworks because they feel rigorous. But rigor isn’t what people carry with them. Story is.
One moment from my time in pharma has stayed with me for years. We were introducing new priorities, but instead of leading with slides or metrics, we brought patients onto the stage. Not one story. Many.
I remember one woman in particular. She was talking about living with her chronic condition, and she said something I’ve never forgotten:
“I never forget about it. I think about it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
Then she looked directly at the field teams and said:
“When you pull out of your garage, maybe in the rain, to go visit doctors or to drop off samples, it’s not just a job. You’re changing people’s lives.”
And then, as if that weren’t enough, a group of children walked onstage. They had all met at a camp the company sponsored, where kids learned how to manage their disease and support one another. They stood together and played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on their violins.
There were thousands of people in the room, but not a dry eye.
No one left talking about the strategy deck. They left understanding why their work mattered.
That moment is what got me curious about Learning Maps and dialogue-based engagement. The first time I saw one in action, it completely changed my thinking about how adults actually take in information.
It looked like a giant board game. Big, visual, almost playful. The kind of thing you don’t expect to find in a corporate ballroom or hospital conference room. But the moment you step in, you can’t walk away. You’re in it. Talking, asking, challenging, figuring it out alongside everyone else at the table.
Here’s what surprised me the most: the methodology works almost identically across audiences that have nothing else in common. For years before I came to Root, I built and delivered programs like this with patients managing chronic disease and with healthcare professionals learning about new treatments. Same approach, same room dynamic. The work I do now at Root is primarily with companies and their employees, but the methodology itself isn’t limited to one audience. It works because it isn’t really about strategy, or healthcare, or business. It’s about how human beings learn from each other.
One session from earlier in my career stays with me. A room of patients living with type 2 diabetes. Some had been managing the disease for decades. Others had been diagnosed in the last few months.
When the conversation landed on eating, you could feel the frustration because food is everywhere: birthdays, holidays, sports, grief, celebration. Saying no isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a hundred small ones a day.
One man finally said it out loud. His wife buys cookies and sweets for the grandkids, and they sit on the counter. And he knows he shouldn’t have them.
“It’s so hard not to have some once in a while. My wife thinks it’s easy to always say no.”
Another man across the table, about the same age, leaned in. His wife used to do the same thing, so he asked her to put the snacks somewhere he wouldn’t see them. Now she hides them. Out of sight, out of mind. The whole table started nodding. That’s a good idea. And then he looked at the first man and said something so simple it caught me off guard:
“Just ask her to help you. She probably wants to. She just doesn’t know how hard it is to say no all the time.”
The first man’s face changed. Not because someone had solved his problem. Because someone had finally said the thing he’d been carrying around for months.
That’s what storytelling does that a pamphlet can’t. No facilitator, no clinician, no app could have delivered that moment. It happened because two people sat at a table and one of them recognized his own life in another man’s words.
That’s also what most organizations underestimate about AI right now. People don’t adopt new ways of working because they attend a training session. They adopt them when they understand where they fit in the story and when they feel safe enough to engage with what’s changing.