In this morning’s working session, we took a deductive storyline from being ‘good’ to being ‘great’.

I thought you might be interested in the journey so have pulled out the insights and offered the recording here for your use. As Brooke mentioned, it’s much easier to rework someone else’s story!

We elevated the quality of both the structure and the reasoning by iterating through a couple of versions. Here are the highlights of the changes we made.

The original version was a flow that made sense but was light on reasoning which is core to a powerful deductive structure. Here are the weak points. The original

• Was light on reasoning. The story highlighted the problems and aligned the solution with the problems rather than justifying why this was the right way to fix those problems.
• Was not truly deductive. The story flowed from one thing to the next rather than starting with a broad statement, commenting on that statement and then leading to a powerful recommendation.
• Contained assumptions. The assumption was that fixing the internal problems would be sufficient to regain the company’s leadership position in the market. While that may be a good place to start, that’s rarely enough to succeed in a competitive environment. If it is, however, then that’s good news and worth a mention!

The new version followed a tightly linked structure that was stronger at all levels. The new version

• • Elevated the thinking in the statement. We tied together the two potential causes of the problem rather than splitting them across the two limbs of the story.
  • Strengthened out the quality of the thinking in the comment. We felt the original version did not really explain why focusing on the marketing strategy was the right thing to do. While we had to ‘make up’ the data, we could imagine the sorts of information that would be needed and used placeholders for that.
  • Put the actions in context. Instead of saying ‘fix these three things’ in the recommendation, we outlined a phased approach.

So, here’s a challenge for you:

• Download the original (visualised below) and ‘have a go’ at fixing it. Give yourself 20-30 minutes to do so.