Everything we do at Astrolab helps turn collaboration into results.
In this article, I want to share how a narrative can be used to combat one of the biggest obstacles to effective collaboration inside companies: lack of clarity and lack of motivation.
A personal challenge
This year I decided to commit to writing one article per day in my blog. I know. Who would think of such an idea? Answer: Andrés from December 2024.
As you can imagine, the task has not been easy. Some days (very few, actually) I sit down to write with clarity, inspiration, and motivation. Most days, I end up writing the post late at night, tired, sleepy, and sometimes frustrated.
In those moments, my mind slows down, gets easily distracted, and struggles to make decisions. Articles that I could write in forty minutes sometimes take two hours.
If you work in a large organization, you may often feel the same way: confused, overwhelmed, and unmotivated, especially in a market with high uncertainty driven by geopolitical trends, layoffs, and artificial intelligence.
The root causes are diverse, but executive indecision is often a constant behind these symptoms.
From executive indecision…
According to a McKinsey article, executive indecision is directly linked to poor organizational performance and employee burnout. In addition, authors of a recent article published in Harvard Business Review explain that indecision erodes momentum and credibility, and causes high performers to disconnect from the organization.
Try to imagine the impact on the business: lost sales, turnover, ineffective meetings, and poor decisions.
How do you solve executive indecision? By facilitating conversations so that leadership teams can have the right discussions and reach agreement.
Ideally, the problem would be solved there. But the numbers show the opposite: most strategies and transformation efforts fail to achieve the desired outcomes.
One reason is bad luck, of course. Another reason is lack of alignment, follow-up, and communication around the decisions made.
The strategy may be sound, but it has limited impact if it is not communicated in a clear, memorable, and even inspiring way across the next two or three levels of the organization.
…to a narrative that brings clarity and energy
This is where narrative comes in—a topic we have referenced in ninety-eight articles published in our blog (ninety-nine with this one), not including an article we published over a decade ago in Expansión, the business magazine with the highest circulation in Mexico.
What is a narrative? Here is a definition I offered several years ago:
“A set of interconnected ideas that help explain the past, justify the present, and promise a future.”
Here is another definition from Gallup:
“An effective narrative creates a shared understanding of the past, an explanation for the change planned today, and a projection for the future. It explains the what and the why clearly. At the same time, it connects employees to the mission and broader strategy of the organization.”
What is a narrative for? To provide clarity by communicating decisions and plans, and to move people to act by articulating the reasons behind them.
This translates into business results, according to McKinsey studies:
– More sales: commercial teams understand the value of the offer and can articulate it better.
– Lower turnover: one-third of turnover is due to uninspiring leadership.
– More successful transformation projects: six of the ten most common causes of failed transformations are communication-related.
When people in an organization gain clarity about priorities—where we came from, where we are now, where we want to go, why we are doing it, and what I need to do—they focus their attention and action accordingly.
“The groups I studied dedicate a surprising amount of time to telling their own story, reminding each other exactly what their purpose is—and then repeating it ad infinitum,” writes Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code, one of the best business books I have read in the past decade. Here is the review we wrote, taken from Astrolab’s historical archives.
Narrative Sprint
If there are signals among the top 100 leaders in your organization that clarity and motivation are lacking, a narrative sprint could be valuable.
What is a narrative sprint? A series of facilitation workshops led by Astrolab that help a group of leaders build and socialize the narrative of a strategy, change, or transformation.
In recent years we have facilitated narrative sprints with leaders in companies such as MARS, Arca Continental, Banco Base, Alpura, Banamex, Heineken, and Clara.
The result is always the same: a shared narrative that connects and brings everyone along. This translates into:
Certainty that the leadership team is aligned around the most relevant whats, whys, and hows.
Clarity that the narrative will be shared and understood across the next two or three levels.
Momentum for executing the strategy, transformation, or change desired.
If you want to learn more about this process, write to andres@astrolab.mx. We can schedule a fifteen-minute conversation at no cost to better understand your organization’s current moment.
