Storytelling That Drives Decisions: Turning Analysis Into a Narrative Leadership Acts On
- Folayemi Tee
- Jul 14
- 5 min read
DAY 2 | Every Case Is a Story With Three Parts - The narrative shape that turns a report into a decision
A report lists. A story moves. The entire difference between them is structure, and the structure is simpler than you think. Yesterday I argued that people act on stories, not data. That can sound like vague advice, the kind that is easy to nod at and impossible to use. So today is the practical shape, the actual skeleton of a case that moves someone to a decision. It is not a mystery, and it is not a talent you either have or do not. It is a pattern you can build deliberately, and once you can see it, you will never be able to unsee how many presentations are missing it.
Every story that has ever held a human being has the same three parts underneath it: a setup, a tension, and a resolution. A world as it is, a complication that disrupts it, and a new path that follows. This is as true of a five-minute funding pitch as it is of a novel. Most business communication delivers only the first part, buries the third, and skips the second entirely, which is precisely why most business communication is forgettable.
The three parts, in business terms
Translate the shape into the language of your actual work, and it becomes obvious.
The setup is the context: where things stand, what the audience already knows or believes, the stable picture.
The tension is the complication: the thing that has changed, the problem you have found, the risk that is growing, the gap between where you are and where you need to be. This is the heart of it, the reason anyone should care.
The resolution is your recommendation: the path out of the tension, what you propose to do, and what you need from the room to do it. Setup earns attention, tension creates the need to act, and resolution gives them somewhere to go with that need. Miss anyone and the case collapses.
The scientist and storyteller Randy Olson gave this structure a form you can hold in your head, and it has quietly become a standard in technical communication: And, But, Therefore. The setup is joined by and. The tension is introduced by but. The resolution follows from therefore. It sounds almost too simple until you try it on a real case and feel it snap into shape. Compare two versions of the same finding.
The flat one: our onboarding has several steps, and completion has been tracked for a year, and it varies by channel, and mobile is lower than web. True, and inert. Now the ABT version: our web signups convert well, and the funnel looks healthy, BUT four in ten mobile users abandon at the payment step, which is quietly costing us most of our new mobile revenue. THEREFORE, we should fix the mobile payment flow before the next campaign spends money driving traffic to a broken door.
Same facts. One is a list of things that are true. The other is a case that demands a decision, and the only thing that changed was the structure. The but did the work. It named the thing at stake, and the moment something is at stake, a room wakes up. If you learn one move this week, learn to find the but in your own material, because it is almost always there and almost always buried.
Tension is the engine
This is the part that most technical communicators resist, because tension can feel like drama, and drama feels unserious. But tension is not theatrics. It is simply the gap between how things are and how they should be, stated honestly, and it is the only reason anyone acts. Nobody funds a project, changes a plan, or approves a risk to preserve a situation they are happy with. They act to close a gap. If your presentation has no tension, you are implicitly telling the room that everything is fine, and then asking them to do something about it, which makes no sense to them even if they cannot say why. The most common failure in business storytelling is not too much drama. It is a case built entirely of setup, all context and no complication, an endless and with no buts, that leaves the audience waiting for a reason to care that never arrives.
If the but is the engine, the obvious question is where to find it, and the good news is that a real tension is almost always already sitting in your analysis, waiting to be named. It usually takes one of a few shapes.
There is the growing risk: something is trending the wrong way and will become a problem if nothing changes.
There is the gap: the distance between where you are and where you have committed to be.
There is the change: something in the market, the product or the numbers has shifted, and the old plan no longer fits.
And there is the closing window: an opportunity that is real now and will not be later.
The mistake is to reach for drama you do not have, to manufacture a crisis so people will care. You almost never need to. The tension in honest analysis is real because if there were no gap between how things are and how they should be, you would have nothing worth presenting in the first place. Your job is not to invent tension. It is to find the true one already hiding in your findings, and to state it plainly, in the terms the audience cares about, rather than letting it sit disguised inside a neutral chart where nobody feels it.
How to build your ABT
You can construct this deliberately for any case, in a few minutes, before you open a single slide.
Write the setup: the one or two things the audience already accepts as true, the stable picture you are starting from. Keep it short. Nobody needs convincing of what they already know.
Find the but: the single most important thing that has changed or gone wrong, stated as a consequence the audience cares about. This is your tension. If you have several, pick the one that matters most and lead with it.
Write the therefore: the specific action that resolves the tension, and the decision or support you need to take it.
Read the three lines aloud, in order. If they hold together as a single moving thought, you have your spine. Everything else in the presentation now hangs off it.
Even with the shape in hand, a few habits drain the life out of it.
All setup, no tension: paragraph after paragraph of context, so the audience never learns why any of it matters.
Too many buts: five tensions competing at once, so none of them land, and the room cannot tell what the case is actually about.
A tension that is your problem, not theirs. The complication has to matter to the audience, in their terms, or it is not tension; it is just information.
A missing or buried therefore, so you build real tension and then leave the room anxious with nowhere to go.
Watch the room the next time you deliver a case built this way. Through the setup, they are patient but neutral, giving you the benefit of the doubt. Then you hit the but, the real tension, stated as something they care about, and you will physically see the change: the phone goes down, the eyes come up, someone leans in. That is not charisma. That is structure doing its job, the moment the audience realises something is at stake for them. Once you have felt that shift a few times, you will never again present a finding as a flat list, because you will know exactly where the room woke up and why.
Go out and be successful.
Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights | www.flotogbainsights.com
Tomorrow: Numbers Don't Speak for Themselves
Turning data into meaning: the so-what test, the one chart that carries the case, and making numbers concrete.
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