The meeting starts well. The prospective client knows the company, has heard good things and is interested.
Until someone has to say: “Yes, we do that. But our work today is much broader.”
The presentation continues. The team explains the new capabilities, recent projects and problems it can now solve. At the end, the client says: “I had no idea you did all of that too.”
When this conversation keeps happening, it is worth investigating. The company may have evolved faster than the way people understand it.
That gap can also emerge inside the organization. People are unaware of opportunities to work with other departments. Managers struggle to explain new priorities. Professionals look elsewhere for challenges without realizing they could find them right there.
A company evolves in parts
A company can update its strategy without reviewing how it explains its direction. It can develop a new customer value proposition without discussing the behaviors needed to deliver it. It can seek new types of talent while continuing to describe a working experience that no longer reflects its possibilities or demands.
These changes need to come together in the strategic narrative.
It connects the organization’s ambition, the choices needed to achieve it, the culture required, the value offered to customers and the reasons people would want to help build it.
From this common foundation, each audience finds answers to different questions. Customers need to understand the value they can receive. Current employees need to understand the direction, their contribution and their development opportunities. Potential recruits need to assess the opportunity and the experience they will find.
When these explanations drift apart, the organization can look like one company to the market, another to employees and a third to candidates.
In What Does Your Corporate Brand Stand For?, published in Harvard Business Review in 2019, Stephen A. Greyser and Mats Urde present a matrix connecting components of corporate identity, including mission, culture, relationships and promises. The model provides a foundation for investigating where those elements have lost their connection. Our interpretation is that this investigation should also guide a review of the strategic narrative.
Success can also tie a company to its past
Being recognized for a capability is an achievement. The difficulty arises when that recognition becomes too narrow to represent the current business.
A technology company may still be known for its original product, although it now solves broader problems. A manufacturer may be remembered for making components, while its engineering team already helps develop complete solutions.
That perception can affect both the purchase of its services and its ability to attract professionals. Customers stop considering it for certain challenges. Talented people do not imagine building their careers there.
An example appears in Storytelling is a strategic imperative in the age of AI, published in Fast Company’s Executive Board section in 2026. Kody Gurfein, Exiger’s chief marketing officer, describes how the company had expanded its capabilities and acquired businesses, yet old descriptions continued to circulate and influence how people and AI systems understood it. This is an executive’s account of her own organization, a concrete example of change outpacing the public narrative.
The original association has value. It was built through experiences, investments and relationships worth preserving. The challenge is to broaden that understanding, giving people concrete reasons to update their perceptions.
The direction must make sense to the people who will build it
Internally, a change in strategy raises very practical questions.
Why are we investing in this area? What becomes a priority? Which capabilities must we develop? How does a decision affect my team’s work?
Without context, people have to construct their own interpretations. A change may seem temporary. A new expectation may appear inconsistent. Teams may continue working toward priorities that have become less important.
The gap between communicating and understanding appears in research presented in No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders, by Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, published in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2018. In an analysis of 124 organizations, only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for execution could list three of their company’s strategic priorities.
That finding suggests a diagnostic question: beyond broadcasting the strategy, are we checking how it has been understood?
The strategic narrative helps explain the relationship between ambition and present choices. It must also clarify the culture the strategy requires. If a company intends to offer integrated solutions, for example, how will departments need to collaborate? What changes in decisions, responsibilities and recognition of contributions?
In Aligning Strategy and Culture: The Magic Is in the Middle, published in INSEAD Knowledge in April 2026, Charles Galunic emphasizes the need to examine routines, incentives, structures and decisions. His analysis reinforces an important limit: updating the language of values cannot replace creating the conditions for the desired behaviors.
The promise to talent must keep pace with the business
A company’s evolution can create new reasons to work there: more complex challenges, international exposure, new learning opportunities or participation in meaningful projects.
These attributes need to be investigated and expressed in the employee value proposition, or EVP, which underpins employer brand positioning.
In Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition, published in Harvard Business Review in 2023, Mark Mortensen and Amy C. Edmondson propose balancing material conditions with opportunities for growth, connection and community, and meaning and purpose. This perspective broadens the discussion about what a company offers its people and how that experience can remain relevant over time.
A manufacturer developing technology may need to attract professionals who do not yet see it as a career option. An organization seeking greater autonomy and experimentation needs to explain what that means in practice, including what it expects from people.
At the same time, current employees must be able to recognize that proposition in their working experience. Otherwise, recruitment communications create expectations that management will struggle to sustain.
Listening to employees and potential recruits helps reveal both what the organization offers and what it still needs to develop.
How to recognize that your narrative has fallen behind
Some signs deserve attention:
Customers know only part of what the company does. They turn to other suppliers for challenges the company can already address, or need lengthy explanations of its current capabilities.
Teams struggle to connect their work to the strategy. They know their department’s goals but do not understand how those goals contribute to the business’s direction.
The stated culture conflicts with everyday choices. A company asks for collaboration, for example, while retaining practices that encourage competition between departments.
The talent the company wants to attract does not consider it. Real opportunities and challenges receive little attention on its careers website, in job advertisements or in leadership communications.
Each department describes a different organization. Sales, HR, Communications and leaders present messages that are individually plausible but difficult to connect.
These signs call for diagnosis. Difficulty attracting talent may involve pay or working conditions. A commercial barrier may lie in the offer or customer experience. The investigation must identify what communications can help resolve and what requires business decisions.
Immediate managers play a decisive role. Conversations about projects, choices and behaviors, supported by consistent practices, give the organization’s direction meaning for each team.
The review starts before the new presentation
Before searching for a better phrase, listen and examine the evidence.
Leaders help explain the ambition and strategic choices. Teams show how those choices translate into work. Customers reveal the value they recognize. The professionals the company wants to attract help explain what makes an opportunity relevant or unconvincing.
This process must distinguish what already exists from what the organization intends to build.
Ambition has a place in the narrative. So does the desired culture. But it is important to be clear about where we are, where we want to go and the commitments we make to bridge that distance.
A common foundation for different conversations
If the answer requires a long list of qualifications, it may be time to revisit the narrative.
At Smart, we help organizations connect ambition, strategy, culture and value propositions in a narrative that makes sense to their different audiences. Shall we talk about what has changed in your company?
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