The case for communicating impact, and a method for doing it

A few years ago, I stood on a stage as a Managing Director at a FTSE 250 media business and spoke to around five hundred assembled employees. My mission was to bring strategy to life. I was told afterwards that I was the only person in the C-suite level who had communicated in a way that actually connected with colleagues on the front lines.

The business was obsessed with spreadsheets and growth levers, going through significant change. What connected with the room was a clear line between what was happening in the business and its impact - what it meant for the people in it. Leaders loved talking about numbers, but I put them into an impact narrative. It was a skill I’d spent twenty years developing in newsrooms; I used it almost subconsciously throughout my time as a corporate leader, and now it’s a very conscious part of my consultancy practice.

So with that begins a series of pieces examining how to bring that skill across a range of business scenarios.

Storytelling with impact, or communicating impact?

There’s a distinction between the two which shapes everything that follows. You can do the first, yet miss out the second. You need to do both!

When most people talk about storytelling in business, they mean making your message land with more force. They’ll help you with better structure, sharper language, and a memorable soundbite or two. That’s all useful and important, but I’m getting at something extra.

Impact Storytelling, as I call it, means communicating impact: translating the value of what you do into terms your audience can measure and act on. It’s less about how you tell the story and more about what the story is made of.

If you want investment, you need to show what the investment produces. If you want to sell, you need to show what changes for the client. If you want to motivate a team, you need to connect their daily work to something that matters beyond the immediate task.

Impact is the engine room of business transformation. Leaders who can articulate it fluently, turning numbers into narrative, are the ones who get things funded, built and followed.

A method in miniature

The approach I use across this series is simple, and I found an echo of it in Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s No Rules Rules, the book about Netflix’s culture. Hastings talks about giving people the context they need to make big bets confidently: instead of waiting for approval, making the logic clear enough that the decision makes itself.

Which is exactly what a good impact argument does.

Find the number your audience cares about. Express your intervention in those terms. Then show the threshold: not what your initiative will deliver (promises, promises…), but what it needs to deliver for the investment to make sense. Make that bar visible, to allow your audience judge whether it’s achievable or not.

Five areas for Impact Storytelling

This series covers five areas where that method applies:

Financial impact: turning a training budget into a revenue argument that survives Procurement.

Efficiency and speed: showing a CFO what saved time is actually worth, and showing an operations director what it makes possible.

People and culture: pricing the cost of disengagement before you make the case for fixing it.

Risk and resilience: calculating what a single failure costs before you argue for the programme that prevents it.

Societal impact: following the cascade from clean floors in Rwandan villages to the compounding benefits that improve life in the whole community.

They’re very different audiences, and different numbers matter in each scenario, but discipline and methodology are largely the same.

What’s the impact for you?

What’s the impact case you’re struggling to land? Is it a proposal that keeps stalling, a programme which finance won’t fund, a transformation that leadership can see but can’t yet justify with a budget?

That’s where Impact Storytelling helps with the argument you may not have been able to make yet.

I spent twenty years in senior leadership roles at Sky, ITV, NBC News and Future Plc before becoming a Positive Momentum consultant, where I help organisations across financial services, sustainability and technology with strategy, storytelling and change. Impact Storytelling sits at the centre of that work.