Storytelling for Influence

Content championship carries a specific tension. Content teams do strategic work, structuring information, shaping decisions and reducing risk, but much of the organisation still sees it as tactical. Changing that means constantly asking for trust, time, resources and commitment before the payoff is visible. This tension doesn't resolve. Learning to work within it is what separates initiatives that land and stick from those that quietly disappear.

The difference between those two outcomes isn't the quality of the delivery.

It's storytelling.

Not the TED Talk version, not a performance at a single moment, but a deliberate, ongoing practice of building trust and keeping the work positioned as the answer to what the organisation is already facing.

In this session:

• Unpack the difference between storytelling and storytelling for influence and what this means for content teams.
• Hear a real example of a storytelling practice that shifted a leadership decision in an unexpected direction.
• Use a simple diagnostic, built around four core storytelling capabilities, to reflect on where your team is focused and what might be missing.

This session is designed to be reflective and practical. It's a chance for content leaders, practitioners and their teams to think together about a skill most organisations underrate, and most careers eventually depend on.

About the speaker

Sarah Clearwater - CEO & Founder, Reframr

Sarah founded Reframr to help organisations transform with people at the heart. For over a decade she has worked where ambition meets reality, helping leaders reshape how their organisation makes decisions, so business success doesn't come at the cost of the people or purpose that make it worth pursuing.

One of Aotearoa's foremost customer strategists, Sarah founded the CX Collective, the country's largest network of in-house design and CX leaders. Her work with Deloitte Fast 50 companies, government agencies, technology scale ups and NZ companies with a global remit has been featured in leading industry publications and podcasts, including the Service Design Show, this is HCD and the Touchpoint Journal.

Sarah advises executive teams on human-centred strategy, guest lectures on organisational change and resilience, and designed Storytelling for Influence to help design & customer teams get their work backed by decision makers.