Your teams are going in different directions.
Who I am and what I do · 11 minutes
- I run 10 free readings a month → book one or email me
- Try it yourself → Drift on WhatsApp (you will be redirected to WhatsApp)
Each is convinced it’s following the same instruction. Your people are listening. They act on what they took from your message. Before your next plan goes out, we show you where your managers and your front line could take it differently from what you meant.
I run 10 complimentary readings a month, as part of my background research for my next special report. Never quoted.
Or run it yourself with Drift on WhatsApp (you will be redirected to WhatsApp)
The CEOs I talk to describe it in three ways
You keep explaining it
You explain the plan in the leadership meeting, then again to sales, then again to operations, each time in a slightly different form. You checked that people understood. You still have to keep explaining, and slowly you become the translation layer between the strategy and the work.
Teams go different ways
The plans are there, people said yes, and the strategy still isn’t being delivered. Nobody changed the direction. Each person carried what they heard, and from where they sit, their version makes sense. You find out when the month closes and the results aren’t there.
The room doesn’t take it away
The board, the review, the all-hands. You walk in fully prepared, the content is right, and still the room doesn’t take away what you meant. Nobody pushes back in the room. The questions come later, in the corridors.
And it isn’t just a few companies. Nearly nine in ten middle managers said their leaders communicated the strategy often enough. Only 55% could name even one of their company’s top five priorities.
What leaders try
When leaders feel this, they look at themselves, thinking they are not clear enough. So they take communication classes, they take speaker coaching. Or they look at their people, push harder, repeat it louder, send people on training. They may even change the structure: a new organisation chart, new processes, new objectives.
Each of these can help, but none of them is enough, because they all assume that when the message is clear, the communication is complete.
That’s why asking “did you understand?” doesn’t help. People answer yes to your words, and you hear a yes to what you meant.
What a reading looks like, on a public message
In October 2026 the BBC’s director general, Matt Brittin, spoke to his staff while the BBC was cutting up to 2,000 jobs.
“A little less conversation, a little more action.”
Read from the top
A call for speed.
Read from the seats of people asking who pays for the cuts
It could sound like “stop asking”.
And that’s how it split. Some staff came out energised. Another insider said, “He mentioned getting smaller several times.”
He may well not have meant it that way. But a reading shows you that split before you speak, not after.
How we work
Drift
Drift shows you, before the plan is sent, how each level could read it differently from what you meant. One managing director has used it more than once, to prepare his meeting with the global CEO and the owners.
The Landing Scan
The Landing Scan shows you afterwards, level by level, what people took from it and what they’re doing differently, so you know where to step in, and how.
CRAFT 91
A programme that runs for one quarter, on three real events you have coming up: Drift first, and a Landing Scan after each one, so you see how each event changed what the organisation actually does.
Leonardo Zangrando
I spent over twenty years in strategy consulting, working with clients such as the BBC, Novartis, Google, Tesco and Salesforce. As an Italian-British working across English, Italian and Spanish-speaking environments, I bring a foreign ear.
When I was nine, my friend Paolo couldn’t follow the maths symbols on the board. I helped him make a picture in his head of how the maths moved, and he got it. He wasn’t the problem. The way it was shown to him simply didn’t match the way he could take it in.
Over the next three years I want to help five hundred leaders check how a decision could be read before they announce it.
The first leader to use Drift used it to work out how to put his plan to his group CFO, and the CFO took up the framing he’d chosen and used it himself. Since then he’s used Drift before every important meeting.
Your Strategy, Made Real
If you have a plan that matters going out in the next few months, a new strategy, a reorganisation, a change of direction, that’s the moment for a reading, before it goes out.
I run 10 complimentary readings a month, as part of my background research for my next special report. Never quoted.
Or run it yourself with Drift on WhatsApp (you will be redirected to WhatsApp)
Clients I have worked with
- BBC
- Novartis
- Tesco
- Salesforce