Moments of Impact

Have you ever walked out of a high-stakes meeting thinking, “Well, that could have been an email”? In Moments of Impact, authors Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon argue that the problem isn’t meetings—it’s how we design them. They contend that most leaders treat every critical gathering as just another meeting, instead of what it should be: a strategic conversation—an intentionally designed, emotionally engaging experience that helps people see and solve the most pressing adaptive challenges of their time.

The authors’ central claim is simple but transformative: strategic conversations are the key leadership skill almost no one is taught but everyone desperately needs. When executed well, these conversations spark insight, create shared understanding, and propel meaningful change. Done poorly, they drain energy, confuse teams, and stall innovation. The book offers a complete guide to designing strategic conversations—combining the logic of strategy, the empathy of design, and the collaboration of great dialogue.

Why Strategic Conversations Matter

Ertel and Solomon ground their framework in the realities of what they call VUCA World: an environment defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In this context, traditional approaches—five-year plans, rigid hierarchies, and endless PowerPoint decks—fail to make sense of change. Adaptive challenges can’t be solved by analysis alone; they demand creativity, empathy, and collaboration. Strategic conversations are where this happens: leaders and teams come together to understand challenges, explore uncharted possibilities, and commit to action.

The Core Argument: Designing for Impact

The book asserts that designing conversations requires rethinking not just what is discussed but how people engage. Strategic conversations are not about reporting or defending plans; they are about discovery, co-creation, and emotional connection. The authors insist these events are designed experiences—complete with a purpose, rhythm, emotional arc, and physical environment that mirrors the creative challenges being tackled.

To achieve those moments of impact—when insight shifts perception—leaders must embrace design thinking. That means empathizing with participants’ perspectives, creating experiences that engage the whole person, and using storytelling, visuals, and structure to shape how people think and feel about complex issues.

VUCA and the Need for Adaptive Leadership

Building on Ronald Heifetz’s concept of adaptive leadership, the authors differentiate between technical challenges (which have known solutions) and adaptive challenges (which require learning and collaboration). Most organizations mistakenly treat the latter as simple problems solvable by expertise. Ertel and Solomon call for a mindset shift: rather than offering all the answers, leaders must create conditions for groups to explore new possibilities together. That’s the role of a strategic conversation.

Five Core Principles for Designing Strategic Conversations

The authors outline five design principles, each with specific practices that transform ordinary meetings into experiences of insight and action:

• Define Your Purpose: Every conversation serves one of three purposes—Building Understanding, Shaping Choices, or Making Decisions. Pick one and design accordingly.
• Engage Multiple Perspectives: Diverse voices challenge groupthink and bring the organization’s full intelligence into the room.
• Frame the Issues: Use clear questions, metaphors, and visuals to focus the dialogue and surface hidden assumptions.
• Set the Scene: The environment shapes behavior—so design the space, visuals, and flow to encourage collaboration and creativity.
• Make It an Experience: Go beyond the agenda to create a narrative journey that engages minds, hearts, and guts.

Stories That Illustrate Transformation

Each principle is brought to life through powerful examples. When Kaaren Hanson at Intuit used a mobile scavenger hunt to help executives feel the future of mobile technology firsthand, the exercise catalyzed real strategic alignment—and led to a multimillion-dollar shift in company focus. Similarly, when the De La Salle Christian Brothers in Australia faced declining membership, a film and simulation exercise helped them face uncomfortable truths and redesign their mission for the future. In both cases, the experience—not a presentation—changed minds and spurred collective action.

When Things Go Wrong

But even powerful tools can fail. The authors warn about the “Yabbuts”—organizational forces that derail progress: politics (who wins or loses power), near-termism (the obsession with immediate results), and the karaoke curse (overconfidence without real skill). Navigating these traps requires courage, empathy, and deliberate design. When handled well, leaders replace the destructive “doom loop” of denial and inaction with a “hope loop,” where shared experiences create momentum and belief in change.

A Leadership Blueprint for the Future

Ultimately, Moments of Impact teaches that designing strategic conversations is not just a facilitation skill—it’s a leadership imperative. In an era when no one person can know all the answers, the leader’s job is to design the conversations that discover them. By combining logic, empathy, and creativity, you can create the conditions where insight happens—and those moments of impact will shape the future of your organization.

Ertel and Solomon start with a deceptively simple truth: every strategic conversation must have a single, unambiguous purpose. They outline three—and only three—reasons to gather people for a high-stakes discussion: Building Understanding, Shaping Choices, or Making Decisions. Choosing more than one guarantees confusion and frustration.

Building Understanding

This first stage is ideal when people don’t share the same facts, perspectives, or vocabulary. The goal is collective learning—not action yet. Consider the publishing executives facing e-books and Amazon’s disruption. If they leap straight to strategy before understanding reader behavior and business model shifts, they’ll only recycle old thinking. A Building Understanding session surfaces shared insights and creates a learning foundation before decisions are made.

Shaping Choices

Once understanding is in place, it’s time to turn “fuzzy issues” into clear options. The authors showcase Toyota Financial Services (TFS), where Ann Bybee and CEO George Borst gathered their top fifty leaders to rethink the company’s business model. Using the “Business Model Generation Canvas” (by Alexander Osterwalder), teams built and tested full-fledged strategic options. This exercise transformed abstract debates into tangible scenarios—fueling alignment and creativity.

Making Decisions

Decision sessions are rare, and for good reason: in most organizations, big calls are made by small core groups, not open forums. Still, when the first two types are done well, decisions often follow naturally. Ertel and Solomon suggest thinking of each conversation as part of a broader process rather than a one-day solution. Great facilitation helps people slow down before speeding up—resisting premature closure in favor of better outcomes later.

The Power of Clarity

When you clearly define your purpose, everyone knows what success looks like. It prevents aimless data downloads, premature decision-making, or defensive posturing. In today’s rush for results, learning to “go slow to go fast” is a radical act of leadership. When the group achieves that shared “aha” before action, you bypass shallow alignment and instead build commitment that endures.

Groupthink is the enemy of breakthrough strategy. The authors emphasize that you don’t get good ideas without friction—and friction needs diversity. Engaging multiple perspectives ensures creative tension, challenge, and ultimately, better decisions. This principle draws from research by Irving Janis on groupthink and sociologist Ronald Burt’s work on social networks (which shows innovation thrives when ideas jump between 'structural holes’ in organizations).

Building a Dream Team, Not a Must-Invite List

Most leaders fill the room with the “usual suspects”—sponsors, experts, doers, and veto powers. Ertel and Solomon challenge this approach. Instead, form a dream team that balances insiders (with institutional knowledge) and outsiders (with fresh perspective). Eamonn Kelly’s “Gives and Gets Game” at Scottish Enterprise revealed how different teams viewed collaboration—each believed they gave more than they received. The exercise broke open defensive silos and built shared accountability.

Creating a Common Platform

Even diverse groups fail without a sense of shared purpose and trust. That’s why black-belt facilitators create a common platform by clarifying eight “planks”: shared objectives, urgency, language, community, and understanding of challenges. Andrew Blau’s arts-education session, where seasoned colleagues shared their childhood inspirations for the arts, reconnected them emotionally before tackling resource conflicts. Common humanity softened political edges.

Igniting Controlled Burns

Avoiding conflict kills creativity. So does pure debate. The authors advocate orchestrating a “controlled burn”—structured tension that sparks insight without chaos. Eight tactics include turning challenges into games, using external perspectives, or forcing tough trade-offs. Neil Grimmer’s Baby Food Fight at Plum Organics—where his board role-played as competitors trying to beat their own company—perfectly captured this. The experience raised urgency, deepened empathy, and revealed blind spots intellectually and emotionally.

Listen Like You Give a Damn

Perhaps the most underrated design tool is listening. Expert facilitators conduct deep pre-session interviews, not to extract data but to understand stories, anxieties, and aspirations. That empathy shapes design decisions that make participants feel seen. When people feel heard, they engage. In a VUCA world, empathy is strategy.

Framing determines what people see—and what they miss. The authors liken frames to camera lenses: they focus attention and filter information. Poor framing leads to confusion, bias, or paralysis; smart framing accelerates clarity and creativity. The key? Stretch current mental models without breaking them.

Stretch, Don’t Break Mind-Sets

Pierre Wack, Shell’s scenario-planning pioneer, learned this lesson the hard way. His first attempts at scenario planning fell flat until he tailored stories to match his managers’ mental models—expanding rather than confronting their assumptions. Ertel and Solomon recommend pre-interviews and test frames to ensure resonance while introducing fresh perspectives. Effective frames provoke curiosity, not resistance.

Think Inside Different Boxes

“Think outside the box” is overrated. The authors advise offering new boxes—structured creative constraints—to inspire ideas. For instance, designers at a retail chain reimagined their company’s logo as if they were Google or Starbucks, prompting disruptive business-model thinking. Constraints, paradoxically, free creativity.

Choose a Few Key Frames

Too many frameworks create confusion (what the authors call “Frameworkpalooza”). Stick to two or three powerful frames: a focal question, a metaphor, or a visual model. The Nueva School’s decision to frame its expansion question as “Should we build a high school?” rather than “Could we?” turned a logistical debate into a moral visioning exercise about the future of education itself.

Turn Issues into Visual Stories

Visual metaphors like Hagerty Insurance’s “Future of Collecting” matrix or the “Drip and Avalanche” frame for digital video markets help groups literally see the landscape. Good framing turns confusion into collective meaning-making. After all, strategy isn’t about finding the truth—it’s about finding the frame that helps people move forward together.

The physical and psychological environment dictates how people behave. Corey Ford of Matter Ventures says it best: “The impact of space is huge—but it’s the most overlooked tool in influencing behavior.” The authors treat setting the scene as part science, part theater—one that activates creativity and collaboration.

Make Your Space

Good design begins with the 'shell space': flexible, open, filled with natural light, and adaptable to tasks. At Amway, Darcy Draft replaced sterile hotel tables with sofas and themed corners—a café, a studio, and a theater—to immerse leaders in creative learning. The result? Skeptical participants became curious collaborators. Flexibility turns rooms into catalysts for imagination.

Get Visual

Humans remember images far better than words (known as the 'pictorial superiority effect'). Visuals help everyone see the same thing at the same time. Gervais Tompkin’s weeklong 'charrette' at Gensler used live sketches, floor maps, and storyboards to help global executives co-create office design principles in real time. Pictures kept alignment tight and decision fatigue low.

Do Sweat the Small Stuff

From room temperature to snack timing, details make or break a session. The Israeli parole board study cited in the book showed that hunger alone can alter judgment outcomes by 65%. Apply that insight to tired executives and you’ll appreciate the authors’ obsession with food, music, and comfort. These small touches signal respect and create the psychological safety creativity needs.

Design to Delight

Great sessions charm the senses. Background music, tactile props, coffee smells—all prime participants for open thinking. As in architecture or gastronomy, delight lives in the details. When the space says 'you matter,' people show up as their best selves.

If people forget most meetings within days, how can you design one they’ll still talk about years later? By turning it into an experience. Ertel and Solomon assert that an agenda is not an experience—real impact comes when participants feel, not just think, their way to insight.

Discover, Don’t Tell

Lectures fail because they overload working memory. Experiential learning, on the other hand, sticks. When Intuit launched its 'mobile scavenger hunt,' executives didn’t listen to mobile-industry stats—they lived them. Racing around Half Moon Bay using smartphone apps revealed the technology’s everyday power. That shared experience later drove $70 million in annual mobile revenue growth. Discovery beats explanation.

Engage the Whole Person

Logic alone doesn’t drive change. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s famous patient studies showed that emotion is essential for sound decision-making. Strategic conversations must engage the head and the heart. The Christian Brothers’ workshop on their order’s decline blended sorrow and hope—using a heartbreaking documentary and a simulation game. The emotional arc created catharsis and courage, leading to a renewal of mission and lay leadership.

Create a Narrative Arc

Like powerful stories, great sessions have a rhythm: tension, climax, and resolution. Borrowing from drama theory (Freytag’s pyramid), the authors show how to pace content for psychological engagement. A good experience alternates between learning and emotion, reflection and action—just as DJ sets or films modulate energy. The goal isn’t constant positivity; tension fuels insight, and resolution anchors it.

From Memory to Movement

As Jeanne Liedtka notes, 'Strategy as experienced' requires personal meaning. Memorable experiences form not just memories but desires—to act, to change, to lead. That’s the ultimate test: not whether people enjoyed the session but whether it compels them to do something different tomorrow.

Every organization has its skeptics who say, “Yeah, but this would never work here.” Ertel and Solomon call them the 'Yabbuts,' and they usually come in three varieties: politics, near-termism, and the karaoke curse. Each subtly undermines progress if left unchecked.

Politics

Borrowing from primatologist Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics, the authors remind us that coalition-building and power plays are as ancient as our DNA. Every strategic conversation sits atop an invisible web of alliances and fears. Art Kleiner’s idea of the 'core group'—the real decision-making circle—shows that authority rarely matches the org chart. Powerful conversations surface political undercurrents early and turn “bad politics” (self-interest) into “good politics” (shared purpose).

Near-Termism

The second yabbut prioritizes today’s metrics over tomorrow’s strategy. The MySpace vs. Facebook story illustrates this vividly: MySpace chased ad revenue; Facebook invested in delighting users. Only one survived. Behavioral economics calls this bias temporal discounting—the tendency to value immediate rewards. Leaders must reframe time horizons to emphasize long-term opportunity over short-term pressure.

The Karaoke Curse

Some leaders think they’re strategic thinkers when they’re just singing someone else’s tune. True strategic thinking, scholar Ellen Goldman shows, takes years of deliberate practice. It requires systems thinking, pattern recognition, hypothesis testing, and synthesis. Don’t assume every executive is a strategist—help them build the skill through experience and mentorship.

Breaking the Doom Loop

Politics, near-termism, and poor strategic thinking reinforce each other in a self-destructive 'doom loop.' Encyclopaedia Britannica’s fall to Microsoft’s Encarta encapsulates it: fear of change, internal resistance, and short-term profit motives blinded them to disruption. Transformative leaders replace this doom loop with a 'hope loop'—aligning shared purpose to courage and creativity. The antidote to every yabbut is a well-designed conversation.

In short, the yabbuts represent human nature in organizational form. You can’t eliminate them—but with design, empathy, and persistence, you can keep them from running the show.

The book closes with a call to leadership. Designing strategic conversations isn’t just facilitation—it’s stewardship of an organization’s most precious resource: belief in the future. Ertel and Solomon argue that good strategy conversations create hope loops—chains of confidence, clarity, and collaboration that liberate creativity.

From Impact Investing to Intuit

At the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio retreat, 41 global leaders in impact investing built a shared vocabulary and network that later birthed the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). Similarly, Intuit’s executives left their mobile scavenger hunt not just informed but inspired. In both stories, people moved from data to desire—from thinking to acting—because the experience created emotional ownership.

The Hope Loop

Strategic conversations can create positive feedback loops. When people see progress, they gain confidence; confidence fosters collaboration; collaboration generates new success—and the loop continues. Like Pierre Wack’s “gentle re-perceiving,” hope emerges as a design outcome, not a byproduct.

Leadership Courage

Real transformation demands courage: to push back against the 'Yabbuts,' to slow down when others rush, to design experiences that invite vulnerability. Leaders must listen before leading, risk emotion over detachment, and design before dictating. As the authors note, once you’ve experienced a great strategic conversation, there’s no going back—you’re changed.

In a world of volatility and noise, Moments of Impact offers a clear leadership mantra: If you can design the right conversation, you can change everything.