Reframe at every boundary

While working to optimise an Exec team, I ran workshops with junior managers to discover how well Exec was serving their needs. One question opened prompted a unanimous. The question was: what do you know isn’t working, but persists despite upwards reporting?

The story? A rationalisation of the fleet, agreed at last year’s budget, had left fewer cars available for the service teams to get out to clients. Often they discovered at the last minute that there’d be no car for them and they’d need to hire. But they couldn’t get a vehicle they could afford, so they had to cancel client visits.

Everyone in at the pointy end of the organisation knew this story. They had faithfully passed data upwards for the Board reporting:

• Pulse surveys showing stress rising in the service team

• The services dashboard showing delivery below KPI

• One budget line a few percent over, with a note: ‘car hire expenses’

But a board member reading that report in busy meeting will do what we always do with data: fit it into the story they’re already holding. At board level, there are two story frames for information: is there a crisis, and are we heading in the right direction? Three small variances, none of them bright red, don’t trigger either. It isn’t a failure of attention but sensemaking working as designed.

But the story that connected those three numbers – the one that would have enabled a resolution at the Board – never made its way up.

Without the story, three small variances are just three small variances. It’s easy to say ‘well, it should have’ – but that’s blame culture and not particularly useful.

The NFP Stack helps makes better sense of this. (If the Stack is new to you, the first article in this series gives the overview.)

How sensemaking works at each layer

People don’t make sense of data in the abstract. They make sense of it through the frame that tells them what to look for, what matters, and what to do next. This isn’t a cognitive shortcut or a bias to correct; it’s how sensemaking works. Each layer has a coherent story that shapes what it notices.

At the Continuous layer, the story is operational: what’s in the way today, what’s consuming time, what needs to move before tomorrow. At the Operational layer, the story is about delivery: are we on track, what needs adjusting, what’s the quarter looking like. At the Strategic layer, the story is directional: where are we going, is anything threatening the path, are we facing a decision point?

These are different stories, running at different speeds, looking for different signals. A small budget variance reads differently depending on which story you’re in. At Continuous, it’s a daily scramble with real consequences for real clients. At Strategic, it’s a number below the threshold that triggers concern.

Neither reading is wrong. They’re just shaped by different stories – and the stories don’t automatically translate as they cross the boundary.

What needs to travel upward

This is where the Stack makes the problem visible. Every boundary between layers is a translation point. Data passes through boundaries reasonably well – numbers are numbers. What doesn’t pass through automatically is the narrative that gives the data meaning at the receiving layer.

The car story would have enabled the board to make sense of those three variances in a completely different way. Not because the board is incapable of connecting dots, but because they didn’t have the story that showed the dots were connected. Once you have the narrative the data clicks into place immediately. Our cost saving is actually costing us, when viewed wholistically.

The same problem runs downward. A board decision framed at Strategic level – invest in digital capability, tighten financial parameters, shift service model – carries its own story. But that story has to travel through Operational and arrive at Continuous in a form that enables sensemaking at that layer too. Without intentional retelling at each boundary, what arrives is the original language, stripped of the framing that made it coherent. ‘We are building digital capability across the organisation’ reaches the Continuous layer as ‘IT are coming to install something on Thursday.’ The Board’s story is gone. Nobody knows it’s gone.

Designing the translation moment

The fix isn’t more data but specific moments where the story frame is explicitly redesigned when information crosses a boundary.

The question I use with teams – what problems feel persistent, what messages do you keep sending that don’t seem to arrive – is one version of this. It asks the Continuous layer to tell its story in plain language, before the formal reporting system strips the narrative out. The car story came out of exactly that moment. Once told, it was obvious. It had just never been asked for.

Going the other direction, the equivalent question is: if this decision lands at the frontline tomorrow, what story will people tell about what it means for their work? Following that thread down through the layers shows where the narrative has dissolved into instructions that no longer connect to the original intent.

Translation moments don’t happen by accident, and they won’t happen consistently unless someone owns them. In the Stack, that ownership sits at each boundary. The executive team owns the translation between Operational and Continuous – their job includes ensuring that what travels between those layers makes sense in both directions. The CEO owns the Strategic/Operational boundary – translating board direction into organisational action, and translating operational reality into strategic intelligence.

That gives the board, and the Chair specifically, a concrete watching brief: not to manage the translation themselves, but to notice when it isn’t happening. Board papers that are consistently data-rich but story-poor are a signal. A CEO who reports activity without connecting it to strategic direction is a signal. The board’s role isn’t to fix the translation – it’s to name that something is missing and create the conditions for it to be addressed.

What the Stack makes visible

The Stack shows the challenge of translation, and removes blame from the diagnosis.

With the Stack, you can see that all three signals came from the same layer, shaped by the same underlying story – and that the boundary between Continuous and Operational is where that story should have been translated upward. It wasn’t, because no one had designed that translation moment or assigned accountability for it.

In the next article I’ll look at a different boundary failure: what happens when the layers are working and the stories are being told, but a cadence mismatch hinders responses.

First published in Strategy, Applied.