Strategic Narrative Feedback Form
The Strategic Narrative Feedback Form is a questionnaire you can use to surface alignment and dissent from an internal team on a draft strategic narrative. It walks executives and stakeholders through agreement-scale questions on problem clarity, audience, pain, solution, uniqueness, and feasibility, plus open-ended prompts, to catch silent disagreement early.
At a Glance
Summary
A questionnaire for surfacing internal alignment and dissent on a draft strategic narrative before it's finalized.
Author
John Rougeux
Last Updated
July 8, 2026
When to Use
Use to solicit feedback from the individuals involved in creating, revising, and approving your strategic narrative, as part of the editing process.
Not Intended For
Do not use for strategic narrative validation with external audiences, such as customers, prospects, or analysts.
Overview
Why Use the Strategic Narrative Feedback Form
While a strategic narrative is a fantastic way to create the backbone for your messaging, its highest calling is as a tool to align your executive team on its strategy. Stories (narratives) are simply more effective ways of communicating meaning than slide decks. However, one of the biggest risks with this work is the "silent dissent": an executive nods in agreement, yet in the following weeks, his colleagues find out what he really felt. He didn't like it, and doesn't believe in it. What the executive team put so much effort into "building alignment" around soon becomes scuttled. That dissent should have been surfaced during the process itself, and that's why this form exists. While some executives are more than comfortable sharing why a strategic narrative draft sounds dumb, weak, far-fetched (or pick any other adjective you like), some are less forthcoming. And still, others may benefit from the chance to think things through and write down their thoughts before vocalizing them. This form provides that space.
How the Strategic Narrative Feedback Form Is Structured
The form revisits the core principles of what makes a good strategic narrative. It must:
- Address a meaningful and unsolved problem
- Clarify who this problem is being solved for
- Make a case for why this problem causes significant pain
- Provide the broad strokes of what the solution should be
- Feel exciting, captivating, and inspiring
- Be unique: not something a competitor could easily imitate
- Be achievable (pipe dreams don't hold up well)
The form walks the reader through a series of questions that surface the extent to which they agree or disagree that the narrative meets these criteria. There are some open-ended questions at the end to allow for additional feedback.
Application Principles
This form is most useful when completed by a group. The gold can be found where rogue opinions surface: someone doesn't think the narrative is defensible, it's not clear enough about the problem it's solving, and so on. Dissenting opinions are not to be overlooked; they are the fodder for further discussion. If used wisely, the process can make the resulting strategic narrative far stronger.
Common Misapplications
Do not use this form to solicit feedback from people who don't understand the business or its strategy. A strategic narrative is designed to capture a broader exercise in thinking about strategy; asking someone without that context for their feedback may only result in misleading responses.