She came into every conversation with her CEO ready.
Clear recommendation. Well-reasoned argument. Specific ask. The kind of preparation that signals you take the work seriously. And she did, every time, without exception.
The response was always the same. Polite. Engaged. And then nothing moved.
When we started working together, she was frustrated in the way smart executives get frustrated when effort stops producing results. She'd done everything right. The ideas were sound. The room was capable. Her CEO wasn't dismissing her. He was listening, nodding, and then going back to doing what he'd already decided to do.
It took a few conversations to see it clearly. The problem wasn't her thinking. It wasn't her relationship with her CEO. It wasn't even the ideas.
It was her sequencing. She was starting at step three.
Most executives never quite realize that making a case and building influence are not the same thing. We treat them as if they are. The entire professional toolkit, structured reasoning, data, slide decks, well-formed recommendations, is built around the assumption that a good argument moves people.
It doesn't. Not on its own.
A case that lands on an unprepared mental model slides off. It doesn't matter how sound the reasoning is. If the other person is operating from a different set of assumptions about the problem, your argument is answering a question they're not asking. You've made a case. You haven't shifted anything.
Influence happens one step earlier, in the reframe. In the moment when someone sees the problem differently than they did before you walked in. That shift is what makes your case possible. It gives your recommendation somewhere to land. Without it, you are pushing against a mental model that was never going to move.
And you can only reframe what you understand. That is where the questions come in, not to gather information, but to map the starting point. What does the other person actually believe about this problem? What assumptions are they carrying that you haven't surfaced yet? You can't move someone from a place you don't understand.
She wasn't asking those questions. She was walking in with the answer before she knew the question her CEO was really sitting with.
The sequence is three steps. They only work in order.
Start by understanding the mental model. Before you propose anything, spend time mapping how the other person is actually thinking about the problem, not the facts they know but the frame they're using to interpret them. Ask questions that surface assumptions. "How are you thinking about this right now?" goes further than most executives expect. Listen for what they believe, not just what they know.
Then reframe. Once you understand the starting point, you can shift it. This doesn't mean a grand reveal or a dramatic pivot. It is often a single observation, a recontextualized fact, or a question that makes the current frame feel insufficient. When the mental model moves, even slightly, the conversation changes. You are no longer pushing against the existing view; you are working with a new one.
Then make your case. Now your recommendation has somewhere to land. You are not fighting the assumptions in the room, you have already moved them. The same argument that slid off before now connects, because the ground beneath it is different.
She changed her sequence. The ideas didn't change. The CEO didn't change. What changed was that she stopped arriving at step three before she'd done the first two.
The argument was never the problem. It was always the preparation the argument needs to work.
Until next week,
Kendall -
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