The Results Narrative: Say What Changed, Not What You Did
You did the work. The migration ran clean, the pipeline's humming, the thing that had been broken for a year finally isn't. So why does it feel like nobody knows?
Here's the miss, and it's one of the most common ones I see in strong people: you describe your work as activity. "I ran the migration. I cleaned up the pipeline. I sat in the reviews." All true. All invisible. Because activity is a to-do list. It tells people what filled your week, not what changed because you were in it.
And the activity version is tempting for a reason. It's true, it's easy, and it's what you actually remember at the end of a long week. You did do all those things. But "what I did" and "what changed" are two different sentences, and only one of them travels. The first one stays on your calendar. The second one shows up in someone else's mouth when your name comes up in a room you're not in.
A result is that second sentence. It's a story with a cause and an effect. "Because we rebuilt the intake flow, first response dropped from three days to four hours." Same week of work. Completely different weight. One tells your manager you were busy. The other tells them you moved a number.
That's the whole tool. The Results Narrative is one sentence, and it has three parts: because of this, that changed, and here's how we know. Cause. Effect. Evidence. If you can say those three things about a piece of work, you can make it land anywhere. A one-on-one, a review, a hallway, a self-assessment you've been dreading.
Try it on something real. Take your last actual win. Not the busiest thing you did, the one that mattered. And force it into the sentence. "Because I blank, blank changed, and here's how we know: blank." Watch where you get stuck. Most people sail through cause and effect and then freeze on the evidence, the "how we know". And that freeze is the most useful moment in the whole exercise.
Because if you can't finish the sentence. If you can't name what changed, or how you'd measure it. That isn't a visibility problem. It's a clarity problem. You did the work and never decided what it was for. And the fix for that isn't louder self-promotion; it's getting clear enough on the outcome that the sentence writes itself.
Do this before your next one-on-one. One win, one sentence. Cause, effect, evidence. Say it out loud, once, so it lives in your mouth and not just your head. The first time is always clumsy. The fifth time is a habit.
Because here's what's true: the work does not narrate itself. Someone is going to tell the story of what you did. In the review, in the promotion conversation, in the room where the decisions actually get made. The only question is whether it's you, in one clean sentence. Or someone else, guessing.
Run the Results Narrative on your last real win. Before somebody else runs it for you.
The Right Altitude Field Guides. One dimension at a time. therightaltitudebook.com/the-field-guides
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