There’s a pattern in strategy work that I keep coming back to. It’s called Fait Accompli (French for “an accomplished fact”). The idea is simple: by the time you walk into the big meeting, the decision should already be made.
You don’t get there by being the smartest person in the room. You get there by doing the work before the work.
The Cold Audience Trap
Here’s what happens when you don’t prepare the room. You schedule a meeting. People show up wondering what you’re going to say. You unveil your strategy. You ask for questions.
And then it happens.
Someone (usually the person with the most to lose or the most threatened by your proposal) launches a question. Not a bad-faith question, necessarily. But a tangential one. A rabbit hole. And suddenly the conversation is about something else entirely. People pile on. The meeting derails. Your proposal gets picked apart or, worse, politely ignored.
You don’t usually get a second shot.
Hewitt calls this a “cold audience” — people who haven’t been prepped, who don’t know what’s coming, and whose first instinct in any meeting is to ask: what’s in it for me?
The Meeting Before the Meeting
The fix is almost boring in its simplicity. You have the meeting before the meeting. Multiple times, with each key stakeholder, individually.
You walk them through your thinking. You ask what they’re not seeing. You ask what they’re working on that could be incorporated. You take notes. You thank them. And then you ask the question that matters: If we incorporate these changes, is this something you can support?
Once they’ve said yes to you privately, they’re extremely unlikely to reverse that publicly.
When the big meeting comes, it’s a formality. You reference their ideas. You credit their contributions. And the room becomes an echo chamber of support. Attacking your proposal means attacking the people in the room who already own pieces of it.
Why This Matters Right Now
I’m in the middle of a major go-live at work. Multiple teams, multiple dependencies, multiple stakeholders who all need to be aligned. The temptation is to build the perfect plan in isolation and then present it like a reveal.
That’s the wrong move.
The right move is to spend the time upfront (before the governance meeting, before the CAB, before the steering committee) lining people up one by one. Not to manipulate them. To genuinely incorporate their perspective so the plan is stronger and they feel ownership of it.
As Hewitt puts it: “Strategy is the art of creating power. If you don’t give them power, they will take yours.”
The Dramatic Structure of a Good Proposal
There’s another pattern in the same chapter that pairs well with Fait Accompli. It’s called Dramatic Structure — borrowed from Aristotle, Hollywood, and every story you’ve ever loved.
Every good story follows the same arc:
- Status quo. This is where we are today. Shared understanding.
- Inciting incident. Something’s wrong. The trend is bad. If we do nothing, we’re in trouble.
- The problem. We can’t stay here. We have to act.
- The battle. It’s hard. The odds are against us. But there’s a way.
- Resolution. Here’s what we build. Here’s the new normal.
Your proposal deck should follow this structure. Not because it’s clever, but because it works. It takes the audience on a journey. It makes them feel the tension before you offer the release.
The next time you’re putting together a strategy deck, try it. Start with where you are. Show the crack in the foundation. Make it hurt. Then show the way out.
What I’m Taking Away
Two things:
Do the prep work. The meeting before the meeting is where decisions actually get made. The big meeting is just where they get ratified.
Tell a story. Facts don’t move people. Stories do. Structure your proposal like a narrative, and you’ll carry the room with you.
The best strategy in the world is worthless if you can’t get buy-in. These two patterns (Fait Accompli and Dramatic Structure) are the tools that turn a good plan into a done deal.