NCTs are a framework alternative to ever-popular OKRs (Objectives, Key Results) for Organizational Management. I personally prefer NCTs over OKRs because the narrative emphasis keeps people accountable to the spirit of the law, and not just the letter. I also prefer NCTs because they are, by nature, companywide and cross-disciplinary.

This is not a knock on the legendary Andy Grove, the creator of OKRs, and I also highly recommend his books High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive (even if he did back CISC over RISC, the right decision at the time, and yet a long-term mistake, which is an important footnote on strategic inflection points), but I view NCTs as a more modern and universally relevant framework.

NCTs stand for:

• N = Narratives: These are the core stories we tell to keep everybody on the same page regarding the spirit of the goals, not just the goals themselves. Incentivizing tasks in isolation of the the bigger picture frequently results in perverse incentives. For example, if you incentivize top-of-funnel leads without discretion, you’ll get low-quality leads at best. Narratives keeps people accountable to the bigger picture. These should be very high-level, so try to have no more more than four Narratives for any given employee at any given time, and try to make all Narratives customer-focused. Narratives can be focused on product, customer experience, sales, and even analytics.

  • These are the kinds of outcomes you don’t want:

    

• C = Commitments: These are the broader commitments we will make to support the Narratives. So, we want to grow sales… exactly how do we plan on doing that? For one client this process started with a commitment to re-evaluate ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles), which then progressed through to product, through development, through marketing, through sales. Etc. This is part of the reason NCTs are so powerful.

• T = Tasks: These are the tangible tasks that support the commitments, which are given to individuals or teams. They are meant to be granular, but are not meant to be a step-by-step implementation guide of whatever the task is. Perhaps a sales page needs a pricing calculator. There should be multiple tasks for development, whomever handles copywriting, and etc. for that project, but only one per person or team who will make it happen. Let each person or team create their own sub-tasks, if needed.