Selling Something You Haven’t Built Yet

Vietnam and Sydney, 2022. I’ve just been made Chief Change Officer of a 400-person digital agency, reporting directly to the CEO and chairing the top management team. On paper, that’s influence. In the room, on day one, it’s nothing. Nobody in that top team asked for a change officer. Most of them are wondering what I’m going to break.

Here’s what almost every leadership book gets wrong about “selling the vision”: it makes it sound like a pitch you give once, brilliantly, and then everyone’s on board. In reality, it’s a hundred small, unglamorous moments — restructuring how the top team runs its weekly meeting so it stops being status-update theatre and becomes where decisions actually get made. That was the real first move. Not the big rollout plan. A better meeting.

You sell a vision; one instance of this actually works better at a time. The big rollout plan came after — the tactics, the sequencing, the stakeholder map. But nobody trusts the map from someone who hasn’t proven they can read a room first.

By the time the plan existed, I didn’t need to sell it. The team that’d sat through six months of noticeably better meetings had already half-built it with me.

Which raises the question I keep coming back to: if selling the vision is really just proving small trust, over and over, why do so many leaders skip straight to the big speech?