Communicating with Influence

Communicating with Influence

Communicating with Influence

Opening Scenario

Fatou is the executive director of a women's cooperative in Dakar, Senegal. The cooperative has 340 members and runs three revenue-generating programs. Fatou has been invited to speak at a regional development conference — 8 minutes, 200 attendees, potential funders in the room.

She knows what she wants to say. She knows the work deeply. But when she sits down to prepare, she faces a blank page and a familiar dread. She has spoken in community meetings her whole life — those feel natural. This feels different. More formal. Higher stakes. She is worried she will say too much, or too little, or that her accent will be distracting, or that she will look like she does not belong at a conference with people who went to graduate school.

Fatou's problem is not what she knows. It is how she frames it. This module gives her — and you — the tools to communicate in a way that moves people to feel and act, not just to understand.

The power of the spoken word is the most ancient technology of African leadership. The griot does not merely preserve the past — the griot shapes the future through the stories the community tells about itself.

— Adapted from Senghor and the West African griot tradition

The African Oral Tradition: The Leadership Communication Foundation

Before the dominance of written communication, African societies developed extraordinarily sophisticated oral communication systems — not as a deficit but as a deliberate choice about how knowledge, history, and authority are transmitted.

The griot tradition of West Africa institutionalized this sophistication. The griot — jeli in Mande-speaking societies, gewel among the Wolof of Senegal — was not merely a storyteller. The griot was the community's living library, political advisor, conflict mediator, and motivational speaker combined. A skilled griot could resolve a dispute between two families, inspire warriors before battle, or publicly shame a leader whose conduct violated community values — all through the precision and power of spoken word.

The elements of griotic communication are the elements of all great leadership communication:

Narrative — truth conveyed through story, not argument. Facts presented as evidence within a narrative arc that carries the audience from where they are to where the speaker wants them to go.

Call and response — communication as dialogue rather than monologue. The griot reads the audience and adjusts in real time. Great leaders do the same.

Ancestral reference — grounding the present in history gives both credibility and meaning. When a leader references the lineage of a problem or a solution, it signals depth and seriousness.

Rhythm and repetition — the most important messages are said more than once, in varied ways. This is not repetition as redundancy but as emphasis.

When Fatou stands before those 200 conference attendees, she is not a woman speaking from a deficit of Western communication training. She is a descendant of a communication tradition older and more sophisticated than PowerPoint. This module helps her access and apply that tradition.

The Know / Feel / Do Framework

Every effective communication — a speech, a meeting, a one-on-one conversation, a written message — has three outcomes it is trying to produce:

Know: what specific information do you want the audience to take away? Not everything you know about the topic — one specific thing. Fatou's 'know': the cooperative has 340 women in Dakar who have increased household income by an average of 35% over three years through three specific programs.

Feel: what emotion do you want the audience to feel? Not a vague positive feeling — a specific emotional state. Fatou's 'feel': these women are not recipients of charity. They are entrepreneurs whose investment opportunity is being offered to the room, not extended to them.

Do: what specific action do you want the audience to take? Fatou's 'do': schedule a meeting with me after this session to discuss a partnership that could expand this model to two additional regions.

The mistake most communicators make: they focus almost entirely on 'Know' — conveying information — and neglect 'Feel' and 'Do.' But people act from emotion, not information. The person who leaves your presentation with three new facts is far less useful to you than the person who leaves with one fact and a strong feeling that compels them to act.

The Know/Feel/Do framework forces clarity before you write a single word. When Fatou fills it in for her 8-minute talk, she realizes she has been trying to convey 15 'knows.' The framework tells her to pick one and make it unforgettable.

Structuring a Message That Moves

Once you know your Know/Feel/Do, structure your message in three parts:

Part 1 — The Hook (30 seconds): open with something that stops people from thinking about what they were just thinking about. A question. A statistic that is surprising. A specific person's story. The worst opening: 'Thank you for having me. Today I will talk about...' The best opening: a story, an image, or a fact that already contains your central message.

Part 2 — The Case (70% of your time): build toward your 'know' through narrative, evidence, and specificity. Not 'our program helps women' but 'Aissatou joined the cooperative three years ago with 5,000 CFA francs. Today she leads a team of four women selling shea products in three West African markets. This is not an exceptional story. In our cooperative, it is the pattern.' One real story, told specifically, is worth a hundred statistics.

Part 3 — The Call (10-15% of your time): land the 'feel' and deliver the 'do.' Bring the emotional tone to its peak — this is the moment that should make the audience lean forward — and then give them the clearest possible action. Make the action specific, easy, and low-friction. 'If this interests you, find me after the session — I have 15 minutes set aside for conversations.'

Storytelling as Leadership Technology

The neuroscience of storytelling is now extensive: when we hear a story — rather than a list of facts — our brain activity mirrors the storyteller's. We experience the events of the story ourselves, emotionally. This is called narrative transportation, and it is the mechanism by which stories change minds and motivate action in ways that arguments rarely do.

African leadership has known this for millennia. The griot's stories did not merely entertain — they installed values, resolved conflicts, and shaped collective identity. Maathai planted trees because she had grown up hearing stories about the fig tree her family called sacred. Nelson Mandela's capacity to hold together a fragile post-apartheid South Africa drew heavily on his ability to tell a story about shared possibility that was more compelling than the story of division.

Structuring a leadership story: the simplest story structure is also the most effective — Sometimes / But / So / Now:

Sometimes: the situation as it was / as it normally is ('Before our cooperative, women in our neighborhood had no formal savings mechanism.')

But: the disruption or problem ('But informal savings groups had no legal protection, and three major groups had collapsed, taking members' savings with them.')

So: what changed / what was done ('So we registered formally, created a legal structure, and added a savings protection mechanism.')

Now: the present reality and what it means ('Now 340 women have a savings account they can trust, and 70% report that financial security has changed how they make decisions at home.')