Everyone Nodded.

Nothing Changed.

Why a convincing argument isn't enough — and the story that does the rest.

About Stephanie

Stephanie Judd teaches leaders what to do when winning the argument isn't enough. Drawing on more than a decade of coaching product, sales and executive teams — and a $31.7 million recommendation that five executives called brilliant and never touched — she shows audiences why understanding produces agreement, but it's only experience that produces action. Funny, personal and immediately usable, with live crowd work and no slides. More than 5,000 professionals have earned her Influential Storyteller certification, and 97% rate her talks and programs excellent.

The Talk

You built the case. You checked the numbers. You walked into the room, made the argument, and every person in it agreed with you. And then nothing happened.

Stephanie has spent ten years on why. Her answer: every story has two parts — the scenes (what actually happened), and the summary (what you decided it meant).


Summaries live in the head, and the head will agree or disagree. But scenes live in the body, and the body is what acts. Almost nobody supplies the scene, because they already lived it and forget you didn't.


This talk hands audiences the move that closes that gap.

Your audience will be able to:

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Diagnose why a case everyone agreed with still went nowhere

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Hear the difference between a summary and a scene — in their own arguments, and in everyone else's

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Run one question on any story they're carrying: What's the summary, and where are the scenes?

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Build the two minutes of lived experience that gets an idea into somebody's body instead of onto their agenda

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Stop explaining, and start giving people somewhere to stand

Why Stephanie

Stephanie lost a $31.7 million recommendation to a room that agreed with her, and spent the next decade working out why.


She's since taught the fix to more than 5,000 professionals at Google, Pfizer, Ford, Twilio, the CDC and the University of Michigan, and coached individual leaders through it: a saleswoman rebuilt one answer and closed five out of five, a product leader finally got his budget and headcount after months of being ignored.


She holds a computer science degree from Cornell and an MBA and MS from Michigan's Erb Institute, is a CTI-certified coach, co-created the Influential Communicator Framework, and has written on leadership communication for Forbes.

who this is for

"I am right, but I can't get traction"

The keynote is for anyone whose job is to change other people's behavior without the authority to order it.

Every booking is customized

Every booking includes a pre-event conversation. Stephanie tunes the examples, the client stories and the crowd work to the room — a sales kickoff gets the saleswoman who closed five of five, a clinical audience gets the nurse and the product leader who couldn't move his executives. The structure holds; the evidence changes. She'll also ask for two or three phrases your people actually use about the problem, and put them on stage in their own words.

The keynote, then the craft

The talk gives away the insight completely. What it can't do is teach execution: which two minutes of your life to use, where to start it, what to leave out, how to land the sentence at the end.


That's what the workshop is for. Book the keynote with a follow-on Influential Storytelling session and your people don't just understand the move, they build and practice a story they can take with them.

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Influential Storytelling is a product of Wolf & Heron