The decision-maker is the hero of a business story.
The term “decision-maker” has near-synonyms such as hero, stakeholder, influencer, boss, even plural entities such as the “target market.” However, in denoting the components of a business story, “decision-maker” has the virtue of aligning with our objective to get someone to DECIDE or DO something.
Sometimes, this person is pre-determined, e.g., you’re giving a presentation to your key customer or your boss and so that person is likely the decision-maker. But… maybe not.
For example, you could be presenting to a group, one of whom is your boss and the highest-status person in the room. But the real decision-maker might be your boss’s boss who may watch a video of you presenting later. Or, it might be someone else whom your boss has proxied or a key influencer who has your boss’s ear. There may be many stakeholders with similar status.
In business, especially when working with medium and large companies, you are often faced with situations where you have multiple stakeholders, multiple heroes, and multiple stories.
What you do is look at each stakeholder’s story like a vector, where the goal is like direction and the urgency of the goal-obstacle pairing is like velocity. Different stakeholders want what they want to different extents, and the obstacles vary in how challenging they are. Each story is a different vector, and storytelling requires solving for a resultant vector, a meta-story which integrates and links the stakeholder stories.
One example of a resultant vector is a framing narrative which positions the customer company as the heroic entity rather than individual decision-makers at executive, managerial, technical, and end-user levels.