NARRATIVE VECTOR
BEYOND THE CHRONOLOGY
A career history is a description, not an explanation.
Roles, decisions, accomplishments, and setbacks are essential evidence—but outcomes do not explain themselves. Similar results can reflect very different combinations of executive capability, personal contribution, organizational support, and circumstance. A career history tells us what happened; it does not establish why.
An executive’s account is equally important, but it is not a transparent record. Even a candid person selects and interprets experience through memory, meaning, and an evolving sense of self. A disciplined assessment must learn from that narrative without accepting it uncritically.
Standardized interviews can improve consistency while obscuring development. Repeating the same questions across every role may collect comparable facts, yet miss what generated recurring patterns, why capability changed, and why performance differed across settings.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
Reconstruct the career as a developing system.
Narrative Vector follows the executive across the arc of a career, connecting roles rather than treating them as isolated chapters. The focus is the developmental movement among capability, motivation, experience, behavior, and environment.
The assessor and executive build that reconstruction together. This is neither passive storytelling nor a rigid template. An emerging model guides inquiry toward the connections, distinctions, and contradictions that a rehearsed career account often leaves unresolved.
The resulting narrative has direction: it shows what has changed, what has remained stable, and which conditions amplify or constrain performance. That model becomes the basis for a mandate-specific prediction—not a generic judgment of executive quality.
THE SIX VECTORS
Six narratives give the model its direction.
Narrative Vector follows six dimensions of the executive’s professional story. Each is a narrative in its own right: it has an origin, a pattern of development, a present expression, and a likely direction.
The dimensions are not independent competencies and they are not combined through a weighted average. They continually shape one another. Expertise may enlarge or constrain vision. Commitment may sustain capability through adversity or pull it toward the wrong objective. Team leadership may extend the executive’s reach, while limited organizational influence prevents that leadership from scaling. Results acquire meaning only when interpreted through all five of the other narratives.
V — Vision
Vision concerns how the executive constructs the world surrounding a problem: what they notice, how they connect variables, the time horizon they can hold, and the level of complexity at which they can establish direction. It includes strategic range, but it is not limited to abstract strategy. It examines whether the executive can translate a sufficiently rich model of the environment into choices, priorities, and a coherent path forward.
E — Expertise
Expertise examines the depth, relevance, and application of the executive’s functional, technical, and industry knowledge. This helps reveal how they use knowledge to see what others miss, make judgments under uncertainty, transfer learning into new settings, and recognize when prior expertise no longer fits the problem. Expertise can enable broader judgment, but it can also become a familiar lens through which every problem is viewed.
C — Commitment
Commitment follows the sources, intensity, and durability of the executive’s motivation. It examines what they pursue, what they are willing to endure or trade away, how ambition has changed, and what happens when progress becomes slow, uncertain, or personally costly. This narrative identifies the conditions under which commitment strengthens, redirects, or erodes.
T — Team
Team concerns how the executive converts individual capability into collective performance. It follows how they select people, set expectations, distribute authority, create productive tension, address underperformance, develop talent, and change the composition of a team as the mandate evolves. The focus is on the operating system the executive repeatedly creates through other people.
O — Organizational influence
Organizational influence examines how the executive produces movement beyond direct reporting authority. It includes relationships with peers, boards, sponsors, and other stakeholders; the ability to read institutional dynamics; and the judgment to build alignment without surrendering necessary disagreement. This narrative reveals how the executive extends ideas through a larger system, outside their immediate team.
R — Results
Results reconstructs the pattern of outcomes the executive has produced, without treating them as self-explanatory. It distinguishes personal contribution from surrounding conditions and examines the scale and repeatability of performance. The results narrative is where the other five dimensions become visible in consequence. Seen across the career, it also reveals how the executive’s impact has evolved as the scale, context, and demands of the work have changed.
DEPTH AT DECISION SPEED
Greater depth does not require a slow, linear process.
Many assessment processes treat interviewing, analysis, and verification as separate stages: collect a large volume of information, interpret it afterward, and then attempt to reconcile inconsistencies. Narrative Vector combines those activities. The working model develops during the conversation, and the conversation changes in response.
Analysis begins before the interview ends.
Because hypotheses are formed and tested in real time, the assessor can pursue the evidence that matters while the executive is still present. Gaps, contradictions, and boundary conditions become subjects for inquiry rather than unresolved questions left for later. Speed comes from integration, not from reducing the person to a simpler model.
Experience increases resolution.
The method rests on a large pattern library developed through extensive executive assessment and organizational work, particularly in private-equity contexts. That experience helps the assessor recognize meaningful distinctions quickly, connect evidence across situations, and identify where an apparently familiar pattern is actually different.
The result is a method designed to fit the tempo of consequential hiring and investment decisions without treating the executive as a collection of simplistic competencies.
THE FOUNDATION
Grounded in theory. Refined through experience.
Narrative Vector is an applied synthesis of established ideas about complexity, adult capability, self-narrative, and structured biographical interviewing. These foundations provide analytical leverage; extensive assessment experience turns them into a practical method.
Complexity and strategic range
The method draws partly from Elliott Jaques’ Stratified Systems Theory and Dr. T. Owen Jacobs’ and Glenn Mehltretter's work applying related ideas to strategic leadership. This tradition examines differences in the scale and complexity of the worlds leaders can construct around a problem: the variables they can integrate, the time horizons they can hold, and their ability to translate a complex model into coherent action. Within Narrative Vector, these ideas inform strategic range.
Capability and self-narrative
Kurt Fischer’s Dynamic Skill Theory contributes a developmental and contextual view of capability. Capability develops unevenly, interacts with context, and may stop scaling as demands change. Fischer’s related work on self-narrative informs another central premise: an executive’s account of their career is a constructed interpretation, not a transparent record. Narrative Vector helps the executive develop a more complete account while testing that account across experiences, contexts, and contradictions.
Structured biography, used adaptively
Structured biographical interviewing provides the longitudinal spine of the assessment. Following the career from its early stages to the present reveals development, recurring patterns, changes in ambition, and differences across organizational settings. Narrative Vector uses that structure adaptively. Each career chapter produces working hypotheses, and those hypotheses shape the next inquiry. The dimensions remain consistent, but the question path responds to the executive and the emerging evidence.
Experience and organizational context
The method has been refined through more than a decade of leadership advisory work and nearly 1,000 executive assessments, the majority involving CEOs and CFOs of private-equity portfolio companies. That experience provides a broad comparative base for recognizing different forms of strategic capability, motivation, leadership, and risk. Organizational-assessment work adds an important systems perspective: the ability to distinguish what an executive personally created from what the surrounding organization enabled, constrained, or concealed.
BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL
The same logic can expand to the organization.
An organization also has a developing narrative. Its present capability reflects accumulated choices about strategy, structure, talent, authority, culture, and the ways people have learned to work together. Current symptoms make sense only when connected to how the system came to be.
In organizational work, executive assessments and leadership-team interviews provide different views of the same system. Narrative Vector helps integrate those perspectives into a model of organizational capability, friction, and risk—and relates that model to the strategic demands ahead. The unit of analysis becomes larger; the principle remains the same: reconstruct the development of the system, test interacting explanations, and predict how the current pattern is likely to behave under new demands.
References available upon request.