Where the map meets
the territory
MELISSA PIERCE:
FRACTIONAL CHIEF OF GETTING THINGS DONE
Part-time on the org chart. All-in on the hard parts. Structure, strategy, communication, and the unglamorous execution to close the gap, one decision at a time.
LET'S TALK

What I Do

What is Narrative Mapping?

Hand me your case for support, your impact report, your comms plan, whatever isn’t landing, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Hand me the internal stuff too: the management struggles, your team’s constant demand for clarity that you’re not sure how to give them, whatever’s been showing up in every 1:1 as a vague sense that something’s off. Those are the kinds of things I’m personally good at untangling, unpacking, unsticking, and unf*cking.

Most all organizational issues look like communication issues up front (and sometimes it’s only that) but more often than not, the real mess is happening in the back within the structures and systems. When those get misaligned nothing you communicate lands as it should, internally or externally. Same problem, different haircut. A mullet of a problem, if you will.

Professionally, I call this work Narrative Mapping. I do the uncovering of who your stories belong to and who needs to hear them differently, who owns what decisions, where information has gone to die, and why the same frictions keep resurfacing in new ways. Practically, people hire me to tell them what’s messy and were, and then, if they want, to help them fix it.

That fix might be a single project like looking at your reporting or marketing plan. It might be a full Narrative Assessment. It might be me sticking around as your fractional Chief of Staff or Operations Officer. Either way, it starts with knowing what’s broken.

What Working Together Looks Like

Send me your marketing plan or a reporting that isn’t landing quite like you hoped it would, and that’s a single project: I’ll take a look under the hood tell you exactly what’s I suspect is  off and how you can fix it, then you take it from there.

If you want a deeper read on an executive, program, or organization, that’s what the full Narrative Assessment is for: it’s six weeks of my time inside your organization – in the comms, the workflows, the meetings – checking out everyone’s version of “how things really work around here.” You walk away with a real map of where the gaps are and what I believe you might want to fix first. See how the full Narrative Assessment works.

Or I can stay and run the fix myself, that’s fractional Chief of Staff work, one to three days a week. That’s basically me in the room with your team instead of handing you a folder of fixes and disappearing.

Different scopes, same starting point: tell me what’s going on, and I’ll tell you where to start.

Not ready for a full six weeks Narrative Assessment or fractional help? Take my 5 minute quiz and get a partial read for free.

Services

Communications Review

I review your donor narrative, impact report, or comms plan and tell you precisely what’s not working, why, and what needs to change. Project-based, and usually where things start

Narrative Maps

A 6-week version of the Narrative Mapping work: finding where your official story and your actual day-to-day have drifted apart, who owns what, and where information’s gone to die between teams.

Workshops & Masterclasses

I teach your team to do this diagnosis themselves, so you’re not calling me every time something feels off.

Fractional Founder / CoS

The full embedded version: strategic and operational leadership, 1–3 days a week, minimum three months. Still real. Just no longer the first thing I lead with.

Ready to See Where Your Map and Territory Diverge?

Most organizations don’t need an overhaul. Sometimes it’s a story that isn’t landing yet. Sometimes it’s the same decision getting stuck in the same place, every time. Either way, tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you straight what I think the issue is.

Not sure where to start? Take the 3-minute quiz and get a straight answer before you book anything.