In yesterday’s post about Outcome Stories, I don’t think I quite got the story right.

I suggested changing the story from “As a writer, I want to publish posts, so I can share it with readers.” to “To get readers, a post must first be published.” I do think this does put more emphasis on the goal because it’s the first few words of the story.

But, it would be better if it were the subject of the sentence. The subject is what we’re talking about, and in my fix, we’re talking about the post, not the outcome.

So, tweaking it more, you could say “Getting readers requires that the post is published.” Maybe this is semantics. The more important thing is that the goal is early in the sentence, but if it can also be the subject, it will carry more weight.

But, if we go down this route, maybe we can develop a template around it

• [Outcome] requires [the object] to [have a state]
• [Outcome] requires [the persona] to [do an action] to [an object]
• [Outcome] requires [the persona] to [do an action] to [an object] when [a trigger happens]

So, we end up with: “Getting readers requires the author to publish the post when they are done writing it.”

And again we’re clear that this is necessary, but not sufficient to accomplish the goal.