The Recovery Pitch

You have just experienced a significant professional failure — now you have to brief your team or a senior stakeholder on what happened and what comes next.

Set the Scene

Describe your failure in two lines: what was the plan, and what went wrong? Keep it concrete — a real situation from your work, or a plausible one you can imagine.

Know Your Audience

Who are you briefing — a manager, a client, a team? Write one thing they already believe about this failure, and one thing they are afraid to hear.

What they believe

What they fear

Your One Message

What is the single thing you must make them believe by the end? And what is the one thing you must not say — the line that would make the situation worse?

Must land

Must avoid

Draft the Brief

Write your 60–80 word recovery message in your notebook — open with what happened, explain what you learned, and close with the concrete next step. Use at least two discourse markers from today's lesson.

Read It as the Audience

Look back at Step 2 — does your message address what they fear, or does it talk past it? Choose one word that captures the tone your message currently has, then one word for the tone it actually needs.

Why that word?

Discuss Share your 'must avoid' line from Step 3 with a partner — do they agree it would make things worse, or could it actually help?

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