When Breach came out in the fall of 2025, our family disappeared into it.

Past the songs, into the world itself. Each track a micro-story, full of symbols, characters and Easter eggs. The kids would surface at dinner with theories. We’d trade lines from RAWFEAR like currency. And underneath a decade of masks, rebellion, and mythology, every one of those threads ladders up to a single question:

Will Clancy escape Dema?

That's the core. Everything else (five albums of it, ten years of it, an entire fan-built encyclopedia of it) is lore.

I probably should say why Twenty One Pilots gets to be the example here…

I needed music that told the truth when my brain was loud and life was messy. Many songs felt polished but distant. That was the wall. Twenty One Pilots didn't flinch. They name the anxiety, the grief, the inner debate… and still choose hope. That combo saved me more than once and helped me keep going. So, when I reference them, it means something, it's a signal: clarity with courage scales.

And there's a business lesson buried in that fandom. It's the one too many Series A founders heading towards Series B learn too late.

What’s the Difference Between Story and Storytelling?

Great storytelling has two layers that founders blur.

Story is the noun: your one-paragraph truth. Clear. Repeatable. The thing you want echoing in rooms you're not in.

Storytelling is the verb: all the ways you express and expand that truth through decks, content, demos, and conversations.

The band has the noun nailed. One sentence, held steady for a decade. That's what made the verb (the videos, the hidden websites, the cryptic liner notes, the random fan mailers) compound instead of confuse. When a thread is unbroken you can follow it to infinite depths. Fans did.

Most companies run this in reverse. They generate the verb constantly, assuming the noun is underneath. Then they scale, and find out it wasn't.

Why Does Your Story Fragment as You Grow?

Between Series A and Series B, the round is the smallest thing you're selling. The bigger sale is alignment: to your team (why we're here), your market (why we're different), your future hires (why join now).

And right at that moment, the surfaces multiply. The investor deck tells one version. Sales drifts in another, one adapted pitch at a time. The team Slack shows a dozen competing philosophies. It accumulated: headcount doubled, then doubled again, and every new voice inherited a slightly different copy.

Here's the part that stings: all of that output is lore. Product stories, customer vignettes, feature pages, origin tales. Lore is good. Lore is how a story gets rich. The problem is when you have lore with no core… nothing to trace back to.

Lore only works when the core is unbreakable. That's true of a band's decade-long universe, and it's true of your company.

What Is a Core, Actually?

Not a tagline. Not a positioning formula. Not something you fill in like a tax form.

Your core is the belief structure your company operates from: who this is for, what's actually in their way, what changes when you win, and the tradeoffs you're enforcing to make that true. Compressed until it fits in one paragraph a stranger could carry.

Two guardrails keep it honest:

If a sentence in your deck can't be traced back to the core, it's lore run amok. Cut it or park it.

If two smart people read your core and argue about what you do, it isn't core yet. You have work to do.

Does Your Company Pass the Fandom Test?

When the core holds, the culture (i.e. people) surrounding your company starts behaving like a healthy fandom.

People can enter from anywhere (a podcast, a referral, a cold email, slide four of someone else's forward) and recognize where they are. Each additional touchpoint deepens the same truth instead of opening a new argument. And the story starts showing up in rooms you're not in, retold in other people's words, still recognizably yours.

One caution before you start building your expanded universe: fandoms reward sprawl. Business rewards clarity. Twenty One Pilots could afford Easter eggs that took fans years to decode. Your buyer gives you five minutes. Don't build the mythology until the canon is bulletproof.

How Do You Stress-Test Your Core?

Could a new hire repeat your core tomorrow, without the deck?

Could a customer retell it without your slides in the room?

Could an investor pitch it back to you accurately, a week after the meeting?

Three different versions from three smart people means you're not there yet. Treat it as a diagnosis. Catching it now is cheaper than catching it in diligence.

What’s Your One Sentence?

If your company had to be distilled into one sentence (the one you'd want every investor, customer, and teammate repeating back to you), what would it be?

That's your core.

And once you nail it? The lore becomes limitless.

Can't get your core into one paragraph? Book a 20-minute narrative diagnostic. Compressing it is exactly what I do.

Not ready for a conversation? Take the narrative assessment first.

‍ ‍

It’s the operating system your company runs on, whether you designed it or not.

Most people searching for “business storytelling” are looking for technique. A better hook. A more compelling case study structure. A framework to drop into the next deck.

That’s not what this is about.

Business storytelling is the cognitive pattern the brain uses to take in and hold information.

‍Every company is already running a story beneath its strategy, its sales conversations, its hiring pitches. The only real question is whether someone built it that way on purpose, or whether it just accumulated.

The difference shows up fast. When the story is built deliberately, decisions compress. Teams move without being told what to do. Investors retell it accurately to their partners. When it isn’t, you get the same argument every six weeks in slightly different words, deals that need the founder on every call to close, and a homepage that’s been rewritten four times without ever quite landing.

This piece covers what business storytelling actually is at a structural level, why most companies get it wrong, and what starts breaking when a company scales past the story that got it there.

What Business Storytelling Actually Is

Here’s what storytelling in business actually is at the structural level: the pattern the brain uses to take in, hold, and recall information. Most people file it under creative skill. It belongs under cognition.

There’s research on this. Narrative cognition studies consistently show the brain retains information delivered in story structure at significantly higher rates than the same information presented as facts or lists. That’s a reliability gap, not a soft point about human connection.

When the message follows the pattern, it sticks. When it doesn’t, it has to be said again, slower, twice.

The practical consequence: every pitch deck, sales call, investor update, and job description either follows this pattern or fights against it. Storytelling is a property of how the message is built. Either it matches how the brain processes information, or the audience has to work to keep up.

The practical implication: forget trying to become a storyteller. Understand the structure your audience’s brain is already looking for, and build your message accordingly.

The Three Elements That Make a Business Story Work

Effective business stories share three structural elements. Miss one, and the story collapses. Get all three right, and the message becomes portable. It travels without you in the room.

1. Desire: What Your Customer Actually Wants

Every story starts with someone who wants something. In business, that’s your customer. The desire is the business outcome they’re trying to reach, the problem they need solved, or the future state they’re working toward. It’s rarely a feature request.

Most companies skip this. They start with what they built, then wonder why nobody cares. A network security company’s real story starts with the CISO who needs to sleep at night knowing a breach won’t end their career, not with a list of platform capabilities.

2. Difficulty: What’s Actually in the Way

Remove the obstacle and you’ve lost the audience. Difficulty is what gives a story somewhere to go.

In business, this means the specific friction standing between your customer and what they actually want, not friction in the abstract. The compliance requirement adding six weeks to every deal. Data sitting in four systems that don’t talk. A process that made sense three years ago and now just runs, because nobody stopped to ask why.

That last one is worth a pause. People living inside a broken process long enough usually stop seeing it as a problem. It becomes normal. Good news! Normal is where the most interesting business stories live: the obstacles so familiar nobody’s named them yet.

Most companies keep the difficulty abstract enough to feel safe. That’s a mistake, and more common than screwing up the difficulty.

“Our customers struggle with complexity.” Sure. So does every company in every category. That’s a placeholder where a difficulty should be.

The version that actually sticks is specific enough to make one reader feel seen. Specific enough that it probably won’t resonate with everyone. A trade-off worth making.‍ ‍

3. Direction: The Path That Only Exists Because of the Difficulty

Direction is where most companies overcorrect.

There’s a powerful temptation to plant the product here. Difficulty named, solution arrives, problem solved. But that move collapses the story. It makes the company the hero and pushes the customer out of the frame.

Direction is what becomes visible once the difficulty has been given a proper shape. Your customer couldn’t see the path before. Smart as they are, nobody had named the obstacle clearly enough to bring it out into the light. Once that happens, the next step is obvious. Your job is to shine a light on the path visible so the customer can walk it.

This three-part structure (Desire, Difficulty, Direction) is the foundation of Go Narrative’s Power of 3D Story™ coaching. It works because it maps to how the brain processes information. The framework being clever is beside the point.

Why Most Companies Get Business Storytelling Wrong

There are two failure patterns that account for most broken business stories.

The Curse of Knowledge

There’s a specific failure mode that hits technical founders harder than most: the more deeply you understand something, the harder it becomes to explain it to someone who doesn’t.

Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge. In practice it looks like pitch decks written in the language of the architecture, not the outcome. Sales teams who answer questions nobody asked. Marketing copy that explains the product to an audience that hasn’t decided to care yet.

The assumption underneath all of it: the audience is already with you. They’re not. They’re still deciding whether any of this is worth their attention.

Stories cut through this because they force concreteness. You can’t tell a story about “digital transformation.” You can tell a story about a warehouse manager who lost three days every month reconciling inventory across systems that don’t talk to each other.

Specificity is the signal. When someone sees themselves in your story, they engage. When they don’t, they move on.

Leading with the Company Instead of the Customer

The second failure is centering the story on the wrong character. Most companies start with what they built, how it works, and why they’re different. They talk about themselves for the first 80% of the pitch and add the customer at the end.

The brain pattern runs the opposite direction. Your audience needs to see themselves first: their situation, their stakes, their frustration. Only after that recognition lands do they give you permission to talk about your solution.

Earn permission by demonstrating you understand your customers world. Skip it, and you’re talking to an audience that’s already left the building.

What Happens When a Company Outgrows Its Story

Every company starts with a story, even if no one writes it down. In the early days, it’s implicit. Everyone sits in the same room. Decisions travel by proximity. The founder’s conviction holds everything together.

Then the company grows.

What used to be obvious becomes negotiable. What used to be a clear “no” turns into a debate. What used to hold under pressure starts to drift.

This is where many companies discover their story was built for a room of five people who already shared the same assumptions. It was never designed to scale past them.

The result is what I call narrative debt: the gap between what leadership believes and what the rest of the organization can repeat under pressure. It shows up as:

‍

• The founder stuck in every sales cycle because deals only close when they’re on the call

• The same strategic debates return every six weeks in different words

• Three people on the team explaining the company three different ways

• A pitch deck that gets rewritten quarterly but is “never quite right”

• Investor diligence dragging because the story doesn’t cohere across conversations

From the inside, none of this announces itself as a story problem. It reads as execution lag, or a hiring issue, or a leadership alignment gap. The naming matters because if you call it the wrong thing, you spend time solving the wrong thing.

The consistent pattern: the story works when the founder is carrying it. Step them out of the room, and some version of the message degrades. The story was never portable. It ran on one person, and always had.

For companies between Series A and Series B, this gets expensive fast. Typically 40 to 75 people, $4–8M ARR, six to nine months from the next raise. At that stage, narrative debt shows up in concrete ways: missed hires who couldn’t be convinced without the founder on the call, investor follow-ups that dragged because someone in the partner meeting heard a different version of the company.

The Compression Test: A Diagnostic for Story Health

Here’s a fast way to know whether your company’s story is working:

Ask five people on your team: “What do we do, and why does it matter right now?”

If the answers rhyme (if they share the same core logic even when the words differ), your story compresses. It’s portable. It will travel.

If the answers diverge (one person leads with the product, another with the market, another with the mission), that gap is your diagnosis. What you’re looking at is a story with no shape that survives retelling. Sending the team to communication training won’t touch it.

What happens next is predictable: every new person who joins inherits a slightly different version depending on who onboarded them. The story fragments a little more each time it changes hands.

A second diagnostic: ask yourself this question and answer it honestly.

If we had perfect positioning today, what would still break in thirty days?

If the answer involves people reinterpreting the message, revisiting the same decisions, or the story degrading when you’re not in the room, you’re looking at a structural story problem.

Positioning tweaks won’t reach it.

Core and Lore: Why Business Stories Have Two Layers

There’s a distinction most companies skip over, and it’s the reason the same messaging problems keep coming back.

Business stories run on two layers.

The first is core: the belief structure underneath the deck, the copy, and the positioning statement. Core is the few things that must be true for the company to win, who you’ve decided this isn’t for even when saying no costs revenue, the tradeoffs you’re actually holding rather than just listing.

The second layer is lore. Everything built on top of core: the sales demo, the investor deck, the homepage headline, the job post for the next VP of Sales. Every company generates lore constantly. That’s fine. The question is whether it all points at the same thing.

When core is clear, lore converges. People produce different artifacts (different words, different formats, different audiences), but the underlying logic holds. When core is missing or fuzzy, every artifact becomes its own interpretation. That’s how you end up with a CEO who says one thing, a sales team that says another, and a homepage trying to split the difference.

I’ve seen far too many people peddling storytelling that focuses on lore: cleaner decks, sharper copy, better case studies. That work isn’t wasted. But a more polished artifact built on a broken belief structure is still pointing in the wrong direction. And you will pay for it again and again.

How to Build a Business Story That Holds Under Pressure

‍ If your company’s story is showing cracks, here’s where to start:‍ ‍

1. Start with the customer, not the product. Map Desire first. What does your customer want that they can’t get unless your category exists? Name that outcome plainly.

2. Name the difficulty with teeth. Generic obstacles produce generic stories. Find the specific friction your customer faces: the one where they read your description and think “that’s my Tuesday.”

3. Position your solution as direction, not rescue. Your product’s job is to make a new path visible; the customer stays the hero of the story. Frame what becomes possible for them once the path is clear.

4. Run the compression test. If five people on your team can’t tell the same story in one sentence, your core isn’t set. Fix that before you rewrite anything else.

5. Build core before polishing lore. Remember, a better deck won’t fix a broken belief structure. Get the three or four load-bearing constraints right, and the rest follows.‍ ‍

The Bottom Line

Business storytelling is the structural pattern that determines whether your company’s message survives contact with people who weren’t in the founding room. Filing it under “soft skills” is how companies screw it up.

When the story is right, decisions compress. Teams align without rehearsal. Sales closes without the founder on the call. Investors retell the story to their partners without distortion.

When the story is wrong (or when it was never built on purpose), every surface-level fix decays within weeks. New positioning. New deck. New workshop. Thirty days later, the same arguments return. Get ready to cut another check.

The difference between companies that scale smoothly and companies that thrash comes down to one thing: whether the story underneath the strategy was designed to hold.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between storytelling and narrative in business?

Think of storytelling as the act and narrative as the architecture behind it. Storytelling (using desire, difficulty, and direction) is how you carry a message across in a given moment. Narrative is the layer underneath: what the company actually believes, who it’s for, what it’s committed to holding. A company can run compelling presentations while three different teams tell three different versions of the company. The narrative is what has to hold for the storytelling to stay consistent across all of them.

How is business storytelling different from marketing copy?

They operate at different levels. Marketing copy is a finished artifact: the headline, the email, the product page. Business storytelling is what determines whether that artifact lands or slides off. Copy that follows story structure tends to work because it starts where the reader actually is, names something real that’s in their way, and shows where they could go. Copy that leads with features is asking the reader to do the translation themselves. Most don’t bother.

Can business storytelling be learned, or is it a natural talent?

It’s a structure you can learn. The Desire-Difficulty-Direction framework works whether or not you consider yourself a “storyteller.” Talent has little to do with it. Engineers, founders, and technical leaders often produce the best business stories because they think in systems, and story structure is a system. An outside perspective carries important weight. Creativity can improve things but creativity without structure is just pretty words.

What is narrative debt and how does it affect growing companies?

Narrative debt is the gap between what leadership believes and what the organization can articulate under pressure. It accumulates as companies grow beyond the founding team. Every new hire, new product line, and new market creates an opportunity for the story to fragment. Companies between Series A and Series B are especially vulnerable because they’re scaling teams faster than the implicit story can travel.

How do I know if my company has a storytelling problem?

‍ Run the compression test: ask five people on your team what the company does and why it matters. If the answers don’t rhyme, you have a story problem. Other signals include: the founder needs to be on every sales call to close, the pitch deck gets rewritten every quarter, investors keep asking the same follow-up questions, and new hires take months to explain the company with conviction.‍ ‍

About the Author

Matthew Woodget is the founder of Go Narrative, where he works with post-Series A founders whose growth has outpaced their story. He spent 20 years inside Intel and Microsoft building and managing narratives across hundreds of stakeholders, including serving as Chief Storyteller for a major Microsoft division. He now helps scaling companies harden their narrative into shared constraints that teams can operate from, without the founder in the room.

Find out where your story breaks: Book a 20-minute narrative diagnostic

Not ready for a conversation? Take the narrative assessment and see where yours stands first.‍ ‍

Is AI the First Productivity Tool That Actually Works for ADHD Brains?

I read Justin’s piece twice. The second time, I kept stopping.

Not because I disagreed. Because I recognized the person he was describing. It wasn’t me. It was the version of me that used to sit in Microsoft meetings — furiously taking notes, hoping nobody would notice I was tracking three conversations at once and losing all of them.

Justin writes that when meetings get transcribed, he checks out. AI will condense thirty minutes of talking into a two-minute summary later. So why give it his full attention now? (You can read his piece here.)

I had the opposite experience.

The first time I sat in a meeting with live transcription and realised I didn’t have to write anything down, I nearly cried. That’s not hyperbole. I’ve spent 35 years taking notes faster than my handwriting can keep up — not because I’m diligent, but because if I stop, I lose the thread. Transcription didn’t make me less present. It was the first time I was actually there.

‍I have ADHD. And I want to be careful how I say what I’m about to say — because I genuinely respect Justin’s perspective. Smart, rigorous thinker. His relationship with AI is clearly working for him. But his brain and mine are wired differently. And that gap is more interesting to me than either of us being right.

Justin also writes about the cognitive circuit breaker. The feeling of running out of brain — the moment you stop tracking the meeting thread, or write an email that makes no sense. He says that feeling was useful. A signal. AI, he suggests, has started to remove it.

I take his point. And then I laugh. Quietly. To myself.

Because I have never had a working circuit breaker.

Can AI Compensate for the Cognitive Circuit Breaker ADHD Adults Never Had?

ADHD means the breaker fires randomly. You’re fully tracking a meeting and then suddenly you’re elsewhere — not because you’re tired, but because that’s just how the wiring works. You write an email that makes no sense not because you’ve run out of brain, but because two thoughts arrived simultaneously and collided on the way out. This has always been a particular challenge for me. I’d start an email, or a conversation TBH, tackling one thing and before you know it I’ve swamped you with half a dozen things. You’ve been staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes not because you’re done — but because you got interested in something three tabs ago and forgot to come back. Or you just zoned out on the back of zoning out. I’m talking Inception levels of zone out. Ever had that?

AI didn’t take my circuit breaker away. It gave me something that compensates for the one I never had. ‍

I have a setup I call Brain Buddy. It’s Claude, loaded with 35 years of context — personality profiles, my operating principles, a documented map of my own avoidance patterns. I explicitly asked it not to be a cheerleader. Its job is to notice when I’m growing — and when I’m running the same loop in a different jacket.

‍It does that well. Better than I expected, honestly.

Where Justin uses AI to do less with his attention, I use it to direct more of mine. I use AI the way a good executive uses a good EA. It reads everything — Slack, email, transcripts, the LinkedIn thread I meant to get back to. I ask it what matters. Then I go deep on what actually needs my brain.

‍What used to take me a morning of painful re-finding, re-reading, re-summarising — I now get as a three-line brief. Then I spend the morning on the thing that actually moves something.

‍That’s not outsourcing my thinking. That’s finally having a system that keeps up with it.‍ ‍

I hit a glass ceiling at Microsoft. Not officially. Nobody said it out loud. But I felt it.

Too contrarian. Too high-energy in the wrong meetings. Too scattered when the culture needed methodical. The people who rose were systematic, operational — the kind of brains that read every email, write impeccable meeting notes, and track seventeen threads without breaking a sweat. I also noticed how they’d reply to ALL those emails and so quickly.

‍I was not that brain.

Why Do People With ADHD Experience AI Differently?

I built workarounds. Color-coded notebooks. Voice memos in the car. Elaborate systems I’d set up on a Sunday and abandon by Wednesday. I got good enough at performing the expected version of productivity that nobody — including me — named what was actually happening.

“You’re so orgniazed, Matthew!” They’d say when they saw my OneNote notebook, my mindmaps, my “inbox to zero” approach. Little did they know…

And then AI arrived.

AI was built to work like the brains that already worked. Systematic. Structured. Organized. Searchable. And somewhere inside that design, it accidentally became the first tool that works like mine. Or at least, worked for mine.

Not because it does the thinking for me. Because it handles the administrative cost of having an ADHD brain — the re-finding, the re-summarizing, the keeping-track-of — so I can do the thing I was always better at than I was given credit for.

‍Going deep. Making unexpected connections. Asking the uncomfortable question in the room. Making sense of really complex random shit.

‍Justin ends his piece with quiet unease. He’s wondering what it means to “be there” anymore. He wonders if the meeting was really for him.

I’m not uneasy. I’m curious.

‍For the first time in 35 years, I’m not working around my brain. I’m working with it.

When we next chat you might want to ask me about some of the things I’ve used AI to help me do. My latest and greatest go so deep and detailed (installing a custom HAOS set up for whole home energy monitoring) it ended up with soldering, side loading operating systems on consumer silicon to avoid using the public cloud of the device manufacturers. I’m doing more. I’m more engaged and excited about what I can create than ever before.

What if the era of AI doesn’t just level the playing field? What if, for some of us, it tips it?

‍ Justin’s original piece is here. Worth reading — especially if your brain looks more like his than mine.

Obligatory biz promo bit: If you’re curious about the sort of sense I can make out of a mess — or you’re heading into a raise and not sure the story will hold under pressure— book a 20-min narrative diagnostic.

p.s. And in the spirit of his “here’s the prompt for this article,” here’s mine - but it was co-authored with AI in a Claude “Work writing” project I have that has some pretty strict Matthew rules :)

voice: Matthew Woodget, founder, Go Narrative. 1st person. Self-deprecating.

ADHD declared early — not as excuse, as lens.

thesis: mutual adaptation. AI and ADHD brains are a better fit than most people realise.

The people worried about AI making them less present are not the people who never had a

working circuit breaker.

hook: response to Justin's piece at workflowlabs.net/blog/em-dash-war.

Acknowledge and link. Respectful disagreement — different brains, not wrong vs right.

Justin = systematic, operational. Matthew = contrarian, high-energy, pattern-connector.

The gap between them IS the point.

structure (desire / difficulty / resolution):

- desire: to be present, effective, trusted with complexity

- difficulty: ADHD means the circuit breaker fires randomly, not when you're done

- resolution: AI handles the administrative cost of an ADHD brain so the good stuff

  (depth, connection, uncomfortable questions) can finally show up

3 moves:

1. meetings — transcription made Matthew MORE present, not less. No notes = in the room.

2. information — uses AI as an EA: brief me on what matters, then go deep.

   Brain Buddy (Claude + 35 years of context, personality profiles, avoidance patterns,

   operating principles) as the honest thought partner, not cheerleader.

3. Microsoft / glass ceiling — too contrarian, too scattered for the culture that rewarded

   methodical. Built elaborate performance systems nobody saw through.

   "You're so organized, Matthew!" They had no idea.

close: not outsourcing thinking. Finally a system that keeps up with it.

Closing question: what if AI doesn't just level the field — what if for some of us it tips it?

tone: warm, funny, specific. Self-deprecating but not self-pitying.

"Inception levels of zone out" energy throughout.

No ADHD-as-superpower clichés. No manifesto. Questions that make people lean forward.

link Justin's piece twice: once in body (first reference), once in footer note.

“Every decision feels expensive.”

Not because she couldn’t decide. She’s a sharp operator. She decides fast.

Because the same decision kept coming back.

ICP. Again. Pricing model. Again. Which segment to prioritize. Again.

She wasn’t indecisive. She was stuck in a loop. Every time she made the call, it held for a few weeks — then dissolved. The team drifted back. The debate reopened. She made it again.

I left that conversation with a phrase: decisions decay.

What decision decay actually is

Decision decay is what happens when a decision is made but doesn’t hold.

Not because it was wrong. Because the belief structure underneath it wasn’t shared.

When a company is small, proximity holds the belief. Everyone sits in the same room. The founder’s reasoning is visible. Decisions travel by presence — you see who made the call, you understand why, and you act accordingly.

Then the company grows. The founder isn’t in every room anymore. New hires arrive and absorb the behavior they see — not the decision that was made. The VP of Sales optimizes for pipeline. Product optimizes for adoption. Marketing covers its bets. Everyone is rational. Everyone is doing their job.

But the company doesn’t share the same belief about how it wins.

That gap — between the decision the founder made and what the organization is actually doing — is decision decay. And it compounds.

Where decisions leak

Decision decay doesn’t happen all at once. It leaks through five specific points, and most companies have at least two active.

Ambiguous decision object. Everyone leaves the meeting believing they agreed — on different things. This is consensus theater. The decision felt real in the room. It evaporated before lunch.

Missing decider. People with opinions showed up. The person with authority didn’t. The result is delay dressed up as collaboration.

No tradeoff acknowledged. Every yes is also a no. When the no isn’t named out loud, it surfaces later as resistance — dressed up as new information.

No cost of delay. If delay is free, delay wins. “Not yet” becomes the default. The decision stays open indefinitely.

No operationalization. The decision was never translated into tasks, owners, and a date. Intent evaporated. Activity continued — just the wrong activity.

If you can’t name the decider, the tradeoff, and the next action in 72 hours, you don’t have a decision. You have a vibe.

Why it gets dangerous between Series A and B

At this stage, decision decay gets expensive fast.

You’re 6–9 months from a raise. Investors are watching for a coherent story about how the company wins. But internally, the ICP keeps shifting. The pricing model keeps getting revisited. The same arguments return every six weeks wearing different words.

None of this shows up as a single catastrophic failure. It shows up as friction — stalled launches, rewrites, GTM motions that don’t stick, a founder who can’t get out of the weeds.

The board calls it an execution problem. The founder feels it as something worse: the sense that the company is slowly escaping their grip, and no single person is doing anything wrong.

That feeling is usually accurate. The decisions are real. The drift is just faster than the system can hold.

The diagnostic

One question cuts through the noise:

If we had perfect positioning today, what would still break in thirty days?

If the answer is “we’d revisit it again at the next board meeting” — that’s decision decay. Not a strategy problem. Not a talent problem. The decision isn’t portable because the belief underneath it isn’t shared.

A second test: ask five people across functions to tell you your ICP. If you get five different answers, the ICP decision has decayed. Everyone accepted it once. Nobody is operating from it now.

What holding a decision actually requires

Most founders try to solve decision decay by deciding more clearly, communicating more often, or hiring better people. None of those fix the root.

Decisions hold when they’re backed by shared constraints — the explicit beliefs and enforced tradeoffs that make a call repeatable without the founder in the room.

In practice that means four things:

—  A named decision with a named owner and a date. If there’s no owner and no date, the decision is imaginary.

—  An acknowledged tradeoff. What are we deprioritizing to make room? If nobody can answer that, the agreement was performance, not commitment.

—  A cost of delay made explicit. What does ninety days of drift actually cost? Put a number on it.

—  A 72-hour next action. What happens in the next three days determines whether the decision was real.

The goal isn’t perfect decisions. It’s decisions that survive the founder leaving the room.

When that works, something shifts. The same argument stops returning every six weeks. Teams make choices that are consistent without checking in. The founder stops being the organizational memory for every call that was ever made.

The pattern underneath it

Decision decay is a symptom of narrative debt — the gap between what leadership believes and what the organization can repeat under pressure.

Positioning is a decision. ICP selection is a decision. Pricing is a decision. But decisions rarely survive scale unless they’re backed by shared assumptions and enforced tradeoffs. Without that structure, they decay through interpretation, good intent, and local optimization.

The fix isn’t making better decisions. It’s building the structure that makes decisions portable.

Most founders don’t fail to decide. They fail to hold the decision under pressure, explain it the same way twice, and enforce it when incentives push the other direction.

If the same decisions keep coming back — or you’re heading into a raise and not sure the story will hold under pressure — book a 20-min narrative diagnostic.

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Not because founders can’t tell it. Because the story worked so well early on that nobody noticed it stopping working. Growth happened. Headcount doubled. A PMM joined and “sharpened” the value prop. A new VP of Sales started running his own version of the pitch.

Six months before the Series B window opens, three different versions of the company are circulating — and the founder is the only one who can feel the gap.

That’s not a messaging problem. That’s narrative debt.

What is narrative debt?

Narrative debt is the gap between what leadership believes and what the organization can repeat under pressure.

It is not a communication failure. It’s a structural one. The story that created early success — the scrappy founding pitch, the tight team who sat in one room — was never built to survive scale. It worked at 10 people because proximity substituted for clarity. Decisions traveled by hallway. Alignment was implicit.

Then the company grew.

What used to be obvious became negotiable. What used to be a clear “no” turned into a debate. And the story that held everything together started carrying weight it was never designed for.

I see this schedule play out consistently in companies approaching Series B:

Six months before the raise: The founding pitch no longer describes the company you’ve actually built. Investors ask questions you’ve already answered. The deck gets rewritten again.

Around 50–75 employees: Messaging fragments. Sales improvises. Marketing publishes a homepage that doesn’t match the deck. New hires absorb the behavior they see — not the decision that was made.

After a pivot: Old storylines linger. The team is still selling a version of the company you stopped being eighteen months ago.

None of this is anyone’s fault. Everyone is rational. Everyone is optimizing for their own context. The problem is that no one is operating from the same set of shared beliefs.

What is the difference between core and lore?

Every company’s story operates in two layers.

Core is the strategic narrative — the shared set of beliefs and constraints that make decisions portable across the organization. It answers the questions that determine behavior: What must be true for us to win? Who is this not for? What tradeoff are we enforcing? What proof needs to exist by the next fundraise for this story to be credible?

Core is not messaging. It’s the belief structure that makes messaging stable.

Lore is everything built on top of it. Every customer conversation, every demo, every deck, every sales email your team sends without you in the room. Lore is inevitable. Your team is going to build it whether you plan for it or not.

The question is not whether lore happens. It’s whether it’s building on something solid, or fragmenting from a foundation that was never locked down.

When the core is solid, lore compounds. Sales adds texture. Marketing finds angles. Customer success brings it into the relationship. The story extends without losing its shape.

When the core isn’t solid, every new hire adds entropy. Every leadership conversation reopens the same debate. And the founder ends up back in every room, re-explaining a strategy the team should be able to carry.

Why does narrative debt become a leadership problem at 50–75 employees?

Below a certain size, the founder is the story. Proximity carries the belief. When someone is confused, they walk over and ask.

At 50–75 employees, that stops working.

There are too many people to reach by proximity. Decisions are being made in rooms the founder isn’t in. New hires are being onboarded by other new hires. The story is now being transmitted secondhand — and each retelling introduces interpretation.

The result: the story lives in one person’s head instead of in the system.

That’s the bottleneck. Not execution. Not talent. The narrative hasn’t been extracted from the founder and encoded into the organization in a form people can operate from independently.

This is why founders at this stage describe the same symptoms: “I’m in every decision.” “We keep having the same argument.” “My team is working hard but nothing is moving.” “I can feel the company drifting but I can’t point to anyone doing anything wrong.”

They’re right. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The story is just not in the system yet.

How do you diagnose narrative debt before it costs you the raise?

Ask this before your next campaign, your next deck revision, your next offsite:

If we had perfect positioning today, what would still break in thirty days?

The answer tells you which failure mode is dominant:

If the answer is “people would reinterpret it” — the core doesn’t compress. People encounter the story and leave with different versions of it. That’s a legibility problem: the story doesn’t survive retelling.

If the answer is “it wouldn’t survive without me in the room” — the core doesn’t travel. It requires the founder to deliver it, enforce it, translate it. That’s a delegation problem: the story lives in one person, not in the system.

If the answer is “we’d revisit it again at the next board meeting” — the core doesn’t hold. Decisions made today dissolve under pressure in thirty days. That’s a decision problem: the story can’t make choices stick.

If the answer is all three, that’s narrative debt. And it doesn’t fix itself.

What changes when narrative debt is resolved?

Teams describe the company the same way without rehearsal.

Decisions compress instead of multiplying. The same argument stops returning every six weeks. Sales closes without the founder on the call. New hires onboard faster because the “why” is in the system, not locked in one person’s head.

The founder stops rewriting the deck. Stops correcting the team. Stops feeling the company slowly escape their grip.

Scaling isn’t about adding slides. It’s about building the belief structure those slides run on.

If your story is starting to fragment — or you’re 6–9 months from a raise and not sure the story is ready — book a 20-min narrative diagnostic.

Not pitched it. Showed it — screen share, click by click — because he couldn’t explain it in words.

Not because it was bad.

Because it had become too many things.

Three product lines. Three buyer categories. Three different budget owners inside the customer’s org. Their homepage read like a restaurant menu — each dish solving a real problem, none of them connected by a single belief.

He didn’t have a messaging problem. He had a category collision.

What is category collision?

Category collision is what happens when a product expands into multiple markets before the narrative catches up.

It’s not rare. It’s the predictable result of good product decisions made without a story to hold them together.

I see this most often in companies approaching Series B — typically somewhere between 50 and 100 employees, after a second or third product line has shipped and the founding story has stopped describing the company that actually exists.

The symptoms show up before most founders name them:

• Sales needs a demo to explain the product instead of a sentence

• Investors hear three pitches in one meeting and tune out after the first

• The homepage reads like a capability list instead of a reason to believe

• New hires take months before they can explain what the company does

‍The part that really hurts: each category maps to a different budget line inside the buyer’s company. You’re not just competing with other vendors. You’re competing with yourself for attention.

Why does category collision get worse as a company scales?

Two forces compound it.

The first is team growth. At 15 people, the founder is still in most rooms. Story drift gets corrected by proximity. At 60 people, that stops working. Sales, marketing, product, and customer success are each telling the story through their own lens — and nobody has a mandate to reconcile the versions.

‍The second is content volume. AI made content easy. Every team is publishing more. When everyone is producing more, volume stops being an advantage. The only filter left is trust. ‍

Trust comes from coherence — from a market that hears one consistent story across every function. When those functions describe the company differently, the market doesn’t do the reconciliation work. It moves on.

Category collision accelerates this. The more your product does, the more surface area there is for the story to fragment. Every new capability is another chance for the team to go off-script.

How do you know if you have a category collision problem?

‍Run this diagnostic before assuming the problem is messaging.‍ ‍

Ask five people on your team — across functions — two questions:

What do we do? Why does it matter?

If you get five different answers, you don’t have a content problem. You have a belief problem. The story isn’t shared — it’s improvised by everyone who touches it.

A faster version: ask a new sales rep and a senior CSM to explain the product to a prospect. Watch what’s different. That gap — between what sales leads with and what customer success reinforces — is where the category collision lives.

Three more signals worth checking:‍ ‍

• Would a new rep explain the value the same way as a customer who’s been with you two years?

• Does your investor pitch describe the same company as your onboarding docs?

• If someone read your homepage and then sat through a demo, would they feel like they were buying the same product?

If the answer to any of those is no, the story has already fragmented. The market is absorbing three versions of you and choosing none of them.

What is the fix for category collision — and why isn’t it simplification?

The instinct when you have three product lines is to kill one. That’s the wrong move most of the time.

Those product lines exist for good reasons. They’re solving real problems for real buyers. Consolidating them doesn’t fix the story — it just reduces the footprint.

The fix is finding the one belief that makes all three product lines inevitable.

Not a tagline. A belief. The thing that, once someone accepts it, makes every line of the product make sense as a single bet on how the world works.

The test: Can you say in one sentence what must be true about the world for all three of your products to exist?

Not what they do. What has to be true for them to matter.

If you can’t say it in one sentence, your team can’t either. And if your team can’t say it, your market can’t either.

Without that belief, you’re asking prospects to do the integration work in their heads. Most won’t. They’ll pick the one thing they understand and ignore the rest. Or they’ll leave.

What changes when you find the one belief?

The one belief doesn’t replace the three product lines. It connects them.

Sales stops demoing and starts making a case. Marketing stops describing capabilities and starts building conviction. Customer success stops explaining features and starts reinforcing a worldview.

The homepage stops reading like a menu and starts reading like a point of view.

Investors stop hearing three pitches in one meeting. They hear one bet, made three ways.

Where does category collision show up first?

The homepage. Always.

If your website reads more like a feature catalog than a conviction, the category collision is already visible. The story grew faster than the team noticed, and now the market is the one paying for it.

This is diagnosable before a raise. It almost never fixes itself.

What’s the one belief underneath your product portfolio?

If your team is telling different stories about what you do — or you’re heading into a raise and not sure the story holds — book a 20-min narrative diagnostic.

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Tell a Powerful Story That Will Get Audience's Attention and Drive Action

Facts, opinions, and value statements push people apart, stories bring people together. – Chuck Matthei

Storytelling is the calculated release of information. – Alex Garland

Imagine standing before your audience, delivering a message that's perfectly aligned with your story type—this is communication stripped down to its most powerful essence, without fluff or theatrics. Communication that makes a connection. It's like this for some of the best stories told. The audience doesn't just listen; they engage on a deeper level. It's a good story, and they know it.

Why does this happen? It's because your words have helped to release oxytocin and serotonin in their brains, chemicals that foster bonding and trust. This isn't a marketing strategy; it's rooted in the principles of neuroscience.

Here's the key insight: Mastery of narrative arcs or the art of traditional storytelling isn't necessary to make an impact.

What's important is to identify and learn how to tell a story that encapsulates your core business story type. This approach isn't about spinning yarns or using fancy words; it's about ensuring your messaging resonates naturally with your audience—whether they are customers, team members, or partners. These types of stories help forge neuroscientific connections that lead to deeper engagement. What more could you ask for? Discover yours here (opens in new window).

In the early 1980s, my life took a pivotal turn when my father's job at Intel led us to America, transforming an intended 18-month stay into nine transformative years. This period granted us precious memories captured through my father's Olympus SLR and shaped my diverse interests and resilience. Diagnosed with ADHD at five and dyslexia at eighteen, I learned early the importance of perseverance. Even as a child, whether facing the daunting obstacle of moving every year or so or navigating the complexities of my conditions - of which ADHD was unfortunately left to languish, it wasn't until my 40s that I was officially rediagnosed and finally started to tackle it. I embraced each obstacle with a determination instilled by my hardworking parents, and this foundational period of my life laid the groundwork for the journey ahead, a relentless quest for questioning the status quo. It led me to shun Hollywood and The Hero's Journey for business storytelling and to discover the 7 Types of Business Stories.

Do you read stories? Watch movies? And wish you could be as compelling and interesting?

Seven types of business stories can catalyze this connection—The Challenge, The Pivot, The Catalyst, Improving Experiences, Changing Perceptions, and Growth Mindset. These themes and blueprints help people connect and interact with your brand on a meaningful level. Let's explore these story types in depth and determine which will best help your company connect with its audience today. Kudos to you for making the effort and time to start this journey.

I'll try my best to show you how stories help. Remember, while it can take hard work to become a master storyteller, when you follow what I share in this blog, you will benefit from an understanding and a rapid start to better business storytelling.

⬇️ Jump to the 7 Types ⬇️

Why is storytelling so important?

That’s what storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again. - Walt Disney.

We all like listening to stories. Storytelling is an intrinsic part of being human, rooted in the depths of time and bridging the individual and the collective consciousness. It's not merely a means of entertainment; it's a profound way in which we navigate and make sense of the world. Through storytelling, we engage, motivate, and inspire, creating emotional connections that transcend mere data or facts​​. Through the stories we share, we understand ourselves and others better, finding commonality and shared meaning in any situation.​

​Our proclivity for stories stems from their centrality to human cognition and communication. They are more than a recitation of events or an idea; they are reflections in which we see ourselves, our values, and our journeys, allowing us to interpret our lives and the world around us​.

The importance of this cognitive process cannot be understated. It helps us comprehend complex concepts, empathize with different perspectives, and learn based on the successes and failures of others.​ Stories told in this way get attention and take people on a journey. And when you share stories, it is because they play to these facts. Make this year the year you do the same.

Contrary to the notion that storytelling is an offshoot of entertainment, it is, in fact, the other way around. When you think about it, the pleasure we derive from a well-told story, be it by a friend or in a movie or a book, it is a byproduct of storytelling's ability to effectively communicate what we go through and solicit the necessary support to navigate our lives successfully. Entertainment media such as literature, film, and art have their roots in the fundamental human need to tell stories​. To transmit information with feeling.

By acknowledging storytelling's essential role in shaping and understanding our perceptions and emotional state, we can harness its power to influence, teach, and forge deeper connections in places where we used to scratch the surface. In essence, stories are the fabric of our existence, woven into the very way we perceive, interact with, and understand the world and each other. Remember, they are fundamental, not ancillary, to human culture and interaction.

Why storytelling is important in business

Stories constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal. --Dr. Howard Gardner, professor Harvard University

In a word, authority. At work, storytelling emerges as an indispensable tool to help organizations share their vision and ethos. And, importantly, deliver information in an easy, palatable manner. It goes beyond mere transactional interactions to create a world where customers feel a part of the narrative. Great companies understand that to engage and resonate with people, they need to tell a story that weaves together character, emotion, and a journey that reflects not just their brand, but also the lives of their audience. When a brand shares stories, they offer more than products or services; they provide an experience steeped in emotional resonance. They provide a reason to care. By listening to stories, customers learn about the company's core values and the passion behind their offerings, fostering a sense of loyalty and connection. A narrative isn't just a marketing tactic; it's a strategic way to build a robust community with feeling around a brand, making it an essential skill in today's market. And it empowers companies to communicate the depth of their character in a way customers know and will like. Are you ready to give it a try?

What is the power of business storytelling?

The story-making process enables us to simplify complex information into the core essence of understanding.

– Yiannis Gabriel, Storytelling in Organizations

Stories in this context are impactful because they get attention and impart information in a way that is easy to understand and remember. You know this because it is just like your favorite movie or book. They can make sense of complex data and abstract ideas, transforming them into something relatable and human. The importance of storytelling in commerce lies in its ability to convey the essence of who you are as a company—your history, your goals, and the shared values that define you. Through storytelling, companies can connect on a different level with their audience and start turning simple interactions into lasting relationships. When a company tells a story well, it does not just share information like it used to; it sparks emotion, understanding and prompts action. The art of the storyteller is to weave together facts and feelings in a story that captures attention and remains memorable long after the tale is told.

Why is storytelling becoming a critical skill for professionals?

Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill when it comes to business. - Gary Vaynerchuk.

As companies try to stand out in a crowded marketplace, the importance of storytelling as a skill has never been greater. Storytelling is a way to share knowledge and ideas, to start conversations, and to find common ground with an audience. The best industry storytellers are those who can share stories that evoke empathy and inspire customers to act. Organizations can engage their audience with respect and honesty by incorporating personal anecdotes and real-life situations into their narratives. A good story can increase sales and build understanding and trust, which are crucial in the long term. The skill of storytelling is about more than crafting a compelling narrative; it's about understanding the human condition and using that knowledge to create a shared vision for the future. As we consider the full scope of what storytelling can achieve, it becomes clear that it is not just an important aspect of business—it is the very fabric that holds it together. For our audience, it all starts with listening to stories. This is the reason it is so powerful.

My education and early career journey was a rollercoaster of hurdles and discoveries. Despite educational setbacks, like the humbling moment of realizing my limitations in calculus, I found my path in a unique combination of computer science and business administration. My university years were not just about academics; they were about exploration and entrepreneurship, from graphic design ventures to managing DJ collectives. This period was pivotal in shaping my eclectic interests and generalist approach, traits that later became invaluable in my professional life. It was a time of embracing diverse opportunities, leading to unexpected directions and laying the foundation for my future ventures in storytelling and marketing.

What are the 5 P's of storytelling?

The 5Ps—plot, point, people, place, and props—originally stem from the entertainment world, a domain where stories are crafted to captivate and delight. When adapting this framework for commerce, one must consider the unique dynamics of the corporate landscape. It's important to know that the plot in enterprise storytelling is not just a sequence of events, but a strategic narrative that guides the audience through a carefully designed experience. The point becomes more than the moral; it's the central message that ties back to the brand's core mission and the value it offers. People are not just characters but representatives of the brand's identity, its customers, and stakeholders, all interwoven into the fabric of the tale being told. The place is the context that roots the story in a setting relatable to the world of industry. Props are the tools and products that feature in the story, symbolizing the practical solutions companies provide.

Recognizing the obstacle for professionals in reverse engineering these entertainment-based frameworks for the work environment, we've developed our own bespoke frameworks you can use to act on, such as the 3D framework—Desire, Difficulty, Denouement. Here, 'Desire' outlines the wants and needs that drive action, 'Difficulty' acknowledges the emotion, challenges and obstacles that add tension and engagement to the story, and 'Denouement,' borrowing from the French term for the 'untangling of the knot,' represents the resolution and clarity that businesses must provide - including the use of your offering. This approach mirrors the intricate process of navigating problems at work, driving action and achieving successful results. For a more in-depth exploration of how these principles can be applied effectively, our 'Storytelling for Action Playbook' offers valuable insights and practical tools to harness storytelling in your company.

The Seven Types of Business Story 

If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself. - Albert Einstein

The Seven Universal Types of Business Story can supercharge your communications in any situation. Think of each type as a lens, a unique perspective through which you know you can tell all your stories.

While you might be tempted to dabble in multiple types, the real magic happens when you commit to just one. It becomes your North Star, guiding all your communications to resonate more profoundly and drive activity.

Let’s explore the seven story types with a brief overview of each:

1. The Challenge: This story type focuses on overcoming adversity and using what we learn to improve the company’s offerings, building customer empathy and trust.

2. The Pivot: This type is about a significant change in direction to serve customers better, emphasizing that their needs are the company’s top priority.

3. The Catalyst: This story type showcases how pushing boundaries and embracing change has led to innovations that help customers achieve their goals more efficiently or effectively.

4. Innovation: This type centers on creative problem-solving and how the company’s innovative products or services have positively impacted people’s lives.

5. Improving Experiences: This story type is about listening to customer feedback and making necessary changes to improve their experience, building trust and loyalty.

6. Changing Perception: This type aims to show how the company has taken responsibility for past mistakes and made changes to improve, inspiring renewed customer confidence.

7. Growth Mindset: This story type emphasizes the company’s commitment to continuous improvement and learning, ultimately benefiting the customer by offering better products or services.

If you’re ready to skip ahead to the good stuff, you can take our Business Story Type Assessment, a tool we’ve developed to pinpoint your narrative North Star. It's your fast track to more straightforward, impactful communications to make every message more resonant, every campaign more effective, and every interaction more meaningful.

Need a little more context? Let’s delve deeper into each Story type so you can identify which one is the best for your business now. Remember, your journey through these types can be quick, slow, sequential, or even erratic. The key is to find the type that resonates with where you are now and let it guide your storytelling to achieve the desired results.

Business Story Type 1: The Challenge. Important struggles make great stories.

Obstacles can appear out of nowhere in commerce, throwing a wrench in your plans. These obstacles often give rise to your most creative and innovative solutions. We've all been in that situation, having that feeling that the thing that went wrong doesn't mark the end but is in fact, the beginning of something new, something wonderful. Even if we can't put a word on it, it's a great moment when it happens.

By leveraging the Challenge story type, you can share your triumphs over adversity, serving as a beacon for others navigating similar rough waters. Your Challenge story celebrates resilience, creativity, and tenacity. It empowers others to face their problems head-on, sparking growth and inspiration.

Core Business Issues and Challenge Solutions:

1. Financial Hurdles: When financial stability was on the line, you didn't fold under pressure. Instead, you tapped into your resourcefulness and financial savvy to turn the tide.

2. Regulatory Complexity: Navigating the maze of ever-changing regulations is no small feat. Yet, you not only complied but also found innovative strategies that set you apart.

3. Shifting Market Demand: In a volatile market, you stay ahead of the curve, recognizing and capitalizing on emerging trends to deliver standout products and services.

4. Supply Chain Disruptions: When your supply chain hit a snag, you didn't panic. Your agility and quick problem-solving ensured that business continued as usual.

5. Price Competition: You took a different route in a market driven by price wars. You differentiated your offerings, reinforcing the unique proposition you bring to the table.

6. Time to Market: Speed is of the essence, and your keen market insights, paired with agile processes, allowed you to launch new products swiftly, securing a competitive edge.

Read more about The Challenge Story Type here.

Story Type 2: The Pivot. Think about changes in direction.

In today's ever-shifting business landscape, your company may have to make tangible adjustments to its situation and to serve your customers better. The Pivot is a story type that allows you to articulate these shifts in a way that resonates quickly and effectively with your audience.

Your Pivot story is a compelling blend of your behaviors and the concrete steps you took to get there. It's a consistent message that captivates and drives collective action. It serves as a proven track record of your ability to adapt and thrive.

Common Business Problems and Pivot Solutions:

1. Business Model Disruption: You didn't just adapt; you transformed your business model to create new success avenues.

2. Growth hurdles: With scaling issues, you pivoted to unlock fresh, effective growth strategies.

3. Shareholder Pressure: You turned shareholder expectations into actionable insights through a strategic pivot.

4. Supplier Reliance: When supplier dependence became a liability, you pivoted to diversify and mitigate risks.

5. Technological Advances: You stayed ahead of the tech curve, pivoting to embrace innovations that enhanced customer engagement.

6. Consumer Behavior Shifts: As consumer preferences evolved, your Pivot realigned your offerings to meet these demands, keeping your brand relevant and engaging.

Read more about The Pivot Type here.

Type 3: The Catalyst. Consider effective approaches.

In the competitive business arena, the Catalyst story type explores the real, impactful transformations you've made as a business. Through your own experiences, you've discovered the keys to unlocking hidden potential for yourself and your customers.

Your unique history equips you with the empathy and insight to craft solutions tailored to your customer's difficulties. As a catalyst, you maximize the potential of existing resources, resolve pain points, and drive growth and efficiency. Your Catalyst story is more than a narrative; it's a proven strategy for transformation and creating real value for your customers.

Common Problems and Catalyst Solutions:

1. Productivity: Your story can guide businesses in optimizing their operations, turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

2. Inefficiency: Through your journey, you've found ways to streamline processes, offering customers the tools to do the same.

3. Internal Politics: Your background enables you to navigate the complexities of organizational dynamics, empowering your customers to do likewise.

4. Communications: Having overcome communication barriers yourself, you can guide others in fostering more effective dialogue within their teams.

5. Structural or Cultural Weakness: Your story addresses the often-overlooked aspects of organizational culture and structure, providing a roadmap for improvement.

6. Customer Engagement: Your transformative journey has equipped you with the insights to enhance customer relationships, a valuable lesson for any business.

Read more about The Catalyst Story Type here.

Type 4: Innovation. Pushing the boundaries.

The Innovation story type is about the groundbreaking things you've implemented that have revolutionized your industry. Companies that embody this story type don't just empathize with customer problems; they're committed to creating transformative solutions.

You're not content with incremental improvements; you aim to disrupt conventional wisdom and set cutting-edge industry standards. This story type is a testament to your relentless pursuit of excellence and fearless exploration of uncharted territories, making you a true pioneer in your field. Storytelling fueled with your Innovation story type inspires others to think beyond boundaries and join you in shaping the future.

Common Problems and Innovative Solutions:

1. Product Issues: Your story showcases how you've turned product flaws into opportunities for groundbreaking improvements.

2. Lack of Right Product: You didn't just identify a gap in the market; you filled it with something revolutionary.

3. Limitations of Existing Products: Where others see limitations, you see a opportunity to innovate, leading to transformative solutions.

4. Market Saturation: In a crowded marketplace, your story focuses on how your innovative approach carved out a unique niche, setting you apart from the competition.

5. Environmental Concerns: Your innovation story can highlight how you've turned sustainability difficulties into opportunities for eco-friendly solutions.

6. Customer Experience: Your relentless focus on innovation extends to the customer experience, creating new ways to engage and delight your audience.

Read more about the Innovation Story Type here.

Type 5: Improving Experiences. Customer stories told well.

The Improving Experiences story type is your track record of listening, adapting, and improving, all in the name of customer satisfaction. You've actively sought and acted on customer feedback to solve problems and elevate the customer journey. You're not just reacting to problems but proactively seeking to improve things through employee training, technological upgrades, or revamped privacy policies.

Storytelling with your Improving Experiences story type showcases the tangible steps you've already taken to make things better for your customers.

Common Problems and Experience-Enhancing Solutions:

1. Customer Relationships: Your story showcases how you've turned customer feedback into stronger, more meaningful relationships.

2. Customer Experience: You didn't just identify pain points; you actively improved them, enhancing the overall customer journey.

3. Use of Technology: Your story highlights how technological improvements have made customer interactions smoother and more enjoyable.

4. Security and Privacy: You've taken steps to protect customer data and make customers feel secure in their interactions with your company.

5. Employee Performance: Your focus on training and development has directly and positively impacted customer satisfaction.

6. Operations: Operational modifications, driven by customer feedback, have streamlined the customer experience, making interactions with your company more efficient and enjoyable.

Read more about the Improving Experiences Story Type here.

Type 6: Changing Perceptions. Empathy fuels great stories.

The Changing Perceptions story type celebrates growth, resilience, and the power of transformation.  

Your company recognizes that reputation is not set in stone; it can be molded and improved. You've faced difficulties like negative press and customer criticism, not as setbacks but as opportunities to evolve.

By taking responsibility for past mistakes and making significant adjustments in critical areas like values, quality, and positioning, you've laid the groundwork for a revitalized brand. Your Changing Perceptions story shows that you’re not just reacting to criticism but proactively redefining how the world sees you.

Common Problems and Perception-Changing Solutions:

1. Reputation: Your story shows how you've turned a tarnished reputation into a respected brand through actionable changes.

2. Values: You've redefined your company's values to align with customer expectations, creating a stronger brand identity.

3. Positioning: Your story highlights how a shift in market positioning has opened new opportunities and attracted a broader customer base.

4. Sales Team: You've restructured your sales approach to better align with your new brand image, resulting in increased customer trust and sales.

5. Quality: Your focus on improving product or service quality has satisfied existing customers and attracted new ones.

6. Distribution: Changes in your distribution channels have made your products more accessible, improving customer perception and increasing market share.

Read more about the Changing Perceptions Story Type here.

Type 7: Growth Mindset. Learning the lesson so you can help your customers.

The Growth Mindset story type is based on the concrete strategy your company has implemented to foster a culture of continuous learning and growth.

Your company understands that growth isn't merely a goal; it's a mindset you've turned into actionable steps. By encouraging employees to take calculated risks, ask questions, and think creatively, you're not just talking about growth—you're facilitating it. This proactive approach to problems adds value to your customers and strengthens your not just your character but your reputation as a trusted, forward-thinking organization that helps others.

This commitment also extends to making customer-centric improvements. Your "Growth Mindset" story is compelling, showcasing your company's dedication to continuous improvement solidifying your reputation for innovation and adaptability.

Common Problems and Growth-Driven Solutions:

1. Know-how: Your story demonstrates how you've turned gaps in expertise into opportunities for learning and development.

2. Embracing Change: You've shown that your company doesn't just adapt to change; it actively seeks it out as an opportunity for growth.

3. Organizational Culture: Your story highlights how you've cultivated a culture that values continuous learning and improvement.

4. Resource Allocation: You've made calculated investments and reallocations to drive innovation and growth.

5. Diversity and Inclusion: Your commitment to diverse perspectives has fueled creativity and innovation, enriching your company culture and product offerings.

6. Customer-Centricity: Your story shows how your growth mindset extends to constantly improving and adapting to meet your customers' changing needs.

Read more about the Growth Mindset Story Type here.

Unleashing the Power of Business Story Types 

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.  – Seth Godin

Reflecting on my diverse career path, from the humble beginnings of potato bagging to the heights of being a chief storyteller and running my own company, the common thread has been my ability to leverage my unique experiences into compelling narratives and to help others do the same. This journey, informed by diverse roles and the resilience to pivot from setbacks, illustrates the potency of storytelling at work and life. It's not just about the tale itself but how the story is told, how it resonates, and how it motivates action. As I continue to evolve personally and professionally, I am reminded that our stories are not just recollections of the past; they are the blueprints of our future, guiding us to our next chapter, constantly unfolding, and inviting us to write the following line.

In today’s world, connecting, inspiring, helping, and leading is more important than ever. That's where the power and importance of storytelling in commerce come into play. Each of these seven different story types—The Challenge, The Pivot, The Catalyst, Innovation, Improving Experiences, Changing Perceptions, and the Growth Mindset—serves as a different lens through which your company can convey information in a way that resonates with your audience. In a way they will want to hear.

Adopting a story type isn't just about adding strategic layers to your communication; it's about enhancing your company's credibility and showing its character in a way that isn't just functional but also emotional. It makes understanding your message feel easy and natural, strengthens your reputation, and fosters a sense of trust and loyalty among your customer base. It's not simply about wanting to tell a story; it's about the desire to share the right stories that embody the idea and importance of aligning with your core problems and objectives. You may have used to worry about connecting authentically, but not anymore!

As you navigate the world’s complexities, remember the importance of storytelling and that your story is an essential tool. When you need to connect with your audience, inspire action, and drive change, think about the power of the right narrative. Use this powerful asset wisely and watch as it transforms how your audience engages with your brand.

Don't wait until tomorrow, or next month, or next year to tell a good story. Act now.

Become a better storyteller without having to learn how to be a storyteller.

Do you want to discover which powerful story type best aligns with your company's unique obstacles and goals? To start take our simple Business Story Type Assessment and unlock understanding and the transformative power of storytelling for your company and work. Then, book a 20-minute Story Assessment call to talk through our proven tools and techniques for crafting stories for the right people at the right time. Plus, it's a great way to ask us any questions you may have.

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]]>The Seven Types of Business StoryMatthew WoodgetTue, 03 Oct 2023 13:53:36 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/the-growth-mindset-story-type-telling-your-story-through-the-lens-of-improvement64584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:651ac6e044ed1a402a742f5b

We all love a good story. Whether it's a book, a movie, or a personal anecdote, stories have the power to captivate and connect us on a deeper level.

As entrepreneurs and executives, we can tell stories of our companies, customers, products, and successes. But how do we tell these stories in a way that resonates with our audience and inspires them to take action?

One powerful technique is through the lens of a Growth Mindset Story Type. Here’s our guide to understanding what a growth mindset is, its impact on your business, and how to craft a powerful growth mindset business story that leaves a lasting impression on your customers.

The Growth Mindset: What It Really Is (and Isn’t)

I've always approached life with what is commonly thought of as a “growth mindset.” But I also subscribe to the belief that some people are better at some things than others: your strengths, your WHY. These are all unique blends.

For instance, my 11-year-old son is a highly talented drummer. He asked if I could drum like him.

My response: “If I spent a long time and worked incredibly hard at it, yes. But you have something in you, a talent, a passion, that means you love it so much and are drawn to it so much that the work doesn’t feel like work.”

Now, I do believe people have innate talents, but I also know that the research shows it will only get you so far. You have to work at it to turn that talent into success. Talent can give you the motivation and boost you need early on in an endeavor. This also makes people think they can't do things if they don't have a natural talent. They see talented people shooting off into the sunset with their immediate success and say, "I can't do THAT!"

I view a growth mindset as something that reframes how we think about our abilities and experiences. It's not about making a big deal about your mistakes; it's about bringing more value to what you do because of what you have learned. Be it through mistakes or active learning. The idea is that instead of focusing on what we can't do — which leads to a fixed, or worse yet, deficit mindset — we focus on what we can do, which fosters a growth mindset. The emphasis is on learning and improvement and that some success paves the way to other successes (ours or others).

The Impact of a Growth Mindset on a Business and Its Stories

Although adopting a growth mindset can benefit a business leader, it can also be difficult. Simply working harder does not guarantee better results or increased learning. It’s essential to use effective strategies, maintain consistency, and be open to feedback from individuals of all ranks within the organization.

To that end, embodying a growth mindset within your storytelling can significantly influence how you communicate about your business. This perspective allows you to craft narratives that deeply resonate with your audience, building empathy and creating a shared journey.

Stories told through a growth mindset lens can help those who hear them see obstacles as opportunities for learning and growth, enhancing a culture of continuous improvement. Consequently, such stories reinforce your organization's growth mindset and commitment to the customer experience. When these stories represent a facet of your value to customers, you build trust and loyalty, translating into long-term business success.

Applying the Growth Mindset Story Type

In a Growth Mindset Story Type, the focus is not just on the destination but the lessons learned along the way and how those lessons add value to the customer experience. Instead of presenting a glossy, picture-perfect image of your company, share the struggles, failures, and pivots that helped you get to where you are today and how the culture of a growth mindset enabled that. Look for the failures, too, when a fixed mindset is deployed.

As an organization that embodies a growth mindset, you will have stories to tell about your customers. Stories of asking questions, gathering feedback, and using this information to iterate and improve your products and services constantly.

You can also look internally for story inspiration. Does your organization support the talented, enabling them to double down and become brilliant at what they do? Do you also support those who struggle with encouragement to do things they thought were out of their reach? What about encouraging people to speak up and challenge the status quo? When they do, are they punished politically, or do people listen and consider their input — no matter how uncomfortable their challenging questions maybe? These are all sources of your growth mindset storytelling.

Another way to apply the growth mindset to storytelling is by demonstrating your company's commitment to ongoing education and improvement. Highlight how your team members constantly learn through professional development courses, peer feedback, or trying new things. By emphasizing the value of learning and growth within your company culture, you attract like-minded individuals and create a sense of momentum and progress that will inspire your audience to get involved.

I’ve had some clients express concerns about having a Growth Mindset Story Type, and they wonder if sharing a story crafted with it could diminish their credibility. The way to manage this is to clearly show how the growth experiences of your people and your company add value to the customer experience. Without such internal experiences, you couldn’t deliver what you do for your customers or clients.

Embracing Growth Mindset Stories

To tell your story through the lens of a growth mindset, you must embrace it. And even if you don't embody it today, that might change in the future. At that point, it might make sense to tell your story through that lens. If you are safe in the knowledge that a Growth Mindset Story Type is the right kind of story type for you to use in your storytelling, then embrace it wholeheartedly!

The Growth Mindset Story Type is a powerful tool for you as an entrepreneur or executive looking for a story that resonates with your audience. By embracing a growth mindset and framing your story as a journey of improvement, you can humanize your brand, build deeper connections with your audience, and inspire others to join you on the path toward progress.

Remember, the Growth Mindset Story Type may lead to other story types in the future, and that's OK. But telling this type of story when it makes sense will be a cornerstone of your company's ability to engage your audience.

Now is the time to showcase your growth mindset with powerful storytelling frameworks and tools. Take our Business Story Type Assessment, then schedule a 20-minute story assessment call with Go Narrative, and let's see if we can help you tell the right business story.  

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]]>The Growth Mindset Story Type: Telling Your Story Through the Lens of ImprovementMatthew WoodgetFri, 29 Sep 2023 22:31:37 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/embracing-the-journey-of-doubt-a-reflection-on-dave-hill-jrs-doubt-riding-shotgun64584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:65174afac83e3c0339760e6c

I recently had the pleasure of delving into a book that is a treasure trove of wisdom and insight, "Doubt Riding Shotgun" by my dear friend and an incredible human being, Dave Hill Jr. Dave’s exploration of the intricate world of doubt is both enlightening and deeply relatable, offering a fresh perspective on a topic that universally affects us all.

The Essence of Storytelling

Hill Jr.'s approach to storytelling is particularly engaging. He doesn’t just dole out advice; he shares personal anecdotes, making the narrative authentic and relatable. This approach is a reminder of the power of storytelling in business. By sharing our experiences and journeys, we can connect with our audience, making our message more impactful and memorable.

Understanding your doubt can be a valuable tool for your business storytelling, providing you with the fuel of authenticity. Our most powerful stories are the ones that come from a place of truth and honesty. Hill Jr.'s book is an excellent example of this. Doubt can often play a negative role in our lives, but it can also be used to bring contrast to the good stuff. By incorporating your doubts into your stories, you can create a more balanced and engaging emotional beat rather than being overly self-promoting. Authenticity is critical to connecting with your audience and building trust in your brand.

The Journey of Doubt

One of the standout elements of the book is the introduction of "the doubters." It’s a delightful revelation to consider how our doubt can serve as an inoculation against criticism, a perspective I hadn’t considered before. Viewing our relationship with doubt as a journey aligns with the broader perspective of life being a journey filled with ups and downs, challenges, and triumphs. It’s a reminder that in business storytelling, acknowledging the journey, with its highs and lows, makes the narrative more compelling and relatable.

Power Dynamics and Burnout

Hill Jr. delves deep into the power dynamics of doubt, highlighting how it can sometimes overstep its boundaries. This is evident in the discussion about burnout, a prevalent issue in today’s fast-paced world. The book suggests that while doubt might aim to shield us from burnout, it could inadvertently exacerbate the problem. This insight is crucial for business leaders, reminding us to be mindful of the narratives we create and the pressures we place on ourselves and our teams.

The Power of Metaphors

His use of metaphors, especially the analogy of the "not up to date" GPS system, is brilliant. It underscores the importance of updating our perspectives and breaking free from cycles that no longer serve us. In business storytelling, metaphors can be a powerful tool to convey complex ideas and, understandably, help the audience visualize and connect with the message.

Balancing Perspectives

The book also emphasizes the importance of recognizing the healthy aspects of doubt and flipping the narrative to see the potential benefits. This balanced view is a reminder that acknowledging different perspectives and fostering a healthy tension between them can lead to more informed and balanced decisions in business.

The Oversimplification of Doubt

The exploration of the 'oversimplification' aspect of doubt was enlightening. I realized that doubt often simplifies complex situations, leading to negative perceptions. This insight is particularly relevant in business storytelling, where oversimplification can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. It’s crucial to present information in a clear and balanced way, acknowledging the complexities and nuances of the situation.

Practical Insights and Exercises

Hill Jr. also addresses common issues like procrastination and analysis paralysis, highlighting their connection to doubt. The practical exercises provided in the book, such as asking oneself what doubt is most concerned about, offer actionable steps to combat these challenges. These insights are invaluable for business leaders, providing practical tools to navigate challenges and make more informed decisions.

When it comes to putting doubt in its place and achieving goals, Hill Jr. covers why it is vital to focus on the end result and the process of getting there. This is where the concept of process goals comes in. Hill Jr. suggests that by setting specific and achievable process goals, we can break down the larger goal into smaller, more manageable steps. By doing this, we can avoid feeling overwhelmed and discouraged (hallmarks of our doubt passenger) and instead feel a sense of progress and accomplishment as we work towards our larger goal. He goes even further by bringing in the importance of practicing self-care along the way, as doing so can also help to combat procrastination and promote a sense of well-being.

A Hopeful Pondering

As I reflect on Dave Hill Jr.’s book, I can’t help but feel a sense of hope and excitement. His approach to doubt, intertwined with personal stories and practical insights, opens up a world of possibilities. It makes me ponder what is possible if we embrace our doubts, learn from them, and use them to tell more authentic and impactful business stories.

In conclusion, "Doubt Riding Shotgun" is a masterful blend of personal anecdotes, scientific insights, and practical exercises. Dave Hill Jr. offers a comprehensive guide to understanding, engaging with, and ultimately harnessing doubt to our advantage. It’s a reminder of the power of storytelling in conveying complex ideas and connecting with our audience on a deeper level. I’m so excited for Dave to have published this book, and I can’t wait to see the impact it will have on the world.

Every business faces challenges with customer experiences at some point. Some are even just really good at continually “raising the bar” or relentlessly making things better for customers. How successful businesses prioritize the customer experience sets them apart.

You can harness those experiences and use them as an authentic story—represented by the Improving Experiences Type—that will help you get attention, be heard, and sell more. Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating storytelling with your Improving Experiences type that will resonate with and ultimately win over your customers. 

Identify the Challenges You Faced

The first step to building a message based on the Improving Experiences type is to identify and document anything negatively impacting your customers’ experiences, from poor service experiences to internal issues like employee performance or outdated systems.

Another challenge you may have faced could be adapting to changes in the market or industry. Did you invest in new tools or technology or shift your focus to accommodate the changing landscape and customer needs? Emphasize how your customers’ experiences relate to this need for change and demonstrate how your company treats its customers. Doing so will showcase your commitment to staying at the forefront of customer experience. 

Share How You Uncovered the Need for Change

Next, share how you realized there was room for improvement and the steps you took to improve things. Areas of improvement could include changing policies, improving an employee training program, or updating your technology to serve your customers better.

One challenge many businesses encounter is handling customer complaints and finding effective resolutions. In your story, consider highlighting instances where you faced difficult situations where customers were unhappy or frustrated, and share how your team worked to resolve those issues. Sometimes, the customer complaint process itself may have been flawed and needed fixing. If so, sharing how you adapted your approach to customer complaints can illustrate your dedication to improvement and customer satisfaction.

Every time you include a message that demonstrates how you improved experiences, it contributes to the consistency of the stories you tell, accrues to your brand narrative, and improves your brand storytelling. 

Demonstrate Where the Rubber Meets the Road

The next step is to expose what you did to enhance the customer experience. Specifics matter. They are an anchor. This part of your storytelling is an opportunity to emphasize the transformations that stemmed from the need to improve the customer experience. You may have implemented new systems and processes, invested in employee training to foster better customer experiences, introduced measures to ensure privacy, redesigned your product for improved user-friendliness, or developed new programs to educate employees on customer service. All these dramatic or subtle changes ensure your story shows a positive outcome.

Highlighting the evidence of successful resolutions, like positive customer reviews or increased sales, demonstrates your commitment to serving customers rather than merely profiting from them. By demonstrating that you have learned from past challenges and are committed to ongoing improvement, you position yourself as a role model, a leader, and a source of inspiration for others in your industry. When this happens, you are more likely to win over customers and attract the attention of other businesses, which could lead to future partnerships.

Do Improving Experience stories have to be about when things went wrong? No! That’s an accessible place to start. But what we are seeking to do here is to demonstrate how you care about improving experiences. That it is a priority for your organization. An Improving Experience story could be about improving a great experience. Maybe you have a council that focuses on excellence in customer experiences. If you don’t yet have one consider establishing one to “walk the talk” of the Improving Experiences stories you tell. 

Create Tension to Captivate and Engage Your Audience

When crafting, don't shy away from highlighting the challenges and difficulties encountered during the improvement process. Embracing these daunting topics adds tension and authenticity, helping your audience relate to your company.

By weaving tension in you captivate and keep your audience on the edge of their seats, eager to learn more about your brand's journey and commitment to their experience. This balance between tension and resolution keeps your audience engaged, which is the ultimate goal of your storytelling. 

Establish Emotional Connection Through Adversity

Exploring the hurdles you faced and the emotions you experienced during your business's transformation forges an emotional connection with your audience. You showcase your brand's vulnerability and humanity by being open about the moments of doubt, frustration, and setbacks. Customers can see themselves in your story and identify with your journey.

By sharing the emotional highs and lows, you make it clear that your business is not just about profit margins but about genuinely caring for your customers and striving to improve their experiences. Such an approach can create a sense of loyalty and trust that transcends typical customer-brand relationships and serves as the foundation for a strong community around your business.

And remember, this isn’t about just any challenge (The Challenge type) or change in direction (The Pivot type); it is about a laser focus and how much you care about and prioritize your customer’s experience. 

Showcase Your Commitment to Your Customer

The Improving Experiences Story Type is an opportunity to showcase your dedication to customer experiences. This commitment signals to your customers that you are there for them. By incorporating this message into your narrative, you assure customers of your dedication to their needs.

Showcasing your brand's ongoing commitment to customer experiences also positions your business as a leader and a source of inspiration within your industry. By embracing the lessons learned through providing less-than-perfect experiences or its relentless pursuit of creating increasingly improved experiences will win over customers and become an example of how a commitment to the experience can propel a company forward. As your story spreads, it can attract the attention of other companies, leading to potential partnerships and opportunities for collaboration.

Highlight Customer Communication 

Does your business prioritize open communication with customers to maximize experience improvement potential? If so, you may want to include this in your story to emphasize transparency and customer engagement. You can share how you provided updates about changes and progress to showcase your company's commitment to involving customers in the process and adapting to their needs.

Integrating open communication in your experience narrative reinforces trust and fosters collaboration, strengthening the bond between your business and its customers. By highlighting these aspects, your story will contribute to long-lasting customer loyalty and further establish your commitment to continuous improvement.

Conclusion

The Improving Experiences Story Type is thematic fuel designed to evoke authenticity through empathy, making your audience drawn to your brand like a moth to a flame. It’s a recipe to turn a negative experience into a story that supports your business’s future success. It shows that even when experiences are good, you do not rest on your laurels and are always dedicated to improving those experiences.

Ready to unlock the potential of the Improving Experiences Story Type for your business? Take our Business Story Type Assessment, then schedule a 20-minute story assessment call with Go Narrative to explore how we can assist you in crafting captivating stories and narratives that showcase your brand's commitment to customer satisfaction.

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]]>The Improving Experiences Story Type: What It Is and How to Use ItMatthew WoodgetTue, 01 Aug 2023 13:01:00 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/the-innovation-story-type-what-it-is-and-when-to-use-it64584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:64c766ae62261922ef4ecb60

Are you the kind of company that pushes the boundaries of creativity, innovation, and problem-solving? Do you thrive on developing new and unique solutions that bring transformative change to markets and industries? If you answered yes, you need an equally inspiring brand story that conveys your company's values and vision for the future: the Innovation Story Type.   

The Innovation Story Type, one of the seven universal story types defined by Go Narrative, is perfect for businesses that drive innovation and originality. This blog post shows you how to create an innovative brand story that captivates your audience and sets your business apart.

Your Unique Selling Proposition Is What Sets You Apart  

Before you can start crafting an effective Innovation story, you first need to think about WHY your company stands apart from competitors. Answering this can make it easier to create a compelling brand story that highlights these differences and delivers a unique customer experience.   

To uncover your unique selling proposition, look at how your offering solves a specific problem. What benefits do you offer over the competition (faster delivery, improved quality, or a better price range, for example)? How do these benefits impact potential customers? 

We like to frame this with our clients as the "strategic positioning" — the understanding of the WHAT and HOW of your offering with your customer. Once you have identified your unique value proposition and strategic positioning, you can then begin finding a creative and engaging way to present them to your audience.

Who Is Your Target Audience?  

Crafting a brand story requires understanding your audience — and having a clear strategic positioning will help you get there. But don't try to boil the ocean. We find it’s best to pick one audience to start with and achieve success there before moving to the next.   

Focusing on the people your solution can help the most, and speaking directly to them with your story is a good starting point, but you also need to consider the channels that resonate with them. The more specific you are, the easier it is to tailor your brand story to their unique needs. Then, as you become more experienced with crafting stories for this one target audience, you can move on to other audiences.   

By creating personas for your priority target buyers and the influencers of those buyers, you can further explore the how and where of your audience’s purchasing patterns. This provides a foundation to develop buyer decision journeys that you can use to ensure you have the right stories. But don’t forget the content across the customer journey. With personas and journeys, you’ll have the tools to make that content sing. 

Consistent Storytelling that Inspires Change 

With a strategic narrative, you can maintain consistency in your brand story across all platforms and inspire action from your target audience. But consistent messaging does more than just reinforcing and clarifying your brand to make your story more memorable. It also helps your audience form an emotional connection with your brand, which, in turn, drives change and engagement.  

One of the best places to look for Innovation stories is history, your history. If you are a new startup, your story is a rich source of tales. How and why did this all come about in the first place? But don’t forget why your founder(s) committed to this world-changing effort. Tell that story.  

If you are a more established business, new products in your portfolio (or major improvements to existing ones) are likely from a deep and meaningful understanding of your existing customers. But do you know which customer brought the "ah-ha" moment? When did that happen, and who was involved?  

Whichever story you select, you'll be off to the races. But you’ve laid your foundation which will have you telling a compelling story in no time. A story with real people, real obstacles, and a solution that inspires people to change with you and not your competition.

Transparency Begets Authenticity 

The most authentic story for any organization or individual is the one that centers on their experiences but doesn’t forget the employees who work tirelessly to achieve this success. Such a story fosters a sense of genuine connection and trust, as they humanize your company, making it more than a faceless entity. It projects how a collective of individuals worked towards a shared goal.  

Customer stories, or case studies, also hold immense value, as allow potential clients to see how others in their position have benefitted from the organization's offerings. But don’t just write boring case studies. By showcasing real-life experiences, customer stories serve as powerful testimonials, validating the company's claims and assuring potential customers that their needs and expectations will be met.   

While fictional stories may not hold the same level of authenticity as personal or customer stories, they allow organizations to create ideal scenarios that represent the aspirations and goals of their target audience. By crafting a compelling narrative that resonates with the desires and needs of potential customers, companies can communicate their vision and purpose and evoke a sense of hope and inspiration, encouraging people to see themselves as part of the journey toward success.   

But fiction does more than that. It makes a world people want to be a part of. Therefore, when they start to buy from you, they turn that into a reality and fuel real customer case studies and stories.

Story Evolution  

But don’t stop here! Continually reevaluate your brand story as your company evolves. This will ensure your story remains authentic. Don’t forget about your values. Analyzing how your brand stories are received using engagement, conversions, and customer feedback metrics provides valuable insights into their effectiveness, allowing you to refine them further and maximize their impact. It also shows you if your values are resonating. And if not, you have more story work to do.

Maintain a powerful brand narrative and avoid complacency by regularly assessing your story's relevancy against market trends, the political climate, and societal changes. But ignoring these truths will result in a tone-deaf narrative that fails to resonate with your audience and causes significant damage to your brand's reputation.  

As a real-world example, consider Kodak, which was once considered to be a household name in the film and camera market. However, its failure to adapt to market trends and emerging technologies ultimately led to its downfall.  

Kodak’s competitors, including Nikon and Canon, embraced the digital photography revolution that began in the early 2000s. The company didn’t react quickly enough to this shift in consumer preferences and behaviors and continued to lean into its traditional film-based products. The result was a brand narrative that seemed irrelevant, outdated, and disconnected from the emerging world of digital cameras and smartphone photography, thus alienating a once-loyal customer base. Ultimately, Kodak was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2012, ending its reign as a highly recognized and respected name in photography products.  

The fall of Kodak is a cautionary tale for brands that may be feeling complacent with their current messaging and don’t take the time to assess their story’s relevancy in the current market. Ignoring changing consumer behaviors and tech trends in your industry can lead to a tone-deaf narrative that fails to resonate with your audience and tarnishes your reputation, just like what happened to Kodak.  

Not sure how your narrative is going to come across to your audience? An outside perspective can be invaluable in ensuring your brand story remains fresh, engaging, and on point. Working with a company like Go Narrative on your brand storytelling means you’ll benefit from a wealth of experience in crafting effective stories for clients across various industries. This enables us to bring creativity and insight that may not be possible with an in-house team.

Conclusion  

Good storytelling requires creativity, discipline, and commitment, but it can be a powerful asset in any organization if done effectively. That’s why it’s essential for companies looking to foster deep connections with their target audience to embrace the Innovation Story Type.    

Ready to discover the power of storytelling for your business? Discover your ideal business Story Type with our assessment, then schedule a 20-minute story assessment call with Go Narrative to learn how we can help you craft compelling stories and narratives about your brand. Our team of experts will guide you through the process, helping you pinpoint your unique catalyst story and develop a captivating, customer-focused narrative that drives success through storytelling for your business. Don't miss the opportunity to harness the power of the Innovation Story Type to propel your company forward.

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]]>The Innovation Story Type: What It Is and When to Use ItMatthew WoodgetThu, 06 Jul 2023 14:06:35 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/9vppke4fkrzrsnf0ux6acvrvnhpccl64584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:64a406aa5defb4567d0f77b7

A catalyst can be defined as any element that drives a reaction or change.

When you look back at your own journey, you can likely identify a catalyst that pushed your brand to develop the specific products or services you currently offer. Likewise, your customers have experienced a specific pain point in their lives that acted as a catalyst for them to find and work with your brand.

The Catalyst Story Type connects the dots between your brand experiences and your audience's pain points and delivers a narrative that truly resonates with them. As one of the Seven Universal Business Story Types, a Catalyst story highlights the transformative power of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. It demonstrates your brand's growth from humble beginnings to industry leader.

In this blog, we'll explore the brand details that can help you identify and develop a Catalyst story and determine whether it’s the right one for your brand to tell right now.

Identifying Your Brand’s Catalyst Story

A Catalyst story revolves around your journey and how it has driven you to create customer-specific solutions. This story type uniquely positions you to address your audience’s pain points while promoting authenticity and vulnerability, which is essential for fostering customer trust.

Identifying your catalyst story involves introspection and understanding your strengths and weaknesses. It must be framed within the context of your audience's challenges, through their eyes and their story. Show how your brand’s experiences have provided insights into these challenges, allowing you to develop targeted solutions.

You can forge a deep emotional connection with your audience by demonstrating empathy for your customers' struggles and sharing how you overcame similar obstacles. In a way, you are bringing your story and your audience's story together in one compelling narrative.

Openly discussing your journey, including the obstacles you've faced and the lessons you've learned, shows your audience that you are genuine and relatable through brand storytelling. This authenticity, in turn, paves the way for lasting customer relationships and loyalty. And that will result in a shared story that will carry your audience further on their own journeys.

Once identified, your Catalyst story becomes the basis for your brand messaging, providing a consistent and memorable theme that ties everything together. By consistently sharing a good story across all your brand communications and touch points, you remind your customers of the values and experiences that set you apart, further strengthening the emotional connection between your brand and your audience.

A Customer-Centric Brand Story

A customer-centric approach is essential to ensuring that your storytelling makes a lasting emotional connection with your audience. Before you jump into crafting the Catalyst story itself, try to understand your target customer’s demographics, preferences, and motivations. By tailoring your narrative to your target audience, you create a stronger connection and increase the likelihood that they will identify with your story.

To truly take a customer-centric approach to your brand, you’ll need to regularly engage with your customers through storytelling and actively seek their feedback. This ongoing dialogue helps refine your story and demonstrates your commitment to understanding and addressing your audience's needs. Incorporating their insights into your narrative establishes a partnership built on trust, empathy, and collaboration. It will ensure your brand storytelling draws them in, rather than pushing them away.

Strengthening Your Catalyst Brand Story Through Company Culture

Catalysts maximize existing resources, tools, and personnel to create unique solutions for customer needs. This requires creativity, collaboration, and an understanding of customer requirements so you can leverage your unique history and skillset to keep innovating for your customers.

By developing a culture of continuous improvement, you can ensure your company remains agile and responsive to changing market conditions and audience needs. Encourage your team to share ideas, experiment with new strategies, and learn from failures through the power of storytelling. This type of collaborative environment nurtures innovation and keeps your company at the forefront of your industry, ensuring you continue to provide transformative solutions for your customers.

Additionally, leveraging external resources and partnerships can help maximize your business's potential. Invest in training your team on storytelling. By collaborating with other organizations, you can access new insights, ideas, and technologies, expand your capabilities, and enhance your offerings. This approach strengthens your Catalyst story and reinforces your commitment to providing the best possible solutions for your customers.

Basecamp: A Catalyst Story

Years ago, entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson ran a web design company called 37signals. While working on client projects, they faced challenges managing tasks, deadlines, and communication among their team members. Little did they know at the time, their story would change dramatically.

Drawing from their own experiences and struggles, Fried and Hansson developed a project management tool called Basecamp designed to address the specific issues they encountered in their business. Their firsthand understanding of the challenges businesses face in managing projects and collaborating with teams allowed them to create a solution that resonated with other companies experiencing similar issues. It set them up for storytelling that was authentic and engaging.

This approach of developing solutions inspired by their own struggles has allowed Basecamp to deliver value to its customers uniquely and meaningfully — and it's a rich bed for the company’s brand storytelling.

By understanding the pain points and needs of businesses managing projects and collaborating with teams, Basecamp has developed and refined its product to better address these challenges. This gives their audience a good story to connect with.

For example, Basecamp's "Work Can Wait" campaign used storytelling to emphasize the importance of work-life balance and how their project management tool helps businesses achieve that. The campaign focused on the idea that work shouldn't consume employees' lives and that using Basecamp can lead to more efficient project management, allowing for a better balance between work and personal life. Now that's storytelling!

Transforming and Elevating Your Brand with a Catalyst Story

A powerful and impactful business narrative using the Catalyst Story Type resonates with customers, leverages existing resources for unique solutions, and transforms and elevates customers' businesses. Through a Catalyst brand story, you can emphasize the transformative power of your product or service. You will demonstrate its value through storytelling in a way that resonates with customers.

Don't tell your audience what to do in your brand communications. Instead, tell them a story that positions your offering as a force that solves pain points and drives growth, taking customers' businesses to the next level.

Tell your story in this way, and you’ll build a thriving, customer-centric business that stands out in a crowded market. Your brand story will be one that will get attention and ensure you are heard. When storytelling is at the heart of your brand, your audience will relate and engage with you.

Ready to find the right type of story to tell for your business now? Book a 20-minute story assessment call with Go Narrative to learn how we can help you craft powerful narratives about your brand and drive business success through storytelling.

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]]>The Catalyst Story Type: What It Is and When to Use ItMatthew WoodgetTue, 06 Jun 2023 00:57:19 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/the-pivot-story-type-what-it-is-and-when-to-use-it-164584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:647e82db27fafa2cdc226db7

When a business is looking to change direction, leaders are tasked with navigating the complexities of a strategic shift, which demands new solutions and careful consideration of how to move forward.

Though pivoting your operations can seem overwhelming, implementing a transition presents the opportunity to tell a compelling story. Do this by combining engaging narrative elements and concrete, actionable steps. With a powerful story, leaders can guide teams through periods of upheaval with authority and inspire them toward collective success.

This blog post will explore why storytelling can be invaluable for executing major changes with poise and precision.

Why use the pivot story type?

Pivoting represents a growth and change narrative, recognizing new opportunities and steering the company toward them. When you craft the stories you tell around "The Pivot Story Type," you craft tales of transformation that charts your organization's journey through the shifts.

Pivoting allows businesses to find new revenue streams, tap into new markets, and respond to unforeseen market changes. It can help them stay relevant in a highly competitive landscape. Pivoting enables businesses to adapt to constantly evolving market demands and meet new trends, technologies, or customer preferences.

Take a look at your company: Have you recently refreshed your values? If so, why?

Perhaps you refreshed your core values to reflect the changing needs of your community and market. Maybe you determined that your focus should be on collaboration, creativity, diversity, and inclusivity to ensure everyone interacting with you feels accepted and valued. Whatever refresh you made, share the story of how you made this decision and the outcome for your organization.

Failing to recognize the need for change can have long-term implications, such as a decrease in revenue, loss of market share, or failure.

Your pivot story is one worth telling, and it can inspire stakeholders and customers. As leaders, we must communicate this story effectively, weaving an engaging narrative with concrete action steps. The pivot story type provides a valuable lens through which we can understand, navigate, and celebrate change.

Through this, we foster an environment of understanding and inspiration for our team, equipping them to steer through the upheaval and work toward success. Stories of pivots not only become chapters of change and adaptation, but they also stand as powerful symbols of progress and determination. Let's embrace the pivot, tell its story, and in doing so, prepare our organizations for the vibrant ebb and flow of the business world.

Identify those that could be affected by this change in direction

When considering a business pivot, identify the key stakeholders affected, including customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, partners, and competitors. Each stakeholder will have a different level of interest in the change, along with unique perspectives and concerns. For instance, employees may worry about job security or role changes, while shareholders may focus on the financial impact.

By taking the time to identify and engage with key stakeholders, businesses can anticipate potential issues and take steps to mitigate adverse effects by tailoring the story to each audience. This, in turn, builds trust and ensures a smoother transition and a more successful outcome.

Look at the pivot successes of others

Despite the challenges, the pivot concept has historically proven beneficial for businesses and stakeholders. By embracing a pivot, you adopt a growth mindset that allows you to explore new possibilities and unlock new opportunities, just like many successful companies, such as IBM and Nintendo, have done in the past.

IBM, founded in 1911, was initially known for its success in manufacturing and selling mainframe computers and hardware systems. However, when faced with declining revenues and near bankruptcy due to the rise of personal computers and shrinking demand for mainframe systems in the early 1990s, the company responded by undergoing significant transformations — including reducing its workforce and refocusing the company's efforts on software and services — that laid the foundation for IBM's future success as a global technology and consulting company.

And by 1996, IBM was telling a story about how the internet would create a paradigm shift in business models that had remained largely untouched for centuries. And that it would transform the nature of how both businesses and consumers interacted, coining the term e-business in the process

Another example of a successful business pivot is Nintendo. They were originally founded as a manufacturer of playing cards in 1889. Yes, you read that correctly. The company pivoted to become a leading producer of electronic games and consoles. In the 1970s, Nintendo began producing electronic games and launched its first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), in 1985. In recent years, it pivoted again with a renewed focus on mobile gaming and the development of the hybrid home console and portable handheld device, the Nintendo Switch. These pivots have allowed Nintendo to continue to innovate and grow in a highly competitive industry, solidifying its position as a leading video game company.

The Nintendo Switch story was about changing (switching) how you played, where you played, and even who played with the device. It's narrative was so refined it manifested in the device's name. Brilliant branding.

Pivoting their business strategies has allowed IBM and Nintendo to stay agile, increase profits, and maintain their competitive edge. They have done so in the face of ever-evolving market demands, finding long-term success in today's rapidly changing world.

And each pivot brought with it the need to tell a new story.

Account for potential risks

Potential risks and concerns are bound to arise when pivoting a business; however, being proactive and developing a story that considers those obstacles can alleviate concerns and ensure success.

Whether it's financial risk, brand reputation, or loss of customers, explore in detail how to integrate those topics into your story. Do this by anticipating any challenges, then develop a story that accounts for those potential risks.

At the same time, remain confident in your pivot and stay optimistic about the future. The goal is to create a strategic and inspiring narrative to get people excited about what's ahead, highlighting the potential rewards of embracing change and taking risks.

Through authentic storytelling, recognize and celebrate milestones achieved during the pivot. Look to team members, customers, and partners who played a role and tell their stories. This will show appreciation for the effort and dedication, motivate others, and create a culture that celebrates progress and growth, building trust, loyalty, and confidence in your organization.

Engage stakeholders beyond your four walls with an external story

To effectively reach — and resonate with — stakeholders, develop a compelling external story that engages them beyond their immediate sphere of influence. Switch it up (pun intended) but keep the core narrative the same!

An authentic, consistent, and transparent story can highlight your organization's commitment to driving social impact while establishing credibility with external partners, customers, and investors. But to find that story, companies must uncover their unique value proposition and determine what sets them apart from the competition.

Start by creating a clear vision for the future by understanding key stakeholders' needs, then craft a unique message that speaks directly to them. Your external story should highlight tangible examples of your plan to impact the community and market  — for example, are you launching an initiative or program or forming a partnership or alliance? Outline how your story will be shared and which channels you'll use.

In today's ever-changing landscape, companies must be agile and willing to shift strategic plans to stay relevant. Knowing the proper steps to make a change can help ensure a successful pivot that pleases all stakeholders while staying true to the organization's core values.

Embrace the power of the "Pivot Story Type" as you navigate change. An authentic narrative encapsulating your strategic shift informs stakeholders and deeply engages them in your transformation. Show your commitment to driving social impact and making it tangible. With the pivot story, you're inviting stakeholders into your journey, resonating with them, and drawing them towards your shared success. Your evolution is an announcement and an invitation to be part of a larger, purpose-driven change.

Now is the time for companies to challenge convention and capitalize on the opportunity for transformation. If you're interested in making an impactful transition, book a 20 min story assessment, and let's see if we can help you tell the right business story.

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]]>The Pivot Story Type: What It Is and When to Use ItMatthew WoodgetMon, 03 Apr 2023 22:30:08 +0000https://www.gonarrative.com/business-storytelling-blog/tell-a-challenge-story64584bc76837b03c7276da1e:6462e95a94f00371932b0ec5:6462e95bbebe2341b599e31d

As any leader knows, all businesses go through ups and downs. Particularly at a time when a recession is looming and many are struggling to keep up, business is bound to fluctuate. However, it’s the way a business grows from these challenges and uses those stories that can make or break it.

And, importantly the storytelling a company employs can help pave the way to success.

Let’s look at the types of stories you should be telling when your business has been through (or is currently going through) a challenging time.

Change shapes THE way we should approach our storytelling strategy

There are three constants in the world: death, taxes, and change. I'd suggest the addition of storytelling, but I am obsessed.

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.” – James Baldwin 

Now, here's the thing with change: It can bring about positives. Government regulations could change, or a competitor could go out of business, opening up new opportunities for your business. 

Conversely, change can also negatively impact a business. For example, those same government regulation changes could make business more difficult and force you to seek help, or a competitor could be doing particularly well and put immense pressure on you. 

Whether it’s positive or negative, change brings with it a set of challenges. Consider the above example: the government regulations changed — do you have enough staff? How are you going to handle the impact? 

If you main competitor goes out of business — are you going to make the most of the new opportunity? Will you be able to serve all of your competitor's customers as well as your existing customers? 

While not every business is in the midst of a challenge, there will be change in the future. Or maybe your past contains such a change that profoundly impacted your business. Regardless of where your business is right now, those changes impose challenges worthy of a story.

The risks of the wrong type of storytelling

Think of a story type like a theme for your story. As a business leader, you need to determine which of the seven universal business story types — the challenge, pivot, catalyst, innovation, improving experiences, changing perceptions, or growth mindset — is right for your company right now. Let’s explore the challenge story type!

The right story at the proper time is imperative to engagement and ensuring press releases do the right thing — unlike that of Silicon Valley Bank, for example, where awful storytelling managed to destroy not just an entire business but shake the biggest economy in the world to its very foundation. 

Going back to the government regulation example, let’s say a regulation changed, imposing negative challenges on your business. As the CEO, you find yourself on stage at an event representing your company. If your storytelling doesn’t address this change the questions will come thick and fast. Your audience wants to know. They will see any attempt at telling a different story as an effort in deceit and deflection. 

Sharing the right type of story gives your audience answers; you can use it as a theme throughout big reveals at events and in press releases and all the way into the stories that find themselves in your sales and marketing messaging.

How to determine the right ‘challenge story’

Tough times force us to adapt, which makes us better — and of course, makes for a good story. To determine the right challenge story for your business, ask yourself these questions: 

• Are we going through a major change?

• Have we been dealing with major challenges recently?

• Has something forced us to rethink things? 

Consider whether everything has been going well in the business — maybe a recent failure, poor decision, struggle, marketing challenge, or adversity forced a difficult decision and led to change, and in dealing with that challenge, you’ve had to navigate how to improve and approach things. 

What was it that pushed you to adapt to act faster or differently? 

What were the burdens that forced you into a situation where the type of story that makes sense for you is that of a challenge story?

 All of these elements are authentic. They will stoke the fires of empathy in the hearts and minds of your customers, and in doing so, attracts them to you

Unlock your business’s storytelling using past experiences, both good and bad

A challenge story could have been expressed externally, such as with the competition and regulation examples we talked about earlier. However, it can also be an internal challenge. Don’t forget to look inside your company. 

Identify internal challenges by asking: 

• Have we had challenges with processes?

• Have you and your team been struggling to change old ideas to new ones?

• Have you been striving for a new way or approach? 

Once you’ve addressed these questions, go on the hunt for stories that represent the internal challenges of your company. When you’re confident that challenge storytelling makes sense for your organization, use it as a filter within those challenges you've identified. There are bound to be stories; by tapping into these authentic stories, businesses will find a rich, fertile bed of opportunities to build transparency and trust with customers. 

But you don't have to stop there. As you think about that new marketing push or sales strategy, how can you weave in the concept of this challenge you managed to overcome? By overcoming a challenge, we learn things. It teaches us something. In your storytelling share that to inspire audiences and customers to also navigate their own challenges.

Leverage the power of your failures for authentic challenge-type storytelling

A company that fits the challenge story profile is BlackBerry. Formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM).

And unfortunately, to this day, they have failed to capitalize on this story. It would have been such a good story. Don’t even get me started on the lack of storytelling on their current website.

BlackBerry was once a dominant player in the smartphone market, particularly during the mid-2000s, thanks to its innovative devices with physical keyboards, secure messaging, and reliable email capabilities. The company's BlackBerry smartphones were especially popular among business professionals and government agencies.

However, with the introduction of Apple's iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent rise of Android smartphones, BlackBerry's market share began to decline rapidly. The company's devices failed to keep pace with the competition in terms of design, user experience, and app ecosystems. Additionally, the increasing consumer preference for touchscreens and versatile mobile operating systems put BlackBerry at a significant disadvantage.

In response to this adversity, BlackBerry made several attempts to reinvent itself, including the release of BlackBerry 10 OS in 2013, which aimed to compete with iOS and Android. Unfortunately, the new platform did not gain enough traction to reverse the company's fortunes.

Recognizing the need for a more drastic change, BlackBerry decided to pivot its business focus from hardware to software and services. In 2016, the company announced it would stop manufacturing smartphones and outsource its production to third parties. Instead, BlackBerry concentrated on developing secure software solutions.

I’d have liked to have seen a strategic narrative such as BlackBerry Reborn. Rebirth is a metanarrative we all instantly recognize. Their tagline could be: "Evolution Unleashed: Secure. Smart. Seamless."

 Key narrative elements for a good story could be; 

• BlackBerry has evolved to become a provider of secure software solutions and services.

• Trust BlackBerry's industry-leading security to protect your data and communications.

• BlackBerry's seamless integration ensures a smooth transition for businesses and individuals

These are authentic elements that build on the challenge that forced their business to change. And are ripe for all sorts of storytelling.

By telling a challenge story BlackBerry could position itself as a leading provider of secure software solutions and services. In a way that highlights BlackBerry's authentic history and dedication to innovation, security, and seamless integration. The bonus? It would allow businesses and individuals to trust the company with their data and communications needs. And trust Blackberry for telling an authentic, good story. A challenge story type becomes a strong, consistent message that resonates with the target audience and helps to re-establish BlackBerry's position as a trusted brand in the tech industry. 

Through the "BlackBerry Reborn" strategic narrative, the company could learn to successfully communicate its transformation and commitment to providing cutting-edge, secure solutions for its customers. 

Instead of leaning into this, they ran away from it.

It’s not too late, Blackberry. If you work for Blackerry please reach out. We can help you learn to capitalize on this.

While the challenge story might not be the most dominant story for you to tell right now, heed my warning: At some point in the not-too-distant future, it may well be the right type of story to be telling. Keep this blog book marked to help when the time calls for it. However, you need to be the judge of whether or not the challenge is weighty enough to be the sort of good story you tell — or maybe changing perceptions with the market and customers, like in our last blog, wins out.

What challenges have you faced? Have you ever had the need to tell a challenge story? I'd love to hear from you.

When you reach out we can take you through our Business Story Type Assessment. Then we can show you how to tell the best possible story for your business.

Ready to find the right type of story to tell for your business now? Book a 20 min story assessment call with Go Narrative to learn how we can help you craft powerful stories and narratives about your brand.