The corporate storytelling trap:
Everyone buys in, except your teams
Welcome to the storytelling trap in the corporate world: where narrative gets ahead of action, where form eclipses substance, and where the first people to stop believing… are often your own teams.
One morning, you open your inbox and discover you’ve become the “Innovation Lead” for Project Horizon. Just yesterday, you were a “Cross-functional Project Officer” working on internal restructuring. Same desk, same headaches, new aura. The project’s name has changed too: no more “post-merger working group” — now it’s the grand-sounding “Alpha Synergy Program.” And you know it’s not just semantics. In corporate life, storytelling isn’t just for show. It shapes reality — or at least, a version of it that’s convenient and marketable. Sometimes, it’s frankly fictional.
Corporate Storytelling: The Art of Gift-Wrapping Vagueness
Naming a project or role isn’t a decorative flourish. It’s an act of power.
It’s like slapping a label on a box no one’s opened yet — it steers perception and sets the boundaries of what others are allowed to see.
The philosopher J.L. Austin called these “performative utterances”: words that don’t describe but create. In the workplace, calling something a “strategic initiative” is often enough to unlock budget, attention, and an aura of legitimacy.
But when you say “transformation” while tweaking superficial workflows, or “innovation” to mean a recycled Excel benchmark, you’ve already stepped into a shared fiction. And the more convincingly you tell the story, the more you’re tempted to believe it yourself.
The Narrative Mirage: When Comms Outrun Reality
Some companies get so good at talking the talk, they start to lose sight of the ground beneath their feet.
The shift often feels innocent, even well-intentioned. But it’s nothing new.
Authoritarian regimes, closed systems, airless bureaucracies — from the Soviets to modern spin doctors — have always had a thing for grand narratives, hollow slogans, and rewritten realities. And it never ends well.
Look at Enron, Theranos, or WeWork: companies that traded actual strategy for a compelling storyline. Polished narratives full of lofty values, masking a much darker truth. Sleek messaging that smothered dissent and muffled red flags.
The result? Careers wrecked, investors wiped out, personal lives shattered and collective trust severely fractured. In these cases, storytelling — meant to unify — morphed into a narrative bubble just waiting to burst.
Walking the Tightrope Between Narrative and Reality
So, should we abandon corporate stories altogether? Of course not.
Humans need meaning. Teams need direction. When well-told, a story can align, mobilize, and ignite momentum.
But only if it’s grounded in shared reality.
Meaning isn’t decreed in editorial meetings. It grows out of facts, of lived history: a crisis weathered, a founding gesture, a lesson learned. However messy, these moments and team rituals are the raw materials of credible, and thus rallying stories – stories.
When the story draws from this living substance, it resonates. When it doesn’t, it quickly feels like window dressing, or worse, a red flag.
Because a company’s narrative isn’t just packaging. It’s a tacit contract.
And if it rings false, trust shatters in an instant.
The Power of a Story Lies in Naming Things Right
Corporate culture isn’t branding. It’s the art of seeing clearly — then naming with precision. That requires:
– Describing without embellishing
– Naming without distorting
– Embodying what you claim to stand for
– Choosing truth over spectacle
There are narratives that don’t manipulate. Stories that flow naturally because they’re rooted in lived experience.
Stories teams don’t need to “believe in” — because they’ve actually lived them.
Slapped-on storytelling breeds doubt.
Lived stories breed belief.
And sometimes, that’s where it all begins:
When a true story rekindles desire, unites energy, and gives an organization the courage to attempt what it never dared before.
