I heard this on Lex Fridman's podcast with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on "storytelling"<p>Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people?<p>Kevin Scott: ...(snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important.<p>Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too.<p>Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing.<p>Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.
I’m a part of a very quickly growing startup, and I’ve realized the power of narrative/storytelling big time in the last few months. It just doesn’t scale to tell everyone what to do, you have to get them all bought in on the Why via a compelling story and allow them to drive towards that through their own ideas.
> narratives (not facts) are what move people<p>I actually find this practice really annoying. If I'm on contract cutting together some hack's godawful kung fu action film, the last thing I want to hear is the fiction he tells himself to get to sleep every night. Narrative is what we give to the public when we want to trick them into thinking that buying low-quality shoes will end world poverty. It has no place inside the company. Maybe it's helpful for customers to believe in the fantasy version of your company, but inside, you want people who know what is really going on, and are willing to participate without the use of such tricks.
You know I don't normally recommend books I read or have read, but both of these books below really resonate with me:<p>"The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers":
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_16" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&...</a><p>"What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture":
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2S6R0FSJS0VSB&keywords=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&qid=1575914558&sprefix=the+hard+thing+a%2Caps%2C365&sr=8-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref...</a>
I thought the article got better later on, but, the opening couple of paragraphs that emphasized story telling were very weak.<p>Senior leadership has a much better understanding of the business context and long term plan than I do, but, I have a much better understanding of the problem details in my specific domain.<p>What I find most valuable from senior leadership is clear feedback about how what we are doing fits in the broader context of what the company is doing, as well as specific high level feedback on the roadmap of our org.<p>The story format can be helpful to frame a vision of how you'd like a product launch to go, but, it's not suitable at all for most of the communication a CEO/SVP does.
Internal communication FROM the CEO is important, and it's nice to see a comprehensive article review a lot of important tactics.<p>However, where a lot of executives also fail is not allowing/encouraging/listening to the discussion that is ABOUT the CEO and Organization. Employee perspective can be very valuable too.<p>Just talking at someone is never the right or effective way, 99.9% of the time.
It's not storytelling or any other skill. It's who you know. Look at the recycled clowns that are many CEOs. Buy back shares. Hire more recycled faces. Nothing interesting there.
I'd caution that "narrative" and "story telling" can lead to fables. You should understand this as defining a clear vision, why it matters, how to get there, what it will look like on Monday morning once you've arrived and then ensure individuals and teams have clearly defined roles and own those roles. This is what Jobs' reality distortion field was built on.
Great post talking about the value of an internal "communication architecture."<p>Related post worth checking out: <a href="https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-architecture-the-ceos-most-important-operational-responsibility-28937bd291e8" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/designing-a-communication-a...</a>
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.<p>Enough said.
Totally agree people benefit from understanding the why - it allows them to bring their own capabilities to the problem, not just follow instructions.<p>Not so sure it needs to be in the form of a narrative though...<p>Why isn't the 'why' a just a fact?<p>By building a story to try to get emotional engagement, aren't you guilty of trying to over-control people's emotional response?<p>If you give them the facts they can make their own personal connections to the mission - again bringing their own story to it, rather than top down.<p>You do need to tailor it to your workforce of course - I work in a high tech industry with lots of self-motivated PhD's.
What a about the people that identify CEO is trying to sell smoke?<p>Some people are tired to hear the same story again and again, in one place or another.<p>When will we empower transparency?