You Don't Need Better Storytellers

Stories work when they are coherent — and joyful

In the previous Letter, we asked what happens when our stories over-rely on rupture to create meaning. Today, we examine the consequences of that habit in business. As storytelling becomes a buzzword, the real work may lie elsewhere: in coherence, perception, and the futures organizations are choosing.

• You Don’t Need Better Storytellers
  • Stories work when they are coherent — and joyful
    • A hunger that isn’t really about content
    • The quiet category error
    • Why this is surfacing now
    • Campbell’s point, applied with intention
    • The instinct behind the storyteller rush
    • Wenders, perception, and coherence
    • Where story really begins
    • Steve Jobs, the liberal arts, and integration
    • Integration makes the story
    • Joy as the test
    • A quiet conclusion
  • Diagnostics for DYNAMO members
    • The Orientation Test
    • The Perception Barrier
    • The Joy Test

Lately, it seems like everyone in business is talking about the need for storytellers.

The word shows up in job descriptions, earnings calls, and strategy decks. Companies are reorganizing communications teams around “storytelling.” Executives talk about needing to “tell their story better” to cut through a fragmented, distrustful attention economy.

At one level, this all makes sense. Attention is fractured, trust is harder to earn, and many of the channels companies relied on for decades no longer work the way they once did.

But I don’t think storytelling itself is the real problem being named here.

A hunger that isn’t really about content

When leaders say they need storytellers, they’re reaching for something more basic: coherence.

They want customers, employees, and investors to understand what the company is doing, why it exists, and where it’s headed—without needing a fresh explanation every time. They want the pieces to add up intuitively.

In other words, they’re hungry for good stories.

Not campaigns. Not clever copy. Not more content.

Stories that make sense of the world people already inhabit, and help them locate a product or brand within the texture of their own lives.

That hunger is real. The diagnosis is wrong.

The quiet category error

Most responses to this hunger focus on the telling.

Hire better writers. Produce more content. Launch podcasts. Put executives on stage.

All of this treats storytelling as an output problem: something you apply at the end.

But stories don’t begin with communication. They begin much earlier, with orientation: what an organization is actually organized around, and what it assumes about value, progress, and the future.

If that underlying orientation is unclear, or internally inconsistent, no amount of storytelling will fix it. You can polish the language, but the dissonance still leaks through.

Storytelling doesn’t start at the end of the process, and it doesn’t live in marketing. It starts at the beginning. And it starts at the top.

Every story has a moral. The purpose of a story, or its lack thereof, is set by leadership. It can’t be delegated to marketing.

What an organization believes about the future — what it assumes is possible, desirable, or worth building — shows up everywhere. In its investments. In its trade-offs. In what it treats as non-negotiable.

By the time a story reaches communications, the course has already been set.

Why this is surfacing now

It’s tempting to assign this trend to the rise of social media or the decline of attention spans, but that explanation feels incomplete.

We’re living through a period of genuine transition. It’s the beginning of what I’ve elsewhere called the Circular Century: a new era in which linear assumptions about growth, ownership, and value no longer hold, and new forms of coherence are required.

The shift from linear to circular systems is a fundamental shift. It touches supply chains, service models, customer expectations, and cultural norms all at once. It changes how value itself is understood.

Transitions like this strain old narratives. The metaphors that once explained the world begin to wobble.

Many leaders correctly sense that the old stories no longer quite fit the moment. The metaphors they’ve been living inside — disruption as virtue, crisis as catalyst, infinite growth as default — fail to furnish a future we would choose.

Campbell’s point, applied with intention

Joseph Campbell once said, “If you want to change the world, you need to change the metaphor.”

That line is often understood as a call for better messaging. But Campbell meant something more fundamental.

He was arguing that the structure of a story shapes what a culture can imagine in the first place. Certain narrative forms make some futures feel plausible, even inevitable, while quietly ruling others out.

The Hero’s Journey is one such form. It has its place. But it isn’t the only mythological pattern available to us, and it isn’t neutral.

When a culture over-relies on a single story structure, it narrows its imaginative range, often without realizing it.

The instinct behind the storyteller rush

Seen this way, the rush to hire storytellers looks less like a fad and more like an instinct.

Leaders can feel that the old metaphors aren’t carrying them forward. They know they need a different story to orient themselves and their organizations.

That’s why so many storytelling efforts feel busy but unsatisfying. They operate at the surface, while the deeper structure remains unchanged.

Wenders, perception, and coherence

This is where Wim Wenders’ perspective becomes especially useful.

In Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception, Wenders suggests that peace isn’t primarily a political or economic condition. It’s a perceptual one. We act extractively, he argues, because we’ve lost the ability to see the world clearly — and to dwell in what already works.

His response isn’t urgency or argument. It’s attention. Slowness. Fidelity to lived reality.

You can see (and enjoy) that logic at work in Perfect Days. By subverting the expectation that “something goes wrong,” the film suspends our reflexive scanning for crisis, and makes space for our deeper perception.

Meaning doesn’t arrive through rupture. It emerges through coherence. Through a world that works consistently enough to be trusted.

That insight matters now, at the beginning of the Circular Century. You can’t bargain your way to a circular future. And you can’t assemble it from disconnected parts. It has to be perceived first: felt, experienced, and reinforced across systems.

Think of it in terms of the marketing funnel. Concern about consumer awareness is premature without awareness. And without perception, how can the consumer develop awareness?

Perception should be the new entry point.

Where story really begins

This is why story doesn’t start with messaging. It starts with orientation.

One way to think about this is through Circudynamics:

• Horizons clarifies and grounds a winning aspiration: the future an organization is trying to bring into being.
• Living Futures makes that aspiration tangible, offering emotional evidence rather than abstract claims.
• Catalysts orchestrates the enabling technologies and capabilities that make the story plausible.
• Connection anticipates customer needs through a proactive reading of lived experience, not reactive feedback.
• Craft unifies the organizational architecture that delivers the story consistently, everywhere.

It’s like Lee Clow said that day at the taco stand: everything a company does is media, and the sum of all its media is the brand. A brand isn’t what it says. It’s what it repeatedly does.

Steve Jobs, the liberal arts, and integration

Steve Jobs famously said that Apple lived at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. That phrase is often remembered as a design sensibility. But in Jobs’ hands it was a method of divining product-market fit, and an organizational commitment.

Jobs didn’t believe customers could reliably tell you what they wanted from a future they had never experienced. John Sculley once described this as Jobs’ defining trait: he always started from the user’s experience, but rejected the idea that you could get there by asking people what they wanted. The leap was too large. The vocabulary didn’t yet exist.

Instead, Jobs applied the liberal arts. He used forms like typography, music, photography, and narrative as tools of perception. They helped him understand the utility of his products. Beauty and coherence weren’t decorative; they were functional. They carried information value about future utility.

But perception alone wasn’t enough. Jobs also understood that seeing unmet needs created an obligation. The organization had to be capable of responding coherently. Product, design, engineering, marketing, retail, and support couldn’t be loosely coupled without breaking the experience.

Seen this way, Jobs’ real “hack” of the Innovator’s Dilemma wasn’t defiance of customers, but a deeper form of listening paired with an integrated architecture that could act on what it heard.

Jobs didn’t treat story as a message to be told; he treated it as a future to be chosen.

Integration makes the story

This is a place where ideas from Lee Clow, Ana Andjelic, Roger Martin, and Clayton Christensen converge.

Clow’s observation that “everything a company does is media” is really an argument for integration. If every action communicates, fragmentation causes narrative collapse.

Andjelic makes the same case operationally. Marketing can’t be separated from product, operations, or customer service without losing credibility. Meaning only accrues when those functions move together toward the same future.

Martin collapses the distinction altogether. If marketing is about understanding customers and strategy is about choosing how to win with them, then they aren’t separate disciplines. They’re different vocabularies for the same work.

Christensen grounds it in lived reality. The job a customer is trying to get done is never just functional. It’s social and emotional too. Meeting it reliably requires coordination across the whole organization, not insight isolated at the front end.

All of this points to a simple but demanding idea: a good story in business is inseparable from the system that delivers it.

Joy as the test

In Sparking Joy, I argued that joy isn’t a soft byproduct of circularity. It’s the threshold of success.

Quality was the dividend of Lean. Circularity is Lean 2.0. Circularity’s dividend is joy. Joy is the lived test of circular transformation. If a circular system doesn’t spark joy in experience, it won’t scale.

Helping the customer access their joy through heightened perception is the task of the circular marketer.

Marie Kondo’s question — does this spark joy? — cuts through good intentions and theoretical benefits. A good story in business has to pass the same test.

A quiet conclusion

When people say storytelling is important, they mean something other than more and better influencer messages.

They’re expressing a hunger for coherence. For stories that make sense of the moment we’re in and point toward a future that feels durable, humane, and worth choosing.

In business, those stories don’t begin with words. They begin with choices: what leaders decide to build, how they organize, and what kind of world they’re willing to support.

You don’t need better storytellers. You need internal coherence.

Everything else follows.

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Behind the paywall, I share practical diagnostics for narrative coherence, from leadership choices to lived experience, and why this work matters now. If this essay resonates, your support helps make more of it possible.