Who am I, why am I here, and other questions philosophy hasn’t answered but strategic narratives have

Once upon a time, I decided to quit my job. It was my first time quitting, and it felt great.

There was a lot of sound advice flying around against it: “You should never quit before finding another job”. “You’re more interesting to other companies if you’re working somewhere”. “You can ask for a leave without pay and come back fresh from the experience”.

People didn’t quite get why I was doing what I was doing. But I did. I didn’t want to come back fresh. I didn’t want another job. I didn’t want a 9 to 5. I didn’t want another organizational culture I didn’t belong to. I didn’t want to do a masters yet, nor flee the country in search of a new life somewhere else. I wanted out. And I trust my gut, so I hadn’t bothered to articulate how and why I knew. I knew.

In the end, I went to Guatemala and Colombia for four months together with AIESEC, a very disorganized students association made up of very young people I took under my wing and imposed some method upon. Thanks to them, I managed to get a hold of housing and NGOs to collaborate in. At the time I thought I wanted to work in nonprofits, so I really wanted to get my hands into the mud. And get to know how struggles differed throughout Latin America.

On my flight back, while we all waited to board the plane, a woman who was also making her way back home to Argentina started talking to me. She asked what I had been up to, and I said I had gotten tired of the big corporations and had taken a break to make my way around new cultures.

She, on the other hand, was working on an international cooperation project. She was project lead on an initiative to better understand the situation of women in a certain district in Colombia. Together with a team who had gathered there, she was exploring the field to take back the knowledge and lessons learnt back home to feed the database of related organizations.

“Wow”, I thought — “She sounds like a big shot”. Who did you go with? I asked her.

— AIESEC

Now we’re getting somewhere

That’s storytelling. And it matters.

It matters in our everyday life. At the time, I didn’t want to explain anything to anyone. And saying “I just wanna travel around” allowed for no uncomfortable follow up questions. But I could have told people the story the same way she did, because that was what I had gone to do. I was investing in something I believed in and could’ve told the story that way because it still made sense with who I am. And people around me would’ve understood much faster.

Reality is a complex, multidimensional thing, so both stories were just as true. They both responded to something I was doing. But one followed a more long term strategic career plan that had to do with my wishes and ambitions. Whilst the other answered to a more short term whim that, to some, triggered an alert.

Understanding the range of stories you can tell and make out of yourself is a great resource that allows for faster decision making with much more clarity.

Still, and this is the key, that range comes not from storytelling, but from strategic narrative. Why? Because your storytelling is simply a consequence of the way you think about you, the place you occupy in this world and why you’re taking up that space.

Let’s really unpack this.

If you had to shoot a remake of Othello, Macbeth, Cinderella, Hercules, any classic, you’d no doubt know which facts and details you can change or get rid off, and which have to stay for it to resemble the original story. No one told you. But it doesn’t matter if Cinderella lost a shoe, a magic ring or a notepad with a lock on it. The important thing is that she needs to forget something, so that the prince has a lead to search for her. And Macbeth could have happened anywhere, but if lady Macbeth feels no guilt, what moves the story becomes something else. You can change how you tell the story, but the narrative behind it is what moves the characters, allows them to decide, and that needs to stay fixed.

Let’s take a break from analogies, now that we start to grasp the concept let’s go to real life scenarios. Let’s talk about Nokia. Born in Russia in 1865 as a paper factory, Nokia ventured into the business of electricity, produced cables and rubber, at some point in the 60’s sold radio transmitters, gas masks and started playing with the idea of robotics; by 1980 they had a foothold on TV and sold computers after taking over Ericsson and Salora. By 2000 they were selling the famously indestructible Nokia cellular phones. We will never forget our first Nokia 1100, may it live forever in our memes. And today, they have a foothold on the moon. A lot happened in a couple of centuries, but they never changed their narrative.

Storytelling? Sure, varied and varying. But their north remained the same, was easily recognizable and made sense: Nokia creates technology that helps the world act together. It used to be paper, it then was TV, then mobile phones worked better. But they weren’t throwing stuff in the air and seeing what sticks. They have always thrived on finding new ways for people to connect. That’s their role, the space they occupy, the story they tell themselves about who they are, the reasoning they go back to when decisions need to be made, or when they need to evaluate a potential change in industries, innovation opportunities or saying no to clients.

If that reason-why is clear to everyone, storytelling becomes child ‘s play. You get to see through the matrix and glimpse at the full spectrum of what the cards you’ve been dealt with can do. All you need to do is check if it makes sense with the narrative and go nuts.

We’re here, you got us, now what?

If you understand where you’re coming from, whenever there is a crisis or a turn of events, whenever the long awaited window of opportunity appears, you can improvise on your storytelling without contradicting yourself, because you know why you’re here and what makes you, you.

It sounds easy enough, but who calls the shots? The comms team should handle this, right? They’re good at words. Or the marketing and sales team? They need to know why and who we are in order to sell, they should manage it. For sure that’s it.

But not quite. The strategic narrative is core to all areas of the company. Not a single soul should be unaware nor unaligned. Working on the narrative is an endeavor that requires the support and participation of founders and C-level executives. This is the company’s strategy, no less. If the decision makers are not on board, there’s no point in working on it. If we don’t understand that the narrative isn’t the way we narrate the strategy, but is the strategy, we don’t really understand what is at stake.

As we mentioned, it’s not something that changes often, if at all. It can survive all kinds of change. Ask Nokia. So it’s something you bother with once and then, because of it, the comms team, the sales team, the marketing team can all understand the range and scope of stories they can make use of. Not only that, it will help them understand which path makes sense and which doesn’t. What to include and what not to include on our sales pitch. It can be a key ingredient to understanding who to ally with, which clients to take and why, which clients we are taking in spite of our end game, which trends to follow, where to take our rebranding.

For all of this, it makes no sense for an individual team to work the strategic narrative, because the important part is the ‘strategic’ not the ‘narrative’. If it’s constructed in isolation and then someone on top disagrees, it all breaks and goes to waste. With frustration, wasted resources and an unhappy team along the way.

Ok, this is big. But what does it look like?

Let’s put things in order. You’re looking at all the ingredients dead in the eye, they’re spread out on the table, but that doesn’t mean you can see the cake. I get it. Strategic Narrative = Strategy/Organizational compass. But is it written down in a document? Is it a manual? What is the final shape it takes?

The ideal is for it to be written somewhere. That’s essentially one of the core services we provide at Sunstone. How we do this will vary from company to company. But it’s not a document to be shared externally and to design with pretty colors and misc. It’s not a brand book. It’s an internal document, an analysis that gets things running.

Many can go their whole lives without putting it down on (imaginary) paper. The real value lies in having clarity on it. But the most likely outcome on the path to achieving clarity is usually a formal document.

Also, there are some components to narratives. For example, Andy Raskin talks about how the narrative will translate itself into words, and how it should take the shape of “the happily-ever-after that your product/service will help the prospect achieve”, what he calls the Promised Land.

This “Promised Land”, he explains, should be both desirable and difficult to achieve (that’s your cue). But it’s also a commitment in itself, and your goal as an organization. I say this because that’s the only scenario when narratives change. People go with you because you’ll get them to the Promised Land. If you no longer can nor want to go to that promised land, then the magnetic fields that mark your north have shifted.

All that being said, where is it? Where does it show? We wanna see them northern lights!

Finding your why and how, and making the most of it

We know why it’s important, who should be involved and what it looks like. Now, how do we get there?

The job is to understand our underlying purpose and essence. To get to the very nucleus of our brand’s DNA (which is usually shared with culture), put it into words, be honest to ourselves about it, and from there start unraveling our strategy.

Thing is, we don’t start this process with a clean slate. We’re usually very committed to the storytelling that we’ve been using and has worked for us up to now. So it takes a very detailed eye to find and outline the organization’s narrative.

I mention a detailed eye because narratives are not born out of spontaneous generation. They are always created from an element that is already there, exists and is actually very predominant in the company’s culture and mission. But for some reason, it is hidden behind the curtains. It has become a big white elephant in the room that no one addressed.

We get there through google forms, questionnaires, personality tests, benchmark, all pre existing documents that are considered relevant input, yes… but there is usually a think-say-do gap. So, to me, the cornerstone of this process is interviews. Sticking only to what clients and employees once said is insufficient. I need to see them say it, follow up question them, find if there is such a gap to finally untangle it, set it on paper, share it and validate it.

Interviews provide a gateway into the story behind the story. And every single time, without exception, when we get the job done and present these insights, there is an “A-ha” moment, when a lot of data sinks into people’s minds. It’s one of my favorite brief silences.

Promised land, northern lights, or how this all plays out

We made it! We did it! We love what we see. We don’t even feel the blisters. Look at that view, look at those lights, how promising, how wonderful. There’s a long way to go, but we finally understand where we’re going. Why we’re going through all of this. And how we plan to make it to the finish line.

The big hardcore questions have dissolved into soft snow and its now safe to tread. Who cares if we do paper, cables, mobile phones or computers. We’re connecting people, Nokia said. To many, they are an example of a cell phone manufacturer who lost their place in the market. To them, they just moved on to the next step: they are, literally, aiming for the moon with 4 and 5G. They are playing another game altogether. They know who they are, they can make sense of themselves, and evolve.

With a narrative at hand, the story that aligns the whole company’s actions on a long-term scale and on the day to day, we can breathe in deeply and marvel at how it waters on everything we do: relationships with customers, culture, marketing materials, meetings, you name it.

You now have a powerful tool to create an unbeatable pitch deck. To make sales skyrocket. To understand why and how you can change your image and not lose your essence. To understand how it was all pieces of one big puzzle and here you are, crafting the next one.

There’s a zillion ways to tell my quit and leave story. All of them coexist in my mind. I can avoid some uncomfortable questions and quietly live my life peacefully, giving the answer that best fits the context. But I’d rather choose the story that ties the room together. That’s true to me in the long term and to a deeper level. That allows me to understand where I should tread lightly and where they will see me rollin’. Because storytelling is an outcome, and it changes with context, but strategic narrative is how I make my choices.

This article is part of a bigger initiative organized and edited by Sunstone made up of three free ebooks called “The Underlying project”. Specifically, it’s one of the ten articles from the ebook on content titled “Change My Mind”. You can download it or any of the other two in topvoices.co