Michael Lissack
more democratized. Employees share experiences on Slack channels and LinkedIn posts. Customers create narratives about your brand on review sites and social media. Partners document their experiences through case studies and blog posts. And algorithmic systems compile and amplify certain narratives while suppressing others. “When we published the original edition of this book, organizational storytelling was something that happened occasionally and intentionally,” explains narrative consultant David Hutchens. “Today, it’s continuous and often spontaneous. The question isn’t whether your organization is telling stories—it’s whether you’re paying attention to which stories are being told and how they’re shaping your collective reality.” This shift requires a new approach to narrative—one that recognizes stories not merely as communication vehicles but as living entities that shape how we understand, experience, and create our world. Stories as Reality-Creation Tools To understand why narrative matters so profoundly, we must first recognize that stories aren’t just how we communicate reality—they’re how we create it. Cognitive science has demonstrated that human beings don’t experience raw reality directly. Instead, we process selected elements of our environment through narrative frameworks that help us make sense of what’s happening and decide how to respond. When a project fails, team members don’t simply process isolated events—they create causal stories that explain what happened. “We missed the deadline because marketing changed the requirements” tells a very different story than “We missed the deadline because we didn’t adequately understand user needs.” These competing narratives aren’t just different explanations of the same reality—they create different realities that lead to different actions. In complex digital environments, this reality-creating function of narrative becomes even more crucial. When working across distributed teams, asynchronous communication, and multicultural contexts, shared
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