Storytelling in business

[jlengstorf]

I wrote this as part of another post, but it was way off-topic. I’d like to come back to this and make it more coherent later:

Stories don’t have beginnings and ends. There’s just the moment where someone starts paying attention, and the part where the hero’s life stops being interesting and people wander off.

I’m a long-time believer that everything we do is based on stories. This is true in business, too.¹

One of the hardest parts of working on a project is choosing where to draw the boundaries. Where does this project start? What story is it going to tell? And what does it not do?

Even harder than making that decision for yourself is getting an entire team to agree on the same beginning and ending.

Early businesses, whether they’re startups, side gigs, or passion projects, face myriad problems, all of which could potentially be solved by the business.

Imagine you want to start a restaurant. Where does the restaurant story start? Is it when someone walks through the door? Or maybe it’s where the produce is sourced from? Does your restaurant have its own garden? Do you partner with a local farmer? Or do you not worry about that and get all the food from Sysco? Is your approach to food political² or historical³ or unabashedly hipster⁴?

Software is even harder, because most of us are just making up the rules as we go along, and if we screw it up, we can just make up a new story and turn that into success. TKTK pivot

The challenge with this is focusing. When we can solve any problem, how can we settle down and focus on “the right problem”? And how do we keep our whole team on the same page?

Right about now, the user experience designers are flipping the table and screaming, “That’s literally what we’ve been trying to tell you the whole time!” while furiously pointing to a wall full of personas, complete with and user journeys: business-flavored micro-fiction following Elaine the Low-Attention Executive or Danny the Grumpy Developer on their adventures through our products.

Near my house there’s a sushi place called Bamboo that starts the conversation with their clientele by saying, “Sustainably caught, humanely raised, naturally grown. No compromises.” The web site talks about making an impact and saving the ocean long before it talks about the hours, location, or menu.

Teardrop Lounge focuses on the history and tradition of bartending, and if you sit at the bar on a quiet afternoon you can get a free master class on the stories behind all your favorite cocktails from extremely knowledgable bartenders.

I poke fun at this bar all the time, but Expatriate is one of my favorite places to spend an evening in Portland. Imagine spending an evening inside a Decemberists song; it’s like that.

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