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Story Is Not a Fad

We tried to kill it. We failed.

Boy, we tried to kill story.

We killed big data, agile, algorithmic, and digital transformation, but story felt like it had a chance. It’s hallowed. Time-honored. And yet: storymaking, storynomics, storyselling, storycasting, storification. Junior executives with quote fingers asking so what’s the “story” with a printed social media post crinkled in their fist. Someone somewhere combined story and strategy into storygy and presumably still has a job.

What we meant this whole time was narrative intelligence. It was always there, just buried under a watchword fad.

We were all raised on a curriculum of narrative intelligence. Even as a child, you sensed when the movie was nearing its end. You knew when a joke was set up wrong. You could tell when the TV ad missed a beat. That’s not a skill you acquired in a workshop. It’s part of our shared humanity.

So why would we give it short shrift when it’s our turn to relay something?

Russian formalist narratologists broke story into two components: the fabula (the information) and the syuzhet (the way it’s organized). Whether it’s a data summary or a stirring keynote, storytelling is the story and the telling. You already understand both intuitively, but the fad gave people permission to say story without doing the work.

The work is unglamorous, non-negotiable, and straightforward as hell: choose what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. This isn’t poetry; it’s strategy, and you’ve been taught all your life how to decide.

If the buzzwords have distracted you, it’s time to get back to your roots.