I hear ya, and here are 4 more places storytelling goes to die:
- The stakeholder deck with 82 slides and zero nouns.
- The resume that reads like someone rewrote their LinkedIn profile using a thesaurus and a dare.
- The sprint review that starts with a Jira ID and ends in existential silence.
- And my personal favorite: explaining product-market fit in a Slack thread using only emojis, acronyms, and the haunting phrase “per last convo.”
Because if your story can’t survive a game of corporate telephone after three lattes, one budget cut, and a surprise reorg—then congrats, you’ve just pitched vapor.
A 'like' doesn't suffice for your comment Dean! This is a laugh/cry commentary. Really appreciate this article a lot @maarten, I get it to my core now about why effective story telling should be part of who I am.
I really love the notion of "retellability" as metric for efficacy! I'm going to start playing around with that notion because it feels like it's testable (immediately and over time) and feels like it would be strongly coorelated to fidelity of message transmission, which is so crucial to change management and engagment.
Yeah... and what makes it hard IMO is that you're guaranteed to lose information, so you have to really test if the core message comes across. You're going to lose many things along the way, what's what you don't want to be lost? That's where the retellability comes in!
I hear ya, and here are 4 more places storytelling goes to die:
- The stakeholder deck with 82 slides and zero nouns.
- The resume that reads like someone rewrote their LinkedIn profile using a thesaurus and a dare.
- The sprint review that starts with a Jira ID and ends in existential silence.
- And my personal favorite: explaining product-market fit in a Slack thread using only emojis, acronyms, and the haunting phrase “per last convo.”
Because if your story can’t survive a game of corporate telephone after three lattes, one budget cut, and a surprise reorg—then congrats, you’ve just pitched vapor.
A 'like' doesn't suffice for your comment Dean! This is a laugh/cry commentary. Really appreciate this article a lot @maarten, I get it to my core now about why effective story telling should be part of who I am.
I really love the notion of "retellability" as metric for efficacy! I'm going to start playing around with that notion because it feels like it's testable (immediately and over time) and feels like it would be strongly coorelated to fidelity of message transmission, which is so crucial to change management and engagment.
Yeah... and what makes it hard IMO is that you're guaranteed to lose information, so you have to really test if the core message comes across. You're going to lose many things along the way, what's what you don't want to be lost? That's where the retellability comes in!
We could also use LLMs to evaluate how much our message is retellable by asking them to do so
I do not trust LLMs to be a better judge than me.