(Another) Quick Riff on Narrative Strategy

Strategy is an imaginative act, and narrative is how it thinks, expresses itself, and brings others along. Which is where words come in. Whether expressed as conversation, brief, or presentation, strategy is meaningless and powerless without words. If you can’t put your strategy into words others cannot follow.

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably ... See more

Going back to Thich Nhat Hanh, I believe that writing is part of every design. If you can clearly define what you’re making and articulate its value, the steps to bring it out into the world will go much faster. It’s easy to put pixels together when you’ve already made decisions. And since we work across systems and borders, there’s no better way t... See more

It’s hard to see which parts of your experience and opinions are distinctive and resonate without sharing them. In my experience, it’s rarely the big grand vision that people are attracted to but rather something more mundane and grounded - something that has a clarity and weight about it that is distinctive.

At the top of every creative log are two prompts—“For others” and “For me”—where I articulate the purpose of the writing.138 Filling these in helps me determine the writing’s fate, so I try to be as honest as possible. No answer is off limits. No reason too egoic. “Wanting to better understand my thinking” and “Wanting to better position myself as

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