Strategy is storytelling
That moment when a certain reality comes to light
Currently challenging myself to write about the push-and-pull of creativity and entrepreneurship; art vs capitalism; artistry vs product for 30 days.
If this is something you’re thinking about, then I want to hear from you!!
It’s almost presentation time in my classroom, so I’m sharing with the students how all strategy is basically storytelling. You can have the most bulletproof and effective roadmap in your arsenal, but if you can’t communicate it effectively to your client or if you can’t communicate it in a way that makes them want to implement it, then well … you’ve sunk your own battleship.
“A faux pas is that moment when a certain reality comes to light.”
—From Selected Crônicas by Clarice Lispector
That sinking feeling is what I believe a faux pas feels like. It’s that moment as Lispector says when you realize that what you thought you did or what passed was not anywhere close to the reality. I had a minor one recently in which I wrote a very meticulous email to a client and sent it. But I forgot the subject🤦. Or there was that time many years ago, young me uncovered a huge faux pas committed by leadership. I took my findings immediately into a meeting, and I was shocked when my superiors were more dismayed by it than appreciative of my uncovering it.
Overall, I just love this line from Lispector. But when I read it, my mind immediately connected it to my storytelling presentation where I walked my students through several dated strategy decks. Often, one of the things I end up doing in a project is creating a terminology list. What I find is that over time, language and meaning get eroded in a company. A developer says “client” whereas a marketer says “customer” whereas a VP says “user.” Technically, all these terms could mean the same thing. But in actuality, each is using the word slightly differently. Without realizing it, they contribute to miscommunication and chaos in the organization.
A strategy, as my mentor Jaime Levy says, is “a shared product vision.” In my early UX career, I remember so clearly being in stakeholder workshops with Jaime. She would walk the client team through a persona or value-proposition exercise. And soon, we’d see how even though the teams were in constant communication on a daily basis across several apps, they did not have a shared understanding of what or why or how they were building something. Even simple terms about who the user was or what the user needed were splintered by that point. Thus, Jaime would start re-alignment through the creation of a shared language.
I guess I’m sensitive to these things because I taught in a foreign country for two years where I did not speak the native language. When I returned to the US, I was often dismayed by how the miscommunication that frustrated me during my tenure in Japan was replicated here in my native country. The only difference was that I shared the same language and culture with my fellow Americans. At least in Japan, I could chalk up a lot of my faux pas moments to just being brand new to the culture and country. Since then, I find the root of many misalignments can be traced back to a simple exchange of what people thought was clear communication.
So if you’re experiencing a baffling professional or personal faux pas, I challenge you to take a step back. Consider what you and the other person/people are really doing. How are you actually contributing to it? Are you speaking in a way that truly communicates exactly what the situation is? You might find that you are all making assumptions about what is and isn’t being said. Or what should and shouldn’t be understood.
Don’t wait for the light to be shown on you. Instead, be the source of enlightenment for all.
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