Stories are the operating system

Every company I’ve worked inside – and there have been a few – ran on a story. Not the deck. Not the OKRs. The quiet story people told themselves about why the work mattered, who they were in relation to it, and what happened if they stopped.

When the story was clear, the org chart was almost decorative. People routed around broken processes because they knew what they were protecting. When the story fractured, the opposite: the best process in the world couldn’t get a decision across the line.

I think most operational problems are story problems wearing a disguise.

The symptom looks operational

A team is missing deadlines. Meetings multiply. Scope creeps. The natural instinct is to reach for the toolbox – tighten standups, reset the roadmap, hire a PM, rewrite the spec. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t, because the real failure happened upstream of any of those levers.

The real failure is that the story stopped making sense to the people living in it. Maybe the mission shifted and nobody updated the narrative. Maybe the founder changed their mind but kept the old words. Maybe two leaders are running parallel stories and neither knows it.

When the story is incoherent, people stop taking risks. They hedge. They ask for more meetings because they’re trying to triangulate a truth that isn’t there.

What I look for

When I walk into a company as a fractional operator or advisor, I don’t start with the dashboard. I start with three conversations.

First, the founder. What is the company for? Not the tagline – the actual answer, the one they’d give to a friend at midnight. That’s the story at its source.

Second, someone two levels down. What do they think the company is for? The delta between those two answers tells me how much of the organization is running the right OS and how much is running something stitched together from old memos.

Third, a new hire. What did they think they were joining, versus what they actually found? Fresh eyes see the story most clearly – they haven’t been around long enough to stop noticing.

Fixing the story is the work

Once the gap is visible, the fix is rarely more process. It’s usually narrative. The founder has to tell the truth about where the company actually is, what changed, and why it changed. People are remarkably forgiving of pivots. They are not forgiving of being lied to about pivots, even kindly, even by omission.

The org chart doesn’t save you. The operating model doesn’t save you. The story saves you – and the leader’s job is to keep the story honest.

That’s most of what I do.

–S.