Companies aren’t looking for storytellers. They’re looking for meaning.

The Wall Avenue Journal‘s latest story, “Companies are Desperately Seeking Storytellers,” lit up LinkedIn the day it was revealed. Marketer reactions had been heated – and cut up proper down the center.

Some argued that organizations have already got storytellers and easily want to offer them the liberty to train their expertise. Others celebrated storytelling as a newly acknowledged strategic talent, important in a world saturated with AI-generated content material.

Each side are partially appropriate, however each miss the deeper difficulty: What corporations are fighting isn’t storytelling. It’s sense-making.

Why storytelling instantly feels pressing

The rising curiosity in storytelling roles isn’t nearly telling tales across the campfire, creating model myths or exercising inventive aptitude. It’s not simply that extra entrepreneurs are including storytelling expertise to their resumes, or that extra corporations need entrepreneurs with these expertise. 

Relatively, it’s a response to a extra uncomfortable actuality.

Advertising for contemporary companies has grow to be fragmented. What we knew simply 10 years in the past largely doesn’t apply anymore, and we’re nonetheless studying tips on how to take care of a bunch of recent normals, like these:

• Channels are splintered.
• Buyer journeys are non-linear.
• Messaging is produced at scale.
• AI has made content material low-cost, quick and plentiful, however no more significant.

What’s scarce now isn’t content material or consideration. Its coherence with context.

Prospects, staff and buyers are swimming in data however struggling to know what all of it means. When that means breaks down, belief exits the constructing.

Hiring storytellers is a proxy transfer. It’s a sign that one thing feels disconnected, however leaders can’t fairly articulate what it’s.

The permission argument and the place it falls brief

One widespread response to the WSJ article argued that corporations already make use of succesful storytellers. They simply have to loosen their grip on the message. Storytellers want fewer constraints, fewer fashion guides and fewer approval layers. 

In different phrases, again off and allow us to do what we do greatest. They aren’t fallacious, both.

Company environments are glorious at sanding the perimeters off something human. However giving entrepreneurs permission to be extra inventive isn’t sufficient to create efficient storytelling.

Being articulate or inventive is vital. Nevertheless it doesn’t routinely imply somebody can create compelling tales in a company atmosphere. The abilities are completely different. A storyteller should be capable of create in a structured enterprise atmosphere with these necessities: 

• Construction narrative throughout time.
• Create relevance with out distortion.
• Translate complexity with out oversimplifying.
• Align emotion with intent reasonably than manipulation.

Freedom helps entrepreneurs unleash their creativity. Nevertheless it doesn’t change the necessity to create understanding and context.

The strategic storytelling argument and its hidden threat

The opposite storytelling camp frames storytelling as a strategic enterprise functionality — one thing entrepreneurs can embed, scale and operationalize.

Once more, not fallacious. However this framing introduces a quieter hazard.

Storytelling can grow to be performative when the creativity that fuels it will get hitched to enterprise conventions. When storytelling turns into a division, a job title or a repeatable course of whose price is measured by irrelevant KPIs, it steals the magic that distinguishes storytelling from different enterprise expertise. 

Does any of this sound acquainted? It harkens again to the age-old tug of struggle between technique and ways. Once we use storytelling to advance a technique, we’re extra more likely to create significant tales. Once we scale back it to a tactic, we take the magic out of the method.

The result’s inevitable: Organizations create superbly written narratives that really feel hole as a result of they optimize for output reasonably than perception. Rationalization replaces that means. Polished tales change trusted ones.

That is how manufacturers find yourself speaking at folks as an alternative of serving to them perceive.

What storytelling actually does within the mind

Tales in a enterprise context don’t work simply because they’re entertaining. They work as a result of they align with how people course of the world.

Our brains are continuously asking questions like these:

• What’s happening right here?
• Why does this matter to me?
• What ought to I count on subsequent?

Tales arrange data into trigger and impact. They assist us resolve uncertainty and scale back cognitive load. They permit us to simulate outcomes with out threat.

In different phrases, storytelling isn’t a inventive flourish. It’s a cognitive software.

That’s why it exhibits up in every single place — in management, product narratives, buyer expertise, advertising and marketing, and tradition. It’s additionally why its absence feels so destabilizing.

The true drawback corporations want to unravel

Most organizations don’t want extra storytellers. Right here’s what they do want:  

• Clearer inner narratives.
• Fewer conflicting alerts.
• Shared understanding of who they’re and why they exist.
• Messaging that aligns with lived experiences.

Till these foundations are in place, storytelling efforts will really feel pressured, irrespective of how proficient the individuals are.

This additionally explains the irony I noticed working all through the WSJ article.

Corporations need the outcomes of storytelling — belief, readability, connection — with out accepting the uncertainty that actual tales carry. They need narrative management with out unpredictability. Humanity with out ambiguity.

However that’s not how tales work. That leads me to my last level.

Storytelling isn’t the reply. Creating that means is.

The present obsession with storytelling is a symptom, not an answer. Whether or not they understand it or not, companies are actually trying to find that means:

• Which means prospects can acknowledge.
• Which means staff can consider.
• Which means that holds up underneath stress.

With out that means in these types, storytelling turns into self-indulgent ornament. It doesn’t construct model fairness or belief. 

No job title, nevertheless modern, can repair that.