The stories organisations tell about themselves

Every organisation has a story it tells about how it came to exist, and the gap between that story and the experience of dealing with it is where cynicism comes from.

What the story is for

The legitimate functions.

Explaining why the organisation exists, which is otherwise not obvious.

Giving employees a reason beyond the salary.

Making decisions easier, since a clear purpose resolves arguments.

Distinguishing it from competitors who do the same thing.

And giving customers a reason to prefer it, which is the commercial version.

Why most of them fail

The consistent problems.

They are aspirational rather than descriptive, which means everyone inside knows they are not true.

They are generic — innovation, people, excellence — and could belong to any organisation in any sector.

They were written by a committee, which removes anything specific enough to be interesting.

They are contradicted by ordinary experience of the organisation.

And they are announced rather than demonstrated.

The gap problem

The central issue.

A story that does not match the experience is worse than no story, because it adds hypocrisy to whatever the original shortfall was.

Which means the useful question is not "what do we want to say" but "what is actually true about us that is worth saying".

And where the gap is large, the answer is to change the organisation or to change the story, rather than to communicate harder.

What makes one credible

The features that survive scrutiny.

Specificity: a particular decision, a particular constraint, a particular problem.

Including the difficulty rather than only the vision.

Naming the trade-off: what the organisation chooses not to do.

Being verifiable, at least in outline.

And being told consistently by people at different levels, which is the strongest test.

The founding story

The most common form.

These work when they explain a genuine constraint or insight that still shapes the organisation.

They fail when they are retrofitted, when the founder's account is contradicted by the record, or when the organisation has long since become something else.

Which means an honest one includes what has changed since, rather than pretending continuity that does not exist.

And an organisation that has outgrown its founding story is better served by a new one than by repeating the old.

Internal versus external

A distinction that matters.

The story told to staff and the story told to customers should be the same story, in different words.

Where they differ, staff notice, and the internal one loses.

Which means testing the external claims against the internal experience before publishing them.

And that employees are the most credible carriers of the story, or the most damaging contradiction of it.

Values

The specific failure mode.

Lists of values are almost universally generic, and their generality is what makes them useless.

A value that would not be chosen by a competitor is a real value; one that everyone claims is a description of the sector.

The test of a stated value is whether the organisation has ever given something up for it, and being able to name the instance.

Which is the difference between a value and a preference.

Telling it in practice

Where it appears.

In recruitment, where it should be honest about the difficult parts, since misrepresentation produces expensive early departures.

In onboarding, where it explains why things are done as they are.

In decisions, where it should be referenced when it makes a decision harder rather than only when it makes one easier.

And in how the organisation behaves when nothing is at stake, which is where anyone paying attention actually reads it.

Change and honesty

What happens when the story stops being true.

Organisations grow, are acquired, change markets, and lose the conditions that produced the original story.

Continuing to tell the old one produces the disillusionment familiar to anyone who has watched a company scale.

Which means saying what has changed, and why, and what remains.

An honest account of a change is received considerably better than a claim that nothing has changed, which nobody believes and everybody notices.