There is a document somewhere in your organisation — probably a slide deck, possibly a PDF, almost certainly last updated eight months ago — that contains your strategy. It has a vision statement. It has pillars. It has, if you were thorough about it, something labelled “strategic narrative” in the appendix, which means it has three paragraphs about where you came from and a bullet point about where you are going. That document has been approved. It has been presented. It has, in the most technical sense of the word, been communicated. Yet, between the room where it was presented and the floors where the work actually happens, it vanished, because nobody could repeat it.
This is the central problem, and it is older than PowerPoint. Organisations have spent decades confusing the production of strategy documents with the transmission of strategic meaning, treating the act of writing a thing down as equivalent to the act of making it understood, remembered, and carried forward by the people who are supposed to act on it. The result is a peculiar organisational condition in which an enormous amount of output exists alongside a profound confusion about what the organisation is actually doing and why.
Walter Benjamin understood the shape of this problem long before organisations became the dominant institution of modern life. In his 1936 essay The Storyteller, Benjamin argued that the art of storytelling was dying because the conditions for their transmission had collapsed. Information, he observed, had replaced story: precise, verifiable, self-contained, and almost immediately disposable. Information, Benjamin wrote, “lives only in the moment in which it was new.” A story, by contrast, “preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” Strategy documents are information. They live in the moment of the presentation. Strategic narratives, when they exist and travel, are stories. They release their meaning slowly, at different moments, for different people, across time. The distinction is architectural.
What separates a strategy from a narrative is not length or ambition or even quality of thinking. It is whether the thing can travel without its authors. A strategy that requires its authors to be in the room to be understood is not a narrative it is a briefing. Briefings are useful. They are not the sam, meaning that they move. Paul Ricoeur, whose life’s work was devoted to understanding how human beings construct identity and understanding through narrative, argued that it is only through what he called emplotment, the gathering of disparate events and intentions into a coherent plot structure, that scattered facts become something a person can actually hold. Without that plot, experience remains fragmented. The same is true for an organisation’s experience of itself. Without a narrative that emplotments the decisions, the pivots, the losses and the commitments into a coherent story, the strategy sits on a slide while the organisation improvises its own competing interpretations of what is happening. And it does this naturally, it cannot do otherwise.
The organisations that understand this least are, ironically, often the ones that have invested the most in communications. They have teams. They have channels. They have content cadences, editorial calendars, and carefully managed approval chains. What they have built, in most cases, is an infrastructure for the distribution of information not for the transmission of meaning. The traditional communications department was designed around the assumption that narrative control flows from the centre, that content moves through defined approval chains, and that the communication of strategy is a distinct activity from its making. Those assumptions were always fragile. They are now untenable. The gap between strategy documents that exist and strategic narratives that actually travel through the organisation is not a communications problem in the channel sense. It is a structural problem, a problem of what the organisation believes communication is for.
The organisations that understand this least are, ironically, often the ones that have invested the most in communications.
Karl Weick, the organisational theorist whose concept of sensemaking remains one of the most powerful frameworks for understanding how humans actually behave inside institutions, made the point precisely: when people are trying to make sense of complexity, accuracy is optional. Story is not. What travels through an organisation in the absence of a coherent narrative is not silence, it is a proliferation of competing stories, each plausible, each partial, each produced by people trying to make sense of circumstances with whatever interpretive material they have available.
The strategic plan may say one thing. The rumours in the corridor say another. The behaviour of leadership says a third. In the competition between these narratives, the slide deck rarely wins, because the slide deck is not a story. It is a set of claims. And claims, divorced from the human experience of the people who made them and the circumstances that gave them meaning, do not travel.
This is precisely what Byung-Chul Han diagnoses in a different register when he argues that the anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Organisations drowning in dashboards, updates, and communication programmes are not, for that reason, organisations in which people understand what they are doing or why. The production of information at scale creates the sensation of transparency without the reality of shared meaning. Han’s provocation — that “the society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control” — maps well onto the experience of working inside a heavily over-communicated organisation that still cannot tell you, clearly and consistently, what it stands for. Transparency without narrative is noise with a good production budget.
The deeper issue, though, is not one of communication function design. It is philosophical, and it touches something Slavoj Žižek has spent a career excavating in a different context: the relationship between what an organisation says it believes and what its structure, behaviour, and investment actually reveal it believes. Žižek’s observation that subjects are always divided between what they consciously know and say about things, and a set of more or less unconscious beliefs they hold, applies to organisations as much as to individuals. An organisation can produce a strategy document full of language about agility, customer-centricity, and purpose while simultaneously running every process, incentive structure, and governance arrangement on entirely different assumptions. The narrative that travels in that organisation is not the one in the document. It is the one encoded in the behaviour. And the people inside the organisation, who experience the behaviour daily, are not deceived by the document. They are simply polite enough, most of the time, not to say so out loud.
Hannah Arendt, writing about action and narrative in The Human Condition, observed that nobody is the author or producer of their own life story. That stories are not made by intention alone, but emerge from action in a web of relationships where consequences fan out beyond what any single actor can control or predict. What she was describing is precisely what happens to strategy in the absence of a containing narrative: the organisation’s story gets written anyway, by the accumulation of its actions, by the patterns its behaviour creates in the perceptions of the people inside and outside it, and by the interpretive frameworks, the competing stories, that fill the vacuum where a shared narrative should have been. The choice is not between having a strategic narrative and not having one. The choice is between shaping it deliberately and inheriting it by default.
This is what the shift in organisational architecture now makes more consequential, not less. The communications function that most large organisations currently run was designed for a world in which the speed of information, the volume of content, and the complexity of stakeholder environments were all lower than they are today. What is now becoming structurally visible is that the gap between usage and strategic impact is not primarily a technology problem it is an architecture problem. Organisations that have inserted new capabilities into old structures and old assumptions about what communication is for will continue to produce more output at greater speed while the core condition remains unchanged. The narrative gap does not close because the distribution channel got faster. It closes when the organisation starts treating narrative not as a downstream product of strategy but as the medium through which strategy becomes real.
A map that nobody reads is not a navigational tool. It is a document. Most organisations have extraordinarily well-drawn maps, strategy documents of genuine quality, produced by serious people who understood what they were doing. What they do not have is the story of the territory: the human account of why this particular map, why now, what it felt like to make the choices it encodes, what was given up to arrive at the direction it indicates. That story,the one that carries the strategy into the lived experience of the people who are supposed to act on it, cannot be written in an appendix and distributed through a company-wide email. It has to be told. It has to travel the same way that Benjamin’s storyteller described: in a form that the listener can hold and retell, that compels repetition, that releases its meaning not all at once but over time, in the situations where it is needed.
The organisations that understand this are not necessarily the ones with the best strategies. They are the ones whose people, at every level, can tell you what they are doing and why, not by reciting the pillars, but by accounting for their own work in terms of a shared story that makes sense of where they are, how they got there, and where the whole thing is going. That coherence is not a communications deliverable. It is an organisational capability. And building it requires taking seriously something that most leadership teams have never treated as serious work: the question of what story the organisation is actually living in, as distinct from the story it has been told to communicate. Those are not the same thing. Closing the distance between them is the strategic work that precedes all other strategic work.
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