Narrative Strategy: Before the Story, the Definition
For the first 3 or so years of my consulting career I was known as the “Hollywood producer innovating in healthcare.” There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it opened a lot of doors. It captured the novelty of what I was doing, and cut through a lot of the noise.
Until it didn’t.
I was changing. The work I was doing was expanding into dimensions I could only dream of. I was no longer "the Hollywood producer" sitting in corporate boardrooms or on advisory calls. I was doing more than bringing my entertainment expertise to the conversation. But what exactly was I doing — and did it actually make a difference to the people who hired me?
On the Edge of Creation
Here’s the thing about a new initiative, bit a a product, a policy, or a company deciding to become something it wasn’t before. Before any of it is real, it doesn’t have language yet. There’s no shared word for it. And until there’s a shared word for it, nobody in the room is building the same thing, even when they think they are.
I learned this by watching it fail. I’d sit with leaders trying to describe an idea that was supposed to become results, and I’d watch the room nod along to a sentence that meant five different things to five different people. Everyone thought they’d agreed. Nobody had. The strategy document was fine. The definition underneath it was never actually shared. It just felt shared, because everyone was too polite or too busy to say “wait, what do you mean by that.”
That gap is where things quietly die. Not in execution. Before execution, in the kick off meeting that was supposed to align everyone but didn’t.
Making Ineffable Irresistible
This is where my Hollywood producer instincts turned out to be more useful than I expected. Building a show from scratch means building a whole world before a single frame gets shot — characters, stakes, a reason to keep watching. Story is what makes people show up for something that doesn’t exist yet.
Turns out companies need the same thing when they’re trying to become something new. Not a tagline. A story that a hundred different people — legal, product, sales, the exec who’s skeptical, the exec who’s all-in — can all tell the same way, in their own words, without a slide deck in front of them.
That’s the discipline I started building: narrative strategy.
The Stories We Tell to Create Something New
I define narrative strategy as storytelling for outcomes. It’s designing a story system that engages, aligns, and mobilizes everyone involved. The thing that once seemed impossible new starts to feel inevitable.
Here’s a version of the problem I see constantly: a company that’s always sold hardware is now launching software. The instinct is to treat this like a brute-force execution problem: ship the roadmap, hit the milestones, announce the launch. But if nobody’s agreed on why the company is doing this or what it means about who they are now, every team fills that gap with its own private story. Sales tells one version. Product tells another. The customer-facing teams are improvising. None of it’s malicious — it’s just what happens when there’s no shared source of truth to work from.
Narrative strategy is how you close that gap before it opens. I co-design a strategic narrative with leaders and their teams: an open-ended account of what they’re building and why, built with the stakeholders who have to carry it, not handed to them after the fact. That becomes the source of truth. Every touchpoint after that — internal comms, sales enablement, the exec’s stage remarks — reinforces the same story instead of inventing a new one. I call the artifact that holds all of this a narrative bible. Done well, it turns transformation from a mandate people comply with into a story people actually believe they’re inside of.
Key Takeaways
Creation starts with definition. Any new initiative involving multiple stakeholders needs a shared understanding before it needs a strategy — most transformations fail here, not in execution.
Story is what makes a shared future feel inevitable rather than imposed. It’s the mechanism that gets people to author the change instead of just complying with it.
Narrative strategy is a system, not a one-time message. A strategic narrative needs a living source of truth — a narrative bible — that every subsequent communication draws from, or the story fractures the moment it leaves the room it was built in.
If your team is living some version of this gap right now — a launch, an AI initiative, a story that made sense two years ago and doesn't quite anymore — the Narrative Audit is where I'd start. Four weeks to find out exactly what's breaking down and what the story needs to do next. Let’s start crafting.