“Don’t just report out on this initiative; you need to tell the story of it.” This is a common request (plea, mandate) made of professionals by their executives, directors, or managers. It is also a common dilemma that comes up in our business storytelling training workshops: one that often leaves business storytellers frozen and confused.
In our last post, we addressed this predicament by clearly spelling out how to tell the business story of a project or initiative. More specifically, we explored how to step away from a dry, chronological report (“this happened, then that happened”) and instead map out the story of an initiative across a classic story arc. When you frame an initiative that way, you do more than simply give your audience a strategic overview. You take your audience on a journey, making that overview more compelling and memorable. In short, you’re telling the story OF the initiative.
But even when the story OF an initiative is structured brilliantly, it can still feel high-level, more conceptual or abstract. You present a well-crafted arc, but you also realize that arc focuses more on the strategic or business endeavour than the human reality driving and benefiting from it. As powerful as that macro-level narrative is, business storytellers often have an opportunity to bring their work and its impact more fully to life. More specifically, they humanize the initiative, demonstrating the positive difference it makes to key stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, etc.) but also to those who are working on it.
This is where another opportunity for business storytelling can come in: telling a story FROM the initiative. While these two approaches might sound like a simple matter of prepositional semantics, understanding the distinction—and more importantly, the connection—between the two can transform how you position or update an audience on an initiative and give richer meaning to it.
Two Views of One Journey
To see how these two narrative perspectives work together, picture looking at a project through a telephoto lens. When you tell the story OF an initiative, you’re using a wide-angle lens. It gives an audience the larger, strategic, landscape view. It brings to life:
- The starting point, platform, or “before” situation that the characters of the story found themselves in when the initial opportunity or problem became apparent;
- The catalytic moment when the characters and their leadership decided to take this initiative on;
- The turmoil the team navigated together, including barriers they had to break through and obstacles they had to overcome;
- The turning point when everything came together and worked as intended;
- The new, better situation of where things stand today and what you’re now able to do because of this initiative;
- And of course, the big realizations and learnings that emerged from it all.
Its view is more macro, and its job is to provide the bigger picture OF this initiative, helping audiences understand the strategic significance and epic journey of it.
When you tell a story FROM an initiative, you twist the telephoto lens to zoom in on a single, vivid scene from that epic journey. Instead of summarizing half a year of progress, you drop your audience right into a specific moment, an actual experience, an unexpected interaction that elicited some meaning and cemented itself in the memory of the business storyteller. Crucially, these micro-stories can happen at different points along the larger journey of an initiative:
At the starting point — This would be a story from the “before” situation when things were operating as usual, rightly or wrongly. This story might bring to life the enduring problems and challenges plaguing the characters, customers, or other stakeholders, or the unrealized opportunity haunting them. It likely does not have a happy ending (not yet at least) because the problems and challenges plaguing the characters are unresolved. Still, it demonstrates why this initiative was pursued in the first place and leads up to the catalytic moment when the characters decided to take it on. In many respects, this experience serves as the “genesis story” for the initiative, answering the question, “Where did this idea come from?”.
Along the tense and tumultuous journey — No journey goes perfectly or as planned. (Just watch “The Odyssey.”) Problems and pitfalls emerge: some foreseen, many not. Accompanying them is the doubt, insecurity, and fear that cloud the psyches of the protagonists, leaving them to wonder, “Is this the right thing to be doing?” These singular crisis-of-conscience moments are ideal for telling a story FROM an initiative. They’re filled initially with tension. But often in these tense situations, an interaction with a customer, employee, patient, clinician, or other stakeholder is the thing to remind the protagonist that this initiative is still worth pursuing even if the journey is harder than expected.
At the turning point — Just when the protagonist and other characters in the story thought all was lost, there is one profound instant when everything starts falling into place. It’s a crystalizing experience when everyone realized it was worth the effort even if there were moments of apprehension or uncertainty along the way.
After the turning point — You might tell a story FROM the aftermath of the launch to offer proof of concept. Rather than just citing a 12.5% boost in retention, you also tell the audience about one Tuesday afternoon three weeks post-launch, when your lead developer sat down with one of your oldest customers, opened the new portal with great anticipation, and watched her face light up as she found in two clicks what used to take her and her team twenty.
Where the macro view outlines the final strategic destination, these micro views let people feel what it took to get there and reassure the business storyteller and the audience that the initiative was the right thing to do all along.
Connection, Not Opposition: The Zoom Lens
It can be tempting to view these two styles as a choice you have to make. “Should I share the big-picture strategic story, or should I share a personal anecdote from the journey along the way?” In reality, effective business storytellers rarely choose one over the other. They aren’t opposing techniques; they are simply different views through the exact same lens.
The story OF an initiative reveals the macro, wide angle context for an initiative, giving purpose to any specific, unique micro moment. Without that macro context, an individual story from the field can feel like an isolated incident—pleasant to hear about but ultimately lacking broader strategic weight and relevance.
On the flip side, the story FROM an initiative zooms in to provide not only real-time evidence and tangible impact, but also a more human, more relatable element to the larger endeavour. It doesn’t just relay what happened, but importantly what was happening to people: what they were thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, experiencing, and realizing along the way.
This human element will help connect both the macro story OF an initiative and any micro stories FROM it to an audience, tapping into their human nature while also appealing to their strategic business mindset. Ultimately, it helps bring soul to the strategy, engaging an audience on multiple, richer levels.
Bill Baker is the founder and principal of BB&Co Strategic Storytelling. For over 15 years, BB&Co has been providing Business Storytelling and Effective Presentation Skills training to organizations such as GE Healthcare, Bristol Myers Squibb, Dell, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, Dell, Adobe, Oracle, and others.
