Language, Narrative and the Evolution of Persuasion

The Evolution of Language: Why Humans Talk

Human language is the most complex communication system in the natural world. It is generative: a finite set of phonemes, morphemes, and grammatical rules can produce an infinite range of novel utterances. It is displaced: it can refer to objects, events, and states that are not present in the immediate context. It is abstract: it can represent concepts, relationships, and counterfactual possibilities rather than merely concrete perceptible objects. No other species has communication approaching this complexity, and its evolutionary origins remain one of the most actively debated questions in evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

Steven Pinker's (1994) language instinct hypothesis proposed that language is a biological adaptation: not a cultural invention that humans happened to develop but an evolved capacity whose neural architecture was shaped by natural selection over hundreds of thousands of years of ancestral social life. Pinker's evidence included the universality of language across all known human cultures, the consistent developmental trajectory of language acquisition in children regardless of their linguistic environment, the existence of language-specific neural architecture that is damaged by specific lesions in ways that do not damage other cognitive capacities, and the cross-linguistic universals in phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure that suggest common underlying biological architecture rather than independent cultural invention.

The adaptive function that language evolved to serve is the subject of genuine scientific debate. Pinker's own view was that language evolved primarily for the communication of propositional content: for exchanging information about the world that enabled more effective cooperation and coordination. Robin Dunbar's (1996) social brain hypothesis generated a different account: that language evolved primarily as a form of social grooming, a mechanism for maintaining the large coalitional networks that the social brain was simultaneously evolving to manage. Dunbar's evidence included the finding that approximately two-thirds of human conversational time is spent on social topics rather than on information exchange about the physical world, suggesting that the primary function of human language is social bonding through the exchange of social information rather than propositional information transfer.

The resolution proposed by several researchers, including Derek Bickerton (1990) and Terrence Deacon (1997), is that language evolved for multiple functions simultaneously and that the generativity and abstractness that distinguish human language from other communication systems were driven precisely by the demands of the specific functions that Dunbar identifies as primary: the management of complex social relationships and the construction of the shared symbolic realities that large-scale human cooperation requires.

Deacon's (1997) symbolic species hypothesis proposed that the critical evolutionary innovation in human language was not phonological or syntactic complexity but symbolic reference: the capacity to use arbitrary signs to represent concepts and relationships in ways that allowed the construction of shared symbolic worlds that do not exist in physical reality. The value of this capacity is precisely in what it enables socially: the construction of shared beliefs, shared identities, shared moral frameworks, and shared narratives that provide the common cognitive infrastructure through which large-scale cooperation among strangers becomes possible.

For leadership, the evolutionary linguistics framework has a direct and important implication. Language did not evolve primarily as a tool for information transfer. It evolved primarily as a tool for social bonding, relationship management, and the construction of shared symbolic realities. Leaders who use language primarily as an information transfer tool are using an evolutionarily sophisticated system for a function that is secondary to its primary evolutionary purpose. Leaders who use language to build shared symbolic realities, to construct and maintain shared identities, and to activate the evolved social motivational systems that Dunbar's social brain hypothesis describes are using language for the functions it evolved to serve.

Marcus Johansson used language as an information transfer tool. His communications were information-rich, analytically rigorous, and motivationally inert. Amara Diallo used language as a social bonding and shared reality construction tool. Her communications were informationally simpler and motivationally powerful. The evolutionary framework offers one way of understanding why.

The Narrative Brain: Why Stories Do What Arguments Cannot

Jonathan Gottschall's (2012) research on the storytelling animal documented a finding that every culture in human history has known without being able to explain: humans are compulsive storytellers and compulsive story consumers. Every known human culture has narrative: myths, legends, folktales, histories, and personal stories that are told, retold, and transmitted across generations with an intensity that suggests they are serving functions beyond mere entertainment. Children begin producing and consuming narrative before they can reliably perform most other complex cognitive tasks. Adults spend a substantial proportion of their leisure time consuming fictional narrative through literature, film, television, and digital media in ways that serve no obvious instrumental purpose and yet are experienced as among the most rewarding activities available.

The evolutionary explanation for the universality and compulsiveness of narrative is that story is a cognitive technology that evolved to serve specific adaptive functions. Brian Boyd's (2009) evolutionary account of narrative proposed that storytelling evolved as a form of cognitive play: a low-stakes simulation environment in which individuals could rehearse responses to social challenges, explore the consequences of different courses of action, and develop the social cognitive capacities, including theory of mind, moral reasoning, and social prediction, that ancestral social life required. Stories are, on this account, social simulations: they allow the social brain to rehearse social scenarios without the costs and risks of real social engagement.

The neural evidence supports this account. Uri Hasson and colleagues' (2008) research found that viewers' brains synchronise with one another while watching the same film, and that stronger synchrony is linked to better memory of what was watched. This intersubject synchrony was stronger for more engaging scenes and predicted how well viewers subsequently remembered them. Related work by Hasson and colleagues on speaker-listener neural coupling, in which the listener's neural activity comes to resemble the speaker's during narrative communication, points the same way, but it is a separate line of research and is not what the 2008 study measured.

These neural findings invite an evolutionary interpretation, which is the chapter's own and not a result of either line of research. If story evolved as a social simulation technology, the adaptive function of neural synchrony and coupling may be to enable the listener to genuinely simulate the experiences that the narrative describes: to run the social scenario through their own neural architecture rather than merely processing it as abstract propositional content. The result, on this reading, is that narrative communication may produce something closer to shared experience than information transfer produces, engaging the evolved systems for experiential learning rather than the propositional memory systems that abstract information is argued to use.

Paul Zak's (2012) popular account of the neurochemistry of narrative proposes that stories that produce emotional engagement, specifically stories that activate the tension and empathy that effective narrative generates, produce oxytocin release in listeners. On Zak's account, this is the same neurochemical response that genuine social bonding produces, and it is linked to increased trust, increased willingness to cooperate, and increased prosocial behaviour toward the persons and causes associated with the story. Zak's book is a popular-science source, so the oxytocin link to trust and cooperation is better read as a hypothesis to be checked against the primary literature than as an established finding. Narrative is, in Zak's framework, a neurochemical social bonding technology: it is proposed to produce the biochemical state of genuine social connection in listeners through simulated social experience.

The implications for leadership communication, if Zak's account holds, are considerable. On that account, information transfer produces understanding but not oxytocin, while narrative produces both understanding and the neurochemical social bonding state that may motivate cooperative behaviour. Marcus Johansson's analytical presentations produced the 71% understanding and 34% motivation that his survey data documented. Amara Diallo's narrative produced the 68% understanding and 71% motivation of hers. The difference was not primarily in the quality of their strategic thinking or in their communication skills in the conventional sense. The argument here is that it plausibly lay mainly in which evolved neural and neurochemical systems their communication engaged. This is a reading of a single case, in which the two leaders and the two years also differed in other ways, and no neural or neurochemical activity was measured.

Narrative Transportation and the Suspension of Counterargument

Melanie Green and Timothy Brock's (2000) narrative transportation theory provided the psychological mechanism through which narrative produces its persuasive effects. Green and Brock proposed that engaging narrative produces a state of transportation: the reader or listener becomes absorbed in the narrative world in ways that temporarily suspend their critical evaluation of the narrative's content. This transportation state has specific cognitive and motivational consequences: transported individuals are less likely to generate counterarguments to the narrative's implicit claims, more likely to accept the narrative's value premises, and more likely to form intentions consistent with the narrative's implicit call to action than non-transported individuals processing the same content analytically.

The evolutionary logic of narrative transportation is connected to the social simulation function of story. If story evolved as a social rehearsal technology, the adaptive value of suspension of disbelief during story consumption is that it allows the simulation to run without the critical interruption that would prevent genuine experiential learning. A child learning social norms through the fairy tales their culture tells them learns more effectively if they are genuinely absorbed in the story than if they are critically evaluating its claims at every step. The transportation state is therefore not a failure of critical thinking but a feature of the narrative learning system: it enables the genuine experiential simulation that story is designed to produce.

For leadership communication, narrative transportation has a specific and practically important implication that the costly signalling framework of Chapter 8 illuminates from a different angle. The analytical communication that Marcus Johansson used activated his audience's critical evaluation systems: they processed his strategic rationale as propositional claims that could be accepted or rejected based on evidence and argument. This is appropriate for genuinely analytical decisions, but it produces the adversarial frame in which counterarguments are generated and resistance is motivated rather than cooperation. Narrative communication activates the transportation state that suspends critical evaluation and enables the shared reality construction that Deacon's symbolic species hypothesis identifies as language's primary evolutionary function.

Amara's story of Emmanuel did not present claims about the strategic necessity of transformation that could be analytically evaluated and potentially rejected. It invited transportation into a narrative world in which the moral stakes of the transformation were viscerally felt rather than intellectually assessed. The question she ended with, which of these two experiences do you want to be responsible for, was not a logical argument: it was a narrative prompt that activated the moral identity of her audience and produced the personal commitment that analytical argument cannot reliably generate.

Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's (1977) script theory provided an early account of the cognitive architecture that makes narrative transportation possible. Schank and Abelson proposed that humans understand events through scripts: cognitive schemas that represent the typical structure of recurring event sequences and that allow rapid comprehension of new events by matching them against stored scripts. Narrative activates scripts rather than requiring the construction of new comprehension from first principles, which is partly why narrative comprehension is faster, less effortful, and more motivationally engaging than analytical comprehension: it is working with rather than against the cognitive architecture that evolved for understanding human social events.

The Ancestral Campfire: Narrative's Social Functions in Hunter-Gatherer Society

The evolutionary roots of narrative leadership are visible in the ethnographic evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, which provide the closest available approximation to the ancestral environments in which human narrative psychology was shaped.

Polly Wiessner's (2014) research on the content and social functions of conversation in the Ju/'hoan !Kung San of the Kalahari documented that evening fireside conversations, which occupy a large proportion of hunter-gatherer social time, are dominated by storytelling rather than by practical information exchange. Daytime conversations are mostly practical: coordinating foraging activities, discussing food distribution, managing immediate social concerns. Evening conversations around the campfire are dominated by narrative: stories of hunts past and present, myths and legends transmitted across generations, accounts of journeys to distant places, and fictional stories that explore moral scenarios and social relationships.

Wiessner's analysis showed that the narrative content of evening conversations served specific social functions beyond entertainment. Stories about successful hunts communicated skill and knowledge in ways that established the reputation of skilled hunters without the self-promotion that direct boasting would have produced, activating the indirect costly signalling logic described in Chapter 8. Myths and legends transmitted the collective moral framework of the group in forms that were emotionally engaging and therefore more reliably internalised than explicit rule statements. Stories of distant places and other groups managed intergroup information in ways that calibrated the group's understanding of the broader social landscape. And personal narratives shared around the fire built the social bonds and mutual knowledge that sustained the coalition through the repeated sharing of genuine personal experience.

For leadership, Wiessner's research establishes the ancestral context in which human narrative psychology was shaped: narrative was the primary technology through which hunter-gatherer leaders communicated, through which reputation was built and maintained, through which collective identity and moral framework were transmitted, and through which the social bonds that sustained coalition were continuously renewed. The modern leader who uses narrative is not merely employing a communication technique: they are activating a psychological system that evolved specifically to perform these social functions and that is therefore specifically calibrated to respond to genuine narrative with the full range of social motivational responses that Wiessner's research documents.

Narrative Identity and Leadership Legitimacy

Dan McAdams's (1993) narrative identity theory proposed that the self is fundamentally a narrative construction: humans construct and maintain their sense of who they are through the stories they tell about their lives, integrating past experiences, present circumstances, and anticipated futures into a coherent personal narrative that provides the continuity and meaning that identity requires.

The evolutionary basis of narrative identity connects to the theory of mind framework discussed in Chapter 2. The same cognitive capacity that allows humans to model others' mental states also allows them to model their own mental states across time, constructing a autobiographical self that exists in narrative rather than in immediate experience. This narrative self is adaptive because it enables the temporal integration that long-term cooperation requires: an organism that can represent its own past commitments and future obligations in narrative form can maintain the long-term cooperative relationships that short-term reward maximisation would undermine.

For leadership, narrative identity has a specific implication for leadership legitimacy. Leaders whose public narrative, the story they tell about themselves, their values, and their relationship to the people they lead, is experienced as genuine and coherent generate the leadership legitimacy that formal authority alone cannot produce. Leaders whose public narrative is experienced as performed or inconsistent generate the cynicism and resistance that the costly signalling framework predicts for cheap signal production.

Amara Diallo's story of Emmanuel was not a random communication choice. It was an expression of a genuine personal narrative about why healthcare mattered and what it meant to get it right. The emotional honesty of the story, the fact that she had spent three hours with Emmanuel and his wife before preparing the communication, was the narrative equivalent of the costly signal: it demonstrated genuine investment of time and attention that performed empathy would not have produced. Her audience read this accurately. The argument here is that the story plausibly activated their narrative transportation because it was genuine rather than performed, and that genuine narrative activates the social bonding systems in ways that performed narrative does not.

Walter Fisher's (1984) narrative paradigm proposed that humans are fundamentally homo narrans: storytelling animals whose primary mode of reasoning is narrative rather than analytical. Fisher argued that narrative rationality, the evaluation of stories based on coherence and fidelity, whether the story hangs together internally and whether it rings true against the listener's own experience of the world, is the primary form of reasoning through which humans evaluate the trustworthiness, competence, and legitimacy of leaders. The analytical rationality of Marcus Johansson's strategic presentations was assessed through a different and ultimately less motivationally powerful evaluative system than the narrative rationality of Amara Diallo's stories.

The Neuroscience of Metaphor and the Body of Leadership Language

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's (1980) conceptual metaphor theory demonstrated that abstract thought is fundamentally structured by metaphors drawn from embodied physical experience: we understand abstract concepts including time, causality, morality, and social relationships through mappings from concrete bodily experience. Time is understood as a spatial journey. Arguments are understood as buildings with foundations and structures. Leaders are understood through the physical metaphors of height, forward movement, and visibility.

Proponents argue that the neural case for conceptual metaphor has grown stronger since Lakoff and Johnson's original proposal. Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff's (2005) work on the embodied simulation basis of language argued that language about physical actions engages the motor regions associated with those actions, a theoretical account in which language is simulated physical experience. When a listener hears that a leader stands firm or moves the organisation forward, their motor systems are partially activated in ways that produce a genuine, if attenuated, simulation of the physical experience the metaphor invokes.

For leadership communication, the neuroscience of metaphor has a specific practical implication, offered here as the chapter's extension of the motor-simulation idea and not as the finding of a specific study. The metaphors through which leaders frame their strategic narratives are plausibly not merely rhetorical choices: they may activate specific neural architectures that shape how listeners conceptualise the challenges and opportunities they face. A leader who frames a competitive challenge as a battle may activate the neural architecture associated with physical conflict: heightened threat detection, increased in-group solidarity, and the motivational intensity of genuine physical danger. A leader who frames the same challenge as a journey may activate the neural architecture associated with exploration: curiosity, forward orientation, and the open-ended engagement that the SEEKING system described in Chapter 27 produces.

The argument here is that the metaphors leaders use may not merely describe the situation: they may help construct the psychological situation for the people who receive them, by activating neural architectures that shape perception, motivation, and social behaviour in specific directions. Leaders who understand this will choose their metaphors with the precision of an architect choosing structural materials: not for aesthetic effect but for the specific psychological states they construct in the people who receive them.

Narrative and Moral Identity: The Gap Between Values and Behaviour

Jonathan Haidt's (2001) social intuitionist model of moral judgment, discussed in the chapters on moral psychology, proposed that moral judgments are primarily produced by rapid intuitive processes rather than by conscious analytical reasoning. The analytical moral reasoning that people produce when asked to justify their moral judgments is, on Haidt's account, primarily post-hoc rationalisation of judgments that have already been made intuitively rather than genuine causal determinants of those judgments.

The narrative framework offers a hypothesis about the mechanism through which moral intuitions are formed and activated. This is the chapter's own bridge from Haidt's model and not a finding in Haidt's paper. On this hypothesis, moral intuitions are not abstract rules stored in cognitive memory: they are plausibly the product of accumulated emotional responses to moral narratives encountered throughout the lifespan. The moral framework that a person carries is then substantially constituted by the stories they have heard, the moral emotions those stories have activated, and the moral identity those experiences have shaped. Moral education would then be, at its most fundamental level, narrative education: the transmission of stories that produce the emotional responses and identity commitments that moral behaviour requires.

For leadership, this has a specific implication for the gap between espoused values and enacted values that Schein's (2010) cultural analysis identified. On the argument here, the gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually do is not primarily a problem of intellectual commitment: most organisational members intellectually understand and endorse the values their organisation espouses. The gap is, on this argument, a problem of narrative activation: the espoused values are held as abstract propositions rather than as emotionally charged narrative commitments that motivate behaviour when the costs of acting consistently with those values are genuine.

Marcus Johansson's transformation communication produced widespread intellectual endorsement of the strategic rationale. It did not produce the narrative activation of moral identity that genuine behavioural commitment requires. Amara Diallo's communication produced the opposite: less comprehensive intellectual endorsement of the analytical rationale but genuine narrative activation of the moral identity of her audience through Emmanuel's story. The question she ended with, which of these two experiences do you want to be responsible for, was a direct activation of narrative moral identity: it placed her audience inside a story in which they were moral agents with genuine responsibility for a specific outcome, rather than intellectual evaluators of a strategic proposition.

Narrative and Identity Construction in Leadership

Narrative is not merely a communication tool for leaders: it is the primary mechanism through which leadership identity is constructed, maintained, and transmitted. The leader who can tell a coherent story about who they are, what they value, and where they are taking the people they lead is constructing the leadership identity that followers are evaluating when they decide whether to genuinely commit to the direction the leader is proposing.

Howard Gardner's (1995) research on leading minds identified the creation and communication of a unifying story as the primary cognitive function of effective leadership: Gardner proposed that what distinguished the most effective leaders he studied was not their analytical intelligence or their technical expertise but their capacity to create stories that answered the fundamental identity questions that followers need answered before genuine commitment is possible. Who are we? What are we trying to do? Why does it matter? What is our relationship to each other and to the people we serve?

These are narrative questions rather than analytical ones. They are answered not by strategic frameworks or financial projections but by stories that construct a shared identity robust enough to motivate genuine sacrifice, sustained effort, and genuine commitment through the difficulty and uncertainty that ambitious endeavours inevitably produce.

Robert Cialdini's (2001) influence framework, while not explicitly evolutionary, maps onto the narrative psychology framework in important ways. The influence mechanisms Cialdini identified, reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity, may all be more effectively activated through narrative than through analytical communication, which is the chapter's own argument and not a claim Cialdini makes: they operate, on this argument, through the emotional and social motivational systems that narrative activates rather than through the analytical systems that propositional communication engages. The leader who tells a story in which reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity are embedded in the narrative fabric is activating these influence mechanisms through what this argument treats as their most powerful channel rather than asserting them as analytical propositions.

Critical Examination: The Limits of the Narrative Framework for Leadership

The evolutionary psychology of narrative is empirically grounded and practically important, but several limitations require honest acknowledgement.

The narrative transportation research, while robust in laboratory settings, has been less extensively tested in complex real-world organisational contexts. The conditions that produce transportation, including narrative coherence, emotional engagement, and the absence of distracting counterarguments, are more controllable in laboratory settings than in the complex, distraction-rich environments of organisational communication. The generalisation from laboratory narrative transportation to organisational communication effectiveness involves inferential steps whose validity in all organisational contexts has not been directly established.

The distinction between narrative and analytical communication, while conceptually clear, is practically less clean. Effective leadership communication typically involves both: narrative that creates the emotional engagement and identity activation that motivation requires, combined with analytical content that provides the intellectual framework within which the narrative makes sense. The risk of overlearning the narrative lesson is that leaders abandon the analytical rigour that genuine strategic thinking requires in favour of storytelling that is emotionally engaging but intellectually hollow. Amara Diallo's effectiveness was not despite her analytical competence but alongside it: her narrative was powerful partly because it was genuinely grounded in a sound strategic understanding that gave it intellectual coherence.

The narrative transportation mechanism, specifically the suspension of counterargument that transportation produces, raises genuine ethical questions that the framework must acknowledge. If narrative is more persuasive than analytical communication partly because it bypasses critical evaluation, then skilled narrative communicators have access to a persuasion technology whose effectiveness is partly a function of its capacity to reduce rational scrutiny. The same mechanism that makes Amara Diallo's communication of a genuinely good transformation strategy more effective than Marcus Johansson's would make a less scrupulous leader's communication of a harmful strategy more effective too. The evolutionary framework for narrative is descriptive rather than normative: it explains why narrative works without endorsing any particular use of that knowledge.

Cultural variation, discussed in Chapter 21, substantially affects narrative conventions, the stories that are considered appropriate in different contexts, and the specific narrative structures that produce transportation in different cultural settings. The narrative frameworks discussed in this chapter are substantially derived from Western, literate, individualist cultural contexts and should be applied with cultural sensitivity in cross-cultural leadership contexts.

Key takeaways

• Language evolved primarily as a social bonding and shared reality construction technology rather than as a tool for information transfer: leaders who use language primarily for information delivery are using an evolutionarily sophisticated system for a function secondary to its primary evolutionary purpose (Dunbar, 1996; Deacon, 1997).
• Narrative may activate neural and neurochemical systems that analytical communication does not reach: film-viewing research finds brains synchronising across viewers, with stronger synchrony going with better memory (Hasson et al., 2008), and Zak's popular account proposes that narrative engagement produces oxytocin release and a social bonding state that motivates cooperative behaviour, a hypothesis to be checked against the primary literature (Zak, 2012).
• Narrative transportation suspends critical evaluation and enables shared reality construction through the narrative learning system: this may make narrative communication more persuasive than analytical communication, while requiring ethical awareness about the bypass of rational scrutiny (Green and Brock, 2000).
• Metaphors may construct psychological situations rather than merely describing them: on the embodied simulation account of language, metaphor choice may activate specific neural architectures that shape perception, motivation, and social behaviour in specific directions rather than being merely aesthetic choices, although the specific effects of battle and journey framings are the chapter's argument and not the finding of a named study (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gallese and Lakoff, 2005).
• Leadership legitimacy is substantially evaluated through narrative rationality, the coherence and fidelity of the leader's story, rather than through analytical assessment alone: leaders whose public narrative is experienced as genuine and coherent generate legitimacy that formal authority cannot produce (McAdams, 1993; Fisher, 1984).
• The argument here is that moral identity is activated through narrative rather than through propositional values statements: the gap between espoused and enacted values plausibly reflects the failure to narratively activate moral identity rather than a failure of intellectual commitment, and closing that gap may require stories that place people inside moral scenarios as agents with genuine responsibility rather than as evaluators of abstract propositions. The step from Haidt's intuitionism to narrative is the chapter's own bridge (Haidt, 2001; Schein, 2010).
• Effective leadership communication requires the experiential investment that genuine story demands: the stories that produce genuine narrative transportation must be grounded in real human experience that the leader has genuinely encountered rather than in synthetic examples constructed for rhetorical effect, plausibly because the evolved signal-reading systems that evaluate narrative authenticity may be sensitive to the difference between genuine and performed experiential grounding, which is the chapter's argument and not the finding of a cited study.

Reflection questions

• Consider your own primary communication mode as a leader. What proportion of your formal communications delivers information and what proportion constructs shared narrative? From the evolutionary framework, which mode is more likely to produce the genuine behavioural commitment that your leadership is trying to generate?
• Think about a significant leadership communication you have made that produced understanding without motivation: people understood what you were saying but did not genuinely commit to acting on it. From the narrative psychology framework, what would a narrative version of that communication have looked like? What stories would you have needed to tell and what experiential investment would gathering those stories have required?
• Examine the metaphors you most commonly use in leadership communication. What neural architectures do those metaphors activate? Are they activating the psychological states that the behaviours you are trying to motivate require, or are they activating different or competing psychological states?
• Reflect on the narrative identity you project as a leader. Is there a coherent story about who you are, what you value, and where you are taking the people you lead that your communications consistently express? Is that story experienced as genuine and coherent by the people you lead, or are there gaps between the narrative you intend and the narrative they receive?
• Consider the moral identity activation in your leadership communication. Do your communications place people inside moral scenarios as agents with genuine responsibility, or do they present values as abstract propositions for intellectual endorsement? What specific stories would activate the moral identity of your team in relation to the values you most want them to enact?
• Examine the experiential investment that your narrative communication requires. What genuine human experiences of the work you are leading do you have direct access to? Where are the gaps between your analytical understanding of your organisation's strategic situation and the experiential understanding that genuine story requires? What specific investments of time and attention would close those gaps?

References

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