What’s the Story?

I can remember the first time I laid eyes on it. I was holding a Xerox copy of a report with the actual handwritten word of the big boss himself, who, in my mind, sat at the right hand of the Lord. It was a capex report, full of numbers neatly aligned and short paragraphs. But what stood out to me was the handwritten word in the margin. It was just one word, “Story.”

It was back in the 80s and I was a young analyst, a very small cog in a very large wheel, involved in the capital spending (capex) process at General Motors, at that time the largest automaker in the world. All the capex projects above a certain size needed a sign-off by the boss, Jim McDonald, the President of GM. Projects he didn’t approve outright were sent back for more information. He conveyed that command in a single word, “Story.”

You can imagine that in a capital-driven company of that size, there was no lack of detailed information backing up these approval requests. The capex report had taken a great many people a great deal of effort to produce. But often the boss had one simple word that indicated all that info didn’t add up.

His request has stuck with me. It became more meaningful through the decades of running various businesses. Financial and operational reports abound, and they are usually rich with data and sometimes information. What’s that mean? Usually, data means nothing all by itself. It’s just numbers. Good analysis can turn raw data into information, data that “informs” you.

But depending on how sharp the analysis is, even good information may or may not tell you what happened, and it never tells you exactly what will happen next. Forecasts are merely forecasts. The real story is often something else. Understanding the story is more of a craft than an algorithm.

There are times when you have to dig in and figure out the story, sometimes get more input from the team, as McDonald did, and then rewrite the story to try to get to a clearer plotline or a better ending.

Altering the Narrative

One business I took over had what I would politely call an undernourished quality control department. So we rebuilt it. Before too long we had all sorts of processes in place for inspection, testing, root cause analysis, corrective action, and you-name-it. We started producing a great deal of data, and the graphs and trends helped the data to become increasingly useful information. We discussed it as a team every week.

At one of those meetings, the team walked through the numbers with real confidence. Every measure we had said that the process was taking root the way it should. I saw the data and understood the information. The improvements were obvious. What’s not to like? Lots.

In my head their story needed to get to the ending a lot faster. There’s a reason why movies are a couple hours, never 4 or 5. And there’s a reason why great series on Netflix can go on for years, but they are organized into coherent episodes, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Multiple episodes build together and create a season. Seasons get renewed if they get results. We needed a crisp Hemingway novel, and these guys were giving me Tolstoy. At the rate they were going, I was not sure I would live long enough to get to the end of episode one, let alone season one.

So when they finished, we celebrated the progress, but then I shared with them that our terrific progress indicated that we needed to rearrange our focus and determine all the areas where we could do significantly less, not more.

The room did not expect that. Do less for quality? Heresy.

Shifting Focus to Provide Coverage

But the information was telling a story if you knew how to look for it, and the story was that in episode 1 we proved we could become very good in a lot of areas, but we had a lot of ground yet to cover; some areas were not yet touched at the rate we were going.

The resources we were consuming would not last to the end of this episode 2, let alone a coherent season. To me, our success in certain areas meant that we could shift our focus and our resources and lean into other areas where we had greater opportunity for incremental gains. By systematically reducing our efforts in some places, we could widen our focus and increase our opportunity to make progress overall.

The next time that team met, the breadth of the data and information had changed. The story told was a different one: less data in the places that had already earned our confidence, statistically, and far more in the places that needed it more.

Good teams tend to latch onto a game plan and stick with it. That’s not bad. That’s what you teach them to do. This team had read the numbers correctly. What they had not done, and what I do not think most teams do without practice and leadership, is stand back and look for ways to ask what a different story might look like.

Where are we going with this? Do we have the resources to keep it up and get renewed for season 2? Understanding the story tells you where you’ve been and where you stand at present, but it does not tell you that you could stand somewhere better if you changed the plot or developed it differently. Changing the plotline takes initiative, insight, and imagination, and it takes authorship. Often, the leader’s job is to not only require a flow of data and information to reveal the story, but beyond that, to imagine a better story, with more coherent parts and maybe a happier ending, and then lead the team to help make it come true.

Adapt, Overcome, Improvise

Angus Fletcher, the PhD, with an interesting combination of degrees in neuroscience and literature, wrote about this in his August 2025 book, “Primal Intelligence.” His argument is that the human mind runs on narrative, on stories, long before it runs on data, and that this is not a weakness whatsoever; it is a great strength.

The ability to create new and better plans from incomplete information is a gift humans possess uniquely. It is the reason a person can see past what the numbers say is likely, toward something that has not happened yet, but could happen, and then spontaneously rewrite the plot to have a different, better ending.

Among other groups, Fletcher works with U.S. Army Special Operations units to develop their ability to improvise and execute in the face of a shortfall of information in a rapidly changing situation. In business, it’s not life-threatening, but you get the idea. The magic of “story” is powerful, and the reason you can’t just run a business by the numbers. You must retain authorship of the situation to drive better outcomes.

Evolution from Analytical Rigor and Creative Insight

Fletcher reprises the same lesson I took away from Kenichi Ohmae many years ago. In his 1982 strategic planning classic, “The Mind of the Strategist,” Ohmae indicates that great business strategy evolves from insight and a particular creative state of mind, not just from rigorous analytical process and the application of appropriate planning paradigms. Paradigms matter. Analysis matters. Logic matters. They stimulate and stress-test the creative process, but they do not by themselves generate good strategy. Good strategy requires the creative leap across the synapse between information, analysis, and some more optimal future state.

Ohmae was writing about strategy, Fletcher about decision making, but I believe the point is broadly applicable. Any element of management, including strategy, is never the sum of the data, analysis, and information you can gather. That’s only the reality you have to deal with at the present moment. The future may be implied but is not yet determined.

The story of where the business is going is open to radical change, and you get to weigh in on that story if you are willing to step outside the logic of the existing plotline and think outside the proverbial box. You can reimagine the story and “the ending” differently if you embrace the uniquely human creative process that allows us to imagine and reimagine what does not yet exist.

Data and information can often tell you what happened and where you stand. In some tactical situations that is enough. Sometimes the storyline is apparent, sometimes you have to ask for it, as McDonald did way back when. More often than not, if you understand the story, it can be written and rewritten in many ways, but only if you imagine that it can. Leaders take the initiative to get outside the box, drive a creative process, and change the course of the narrative. The future is not yet written.