It’s the thread of what you do and what overarching story it tells. It’s a sustained arc about how you show up, what you do from a high altitude view and how you frame the world: on opportunities or threats.
John Hagel has studied the power of narratives and how they’re different from stories.
Stories are:
- about the individual: you, me, someone imaginary
- self-contained: have a beginning, middle, end
- focusing on one point (hence, the moral of the story)
Narratives are:
- about the audience: they can drive individuals, organizations and movements and are a call to action.
- open-ended: they’re overarching
- focused on a big picture: either a threat or an opportunity in the future and a call to arms to do something about it.
Here’s the thing
Building a narrative in harmony with your purpose has better odds to catalyze the impact of your initiatives.
It enables you to start focusing on how you can make an impact along with others —and how they (your customers, stakeholders) can come together to build towards that big opportunity in the future.
It takes the aspiration to work along inspiration
Questions that would lead to this
- Do an inventory of your work and look for the patterns of the outcomes you helped create.
- What’s that common thread?
- Is this thread levered on threats or opportunities? ie. Are you trying to keep X from Y [threat[ or are you trying to move X to Y [opportunity].
Resources worth checking:
- John Hagel
Moving from story to narrative
The Connection Between Narrative and Purpose - Metahelm
Strategic Narrative