May 20, 2026
The hidden stories running your organisations – and how to change them
In many organisations, change initiatives fail long before implementation: they get derailed by the stories people tell about the organisation and the strategy.
These stories are rarely visible on any org chart or strategy deck, yet during periods of rapid growth, change, or increasing complexity, they matter profoundly for aligning people with purpose and optimising for growth. Hidden beneath the surface, they are quietly running organisations.
Strategy never lands in a psychologically neutral environment
We are storytelling animals by nature. We constantly generate narratives about who we are, how we have come to be who we are, and what the future holds. The same process unfolds collectively inside organisations. Organisational ecosystems are also always narrative systems.
Teams develop stories about how things work, whether leaders can be trusted, whether effort is rewarded fairly, whether speaking up is dangerous, and whether change means opportunity or loss.
These stories shape our interpretations and patterns of attention and determine which signals we notice and which we disregard. They influence emotional tone, trust, discretionary effort, openness to innovation, and, ultimately, the quality of both employee and customer experience.
Stories are especially visible during periods of uncertainty or sustained pressure. Once such narratives shape how people feel about the organisation, top-down brand stories, fresh strategy decks, and upbeat town halls or well-meaning offsites rarely achieve what leaders hope they will.
In fact, attempts to impose new narratives too quickly often deepen cynicism because employees experience them as dishonest and disconnected from their emotional reality.
The impact of storytelling on Customer Experience
This dynamic has profound implications for CX. Customers are exquisitely sensitive interpreters of organisational mood. If employees tell themselves a negative story about their organisation and their role within it, this story will be communicated to the customer in one way or another.
We know that when it comes to decision-making and engagement, emotion tops reason every time. The same is true of stories – they tend to top data.
The problem is often not our actual organisational reality, but what kinds of stories we tell about this reality. For example, a strategy intended to generate focus and agility may instead intensify perceptions of instability and overload. What differs is not the external reality, but the interpretive story lens through which that reality is processed.
A three-step framework for narrative examination
When working with organisations, I use a framework called The Story Solution for Organisations™ to take them through a process of narrative examination.
For example, I recently worked with people development company Insights at their Global Leadership Meeting in Edinburgh to help their leaders think more deeply about how the stories they tell can help shape a thriving organisational future. Insights is an ambitious organisation, seeking new ways to tell its strategic story and to connect with its people and customers even more clearly.
We explored the stories we tell ourselves and others, and practised turning strategy into clear, human narratives that drive understanding, ownership and action. This was broken down into three steps:
Step one: diagnostics
Teams need opportunities to courageously surface the stories shaping their interpretations and assumptions. Enhanced self-awareness can change our stories, too – we often look at data and see different things according to our personality preferences.
Understanding ourselves and others through personality tools can shine a light on why we perceive and translate things in the way we do, how others may do that differently and how that shapes the stories we tell.
Step two: agency
In step two, teams learn to recognise that stories are interpretations rather than objective truths, and that some stories are helpful and others less so. This step reduces cynicism and restores agency.
Step three: ‘defusion’
In a third step, teams learn the art of ‘defusion’ – a technique for creating distance from habitual narratives so that they can be observed rather than automatically believed.
At the organisational level, this means helping people disentangle observable facts from inherited or newly formed unhelpful assumptions, non-generative causal stories, and the emotional residues of these old stories.
It is only after this work that teams can co-create authentic, powerful and aligned vision-stories about the future that truly have the power to genuinely motivate and engage.
The leader as an interpreter
Leaders often underestimate how much subjective and emotional interpretation enters communication at every level of an organisation. Strategy does not simply cascade downwards into an organisation in the form in which it may have been intended. What is sent rarely arrives as it was intended, and especially not if it is interpreted by various layers of emotional translators.
Every manager, team leader, and employee acts as an interpreter, subtly reshaping the meaning of strategic messages through tone, emphasis, omission, emotional framing, and personal belief. In other words, people’s strategy stories are always shaped by their pre-existing stories.
The organisations most likely to thrive amid uncertainty are therefore the ones capable of examining their own internal sense-making processes and hidden story-structures with honesty and psychological maturity. They understand that sustainable high performance depends upon narrative flexibility: the capacity to revise outdated stories before they harden into organisational destiny.
Anna Katharina Schaffner, PhD, is a story-solution consultant, burnout and executive coach, an Insights practitioner, and a writer. In her previous life she was a Professor of Cultural History. She is the author of ‘The Story Solution: Change your Toxic Self-Story and Thrive’ (Profile, 2026), ‘Exhausted: An A-Z for the Weary’ (Profile, 2024), ‘The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths’ (Yale University Press, 2021), and ‘Exhaustion: A History’ (Columbia University Press, 2016).
