Narratives Create New Realities
Let's add a multiverse of narratives to our portfolio for the future
Hi, I’m Jen, and I design business models. I am a teacher and consultant and I help people understand how their organizations make money.
Let’s understand how we talk about the future and create collective imagination, particularly for the technologies, people, and organizations that propose a better way.
I’m writing to those of you who will find yourselves creating these new alternatives, or who find yourselves in the decision rooms or zooms that get to pick which projects, people, organizations, technology, and policies get chosen.
The way we talk about our ideas for the future has been deeply shaped by our culture of tech companies and early-stage capital allocators, and my intent is to show how the sausage is made. The sausage of tech is the business model.
I confessed my bit player role in the Netscape IPO. The Big Bang event launched thousands of innovators and speculators to reconfigure the world around the new reality of internet business models.
It was a tale of two stories.
From the outside the story was exciting, the potential of the internet and the possibility of enormous rapid wealth creation.
From inside the syndicate the story was dark and cynical. I was told to suspend disbelief for long enough to let the company ride out the hype cycle.
But the cynics and the enthusiasts were both directionally right because we were not analyzing what had happened prior to that day in 1996, we were forecasting two versions of the future.
You will never see a tech founder tell a cynical story to the public. Part of their value lies in their intense desire to shape a future reality and make the impossible possible. The most talented founders have the ability to shape the world through these beliefs.
One of Steve Job’s co-founders, Bud Tribble, described Job’s skill as a reality distortion field or RDF. Job’s persistence, charisma, and persuasive skills had a powerful effect on developers to achieve seemingly impossible timelines and technical achievements on the Macintosh project. The term came from "The Menagerie” episode from Star Trek to describe how the aliens created their own new world through mental force.
There is nothing wrong with shaping the future through stories. We are humans. We tell stories. Yuval Noah Harari tells us in Sapiens that our ability to create and believe fiction is what makes us special as a species: All other animals communicate to describe reality. We communicate to create new realities.
When I’m working with anyone on a story to ask for anything, we sketch out the narrative storyline.
I work with students who have been historically excluded from early-stage capital. They are great at telling their personal life stories but need to work on how their backstory will lead to a future story of their company.
I also work with technologists who are great at explaining the technical challenges and issues with their invention. But they often fail to tell any story at all and get stuck in the analytical back-and-forth of evaluating the technical features, rather than the business or human possibilities that technology could unlock.
To breakthrough, I borrow from Kurt Vonnegut’s rejected master’s thesis which provides a useful subset of potential stories. Vonnegut attempted to compare contemporary short stories to ancient myths and religious stories.
Vonnegut presents options: is this your standard creation story of incremental improvement? Is this a story of search and discovery like a classic Boy Meets Girl? Is it a story of redemption like so many startup stories - you were on to something, then everything went wrong, but now you’ve figured it all out!
We also talk about the importance of stories to shape how people talk about your company when you are not in the room. How do we resolve objections so they do not tell an Old Testament story that you will live a quick life but suffer in the end, or a Kafka story that your company is nothing, was never anything, will never be anything, and will die, fast.
In the startup world, The more the teller of the story can invoke movement and credible excitement, the more valuable the outcome. Why? Because the syndicate that funds early-stage companies are like hunters looking for a flicker of movement in the brush. They want to pounce before someone else gets the chance.
The best storytellers with the best culturally defined pedigrees tend to win the most attention, the most backers, and the most resources. Storytellers that come with what we deem to have strong credentials have kinetic propulsion built in from the start. People telling stories with Stanford engineering degrees and prior early-stage roles at major tech giants have more upfront value. The unspoken assumption is that these people have the networks and skills to fulfill the story they are telling.
So if you are from a starting place that is not Stanford or the early days of Google, you need to do a bit more work to show how your backstory propels you to create the future you want to see.
If you are in a decision room as a policy person or capital allocator, this means you have to do more work on your end.
For climate and social impact solutions, raise the bar on science, and community. Make sure you have your own network of scientific experts to play out the possibilities being proposed. Ask if the community has been invited to weave their story into the future. Ask how the community will benefit from the future success of the project or company.
For a multiverse of futures (which we need to spread our bets from tech monoculture!) make sure you are filling your portfolio with storytellers that are diverse in their community connections, backstories, and ways of seeing the world.
Sketch the narrative you are hearing to become conscious of the curve. It’s a human strength, not a faulty cognitive bias, that you understand and respond to stories. But be more critical of the stories you hear.