Everyone is a storyteller.
What it means to be a storyteller, though, is changing.
AI can draft a decent story in seconds. Deciding which story the company tells often happens in meetings most storytellers aren’t invited to.
Truth be told, I’ve never fully identified with the frame of “storyteller.” Instead, I’ve always been about the narrative: the business decisions a story has to serve.
My work lives upstream, with CEOs, CMOs, CPOs, CTOs, investors, and the companies they back, where the words that drive a decision get treated like code.
Too often, storytellers work downstream of someone else’s decision.
The CEO sets the strategy
The board approves the investment
The product team locks the roadmap
The head of marketing defines a campaign
And then it lands with the storyteller:
Get people to invest, fund, buy, or believe. That’s real craft.
Inside the company, that’s comms or marketing. Outside it, it’s the agency, the consultant, the advisor. Either way, the brief arrives after the call’s been made.
If you believe in the power of storytelling, you want to be brought in while the decision’s still taking shape.
That’s what a Narrative Architect does.
Narrative Architect: Storytellers make the stories.
Narrative Architects build and manage the language system a company runs on.
A company’s language system is its worldview, beliefs, principles, norms, values, strategy, offerings, and history, codified into a canonical stack that people and AI agents can both run on. When it’s written down, a new hire, a board member, and an AI agent all describe the company the same way.
When it isn’t, you get three versions of the strategy and a chatbot inventing a fourth.
Why Fluency Moves You Upstream
Every decision gets made in a language. Speak it, and you get a seat at the table. Don’t, and you hear about the decision after it’s made.
Here’s my contrarian take: storytelling structure is the poker ante.
It’s the price of admission. Everyone at the table expects you to frame the conversation, paint the picture, humanize something abstract, make it clearer, make people feel it, and make it stick.
Every world has its own language.
The CFO speaks in payback period and downside. The product team speaks in roadmaps and user research. Sales speaks in deal velocity and pipeline. Your AI team speaks in evals and harnesses. And when a reorg or AI transformation asks people to work differently, behavior change has its own language too.
Learn the language of the world you want to be a part of.
Fluency Lets You Call Bullshit on AI
AI can make anything sound right.
Fluency is how you can tell when it’s close, but no cigar.
Ask a model to write the case for a product launch, and you’ll get something like this: “This launch will drive strong growth and deepen customer engagement.” A CMO, much less a CFO, can’t really fund a word of it.
Someone fluent in capital and ROI writes this instead: “This launch pays back in 14 months if churn stays under 3%, and if we’re wrong, it costs us the Q3 roadmap.”
The first sounds true. The second is either true or it isn’t, and you’ll know which. That distinction only comes with fluency.
Where Each Language Gets Written
Every one of these languages lives in a document.
Starting with the ones closest to the money:
Capital. The budget, investment memo, board deck
Strategy. FY27 strategy, OKRs, an offsite pre-read
Go-to-market. The funnel dashboard, pipeline review, win-loss rates
Product. The roadmap, PRD, user research, PLG motions
AI transformation. Architecture, evals, system prompts agents run on
People and change. The pulse survey, change plan, adoption dashboard
Few people are fluent in all six languages.
You don’t need to be.
One more is enough to get you in on the decision earlier.
Your Next Language
Pick the one you’d like to learn next.
Open Claude or your preferred LLM and paste this:
I want to become fluent in the language of [capital, strategy, go-to-market, product, AI, or people and change]. Attached is a document I need you to translate for me into this world. Identify the 10 most important frames or concepts that will have currency for the world I want to influence, and tell me what decision this document needs to argue for. Then quiz me until I can explain that decision back in its own language.
No document handy? Ask it to write a realistic one for a company like yours first.
Then give it something you wrote this month and ask what sounds right versus what’s actually right in that language. Start with capital, and you’ll find out why the launch got funded but the rebrand didn’t.
Everyone is still a storyteller. The question is what level of the game you’re playing.
The next language you learn decides how early you get asked in.
Michael
Want to become a Narrative Architect? Storied AI puts 50+ Narrative Intelligence® skills inside Claude, and the private beta is open by request. Join the waitlist