I run a company built on narrative.
Last month the biggest bottleneck in it turned out to be me.
Technically, our project management systems are Monday.com and Notion.
In reality, my project management system is a 4 x 4 grid I redraw by hand every week.
Little boxes, half of them filled in. Nearly 70% percent of the coordination across the business still bottlenecks through me. Our core team has grown back to 8 members with more than 20+ active workstreams.
Admittedly, I suck at managing the coordination layer.
I just haven’t built my way out of it yet. Even with a sophisticated AI stack.
The moment it became undeniable was a small one. One of my sharpest teammates didn’t realize that a 12-month client engagement was wrapping up that week. She hadn’t missed anything. It just wasn’t codified in the right places she would see.
I was making 500 decisions a week and not reading enough of them back to the people doing the work, even my AI agents. So the work kept getting done, and then kept getting redone, once the context finally caught up.
That gap is my own creation. And I’d guess some version of it is yours too.
The version you’re least unhappy with
You know the other shape this takes.
You sat down with an AI model to write one paragraph. You’re twelve exchanges deep now. It’s close. It keeps being close. Every pass hands you a version and none of them hands you the version, and you can’t quite say what’s off.
You had the tiger by the tail the whole time. You just couldn’t get it to hold still.
Eventually you ship the one you’re least unhappy with and move on.
This AI-first experience is near universal now, and almost nobody has named it.
Everyone is holding a different part
Now multiply that session by everyone on your team, this week, separately.
Each person has their own AI model. Each landing on their own least-unhappy version. Every one of them is right, from where they stand. Each is holding a real piece of the thing, described accurately.
It’s the parable of the 12 blind men and the elephant. One has their hand on the trunk, the other an ear, and another the leg. Every report back is honest. No two matches. And the work can’t move until someone reconciles all of them.
That’s the drag. Not the work itself. The reconciling.
I’ve started calling it Narrative Drag.
The gap between how fast you’re producing and how fast you’re actually moving.
I saw this up close for a software company whose own strategy promised customers faster decisions. Strong promise. When we opened the evidence underneath it, the proof was running on claims nobody had refreshed in a long while. Their own leader called it hope evidence. The promise had outrun the language carrying it, and every team repeating the promise was quietly repeating a slightly different one.
Back in February I described this as the Coordination Tax.
That was the right name at human speed. A tax is flat. You pay it once per handoff and move on. Drag compounds and scales with speed. The faster you produce, the more versions there are to reconcile, and every AI agent you add produces more of them.
Last week I wrote that when production is free, understanding becomes the constraint. This is what the constraint actually costs you.
Almost everyone is spending against their own velocity right now, and the spend is going downstream. Faster drafts, faster decks, faster code, faster agents. An output machine bolted onto the end of the pipe. Almost no one is working upstream, where meaning gets decided before anything gets produced. That is where velocity actually comes from, and it is sitting in plain sight with no one assigned to it.
Velocity is a language problem, not an efficiency problem.
Count the re-explanations
This stays invisible for a structural reason.
Every other source of friction in your business has an owner, a dashboard, and a budget line. Narrative drag has none of these. Nothing measures it. So no one is fixing it. Which is exactly how it becomes the largest drag coefficient.
You can see it once you know where to look.
It shows up at the re-explanation. The number of times this week you explained the same initiative to a different person, in different words, and watched them still not quite land it. That count is the size of your drag.
A large professional-services firm I’m working with is building a session for its senior people around one shift, from informing to influencing.
Informing describes the work.
Influencing drives the decision.
Activity-shaped language reports efforts. Outcome-shaped language unblocks decisions. They named the payoff in a single word. Speed.
You already have names for this. Version control. No single source of truth. Lost in translation. Coordination thrash.
Every one of them is accurate. And every one of them belongs to somebody else. So the problem gets described correctly four times and owned zero times.
Velocity is a language problem, not an efficiency problem.
The upstream fix is the thing we’ve been quietly building, an architecture that decides what things mean before anything gets produced. Storied AI is now live in early private beta. We go public in 30 days.
For now, count your re-explanations this week.
Each one left another version behind. Nothing else measures this drag. That number is the first thing that does.
Hit reply and tell me yours.
Michael
P.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help CEOs & operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote speaker, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk