narrative half-life
Happy 4th of July weekend!
On Saturday I took my girls (age 2.5 and 1) to their first LA Dodgers game.
And it had me reflecting on this 250th birthday of America.
While it feels like there are few things we can agree to in U.S. politics right now...
I can sense a new narrative taking shape. Especially as we head into the mid-terms this fall.
The reason its hard to see is that a truly positive story of America doesn’t get told enough these days.
And you have to repeat an idea or message consistently for it to compound.
That’s the topic of this week’s newsletter.
The Sharper Version That Keeps Costing You
Recently, a chief of staff told me they rewrote their company’s website once a week for 16 weeks straight.
Every version landed. Their CEO would read it and say this is great, this is exactly it. The clarity held for about 36 hours. Then a sharper way to say it would surface, a new frame, a better paradigm, and the whole thing started over.
They weren’t failing. They were doing exactly what their CEO asked. And nothing they wrote ever got the chance to stick, because the walls kept moving before anyone downstream could build on them.
This is the trap for the sharpest leaders. The instinct that built the company, keep finding a better version, is the same one that keeps resetting the clock.
The Version Worth Leaving Alone
A message compounds the way anything does.
It needs time and repetition. The team internalizes it, new hires inherit it, the market hears it often enough to say it back to you. Every rewrite sets that clock to zero.
So the discipline isn’t finding the best possible words. It’s finding the version durable enough to leave alone. Narrative half-life: how long your core narrative survives the rate of change before it genuinely needs a rebuild. A short half-life means you’re re-articulating constantly and nothing accrues. A long one means the framing holds while everything around it moves.
The work is separating what’s load-bearing from what isn’t. One Series C SaaS company had a CEO years ahead of their own org on where the category was going, taking a legacy product AI-first. They kept re-articulating the vision, and every re-articulation quietly restarted the company. The fix had nothing to do with the vision. It was naming the one version that was load-bearing, committing to it, and letting the team experiment at the next layer down while the core held still.
The company started compounding behind them instead of chasing them.
A Generic Voice You Keep Rewriting to Escape
Your AI runs on your language now, too.
Point a model at your message and, left alone, it drifts toward the generic. Anthropic says it plainly about its own model: it has a consistent default house style that is persistent. The critic Kyle Chayka gave the result a name, the generic style of AI web design. That flat, could-be-any-company voice you keep rewriting to escape is the machine averaging you toward the middle.
You don’t fix that with another rewrite. You fix it by giving the model a durable layer to run on. Anthropic’s own analytics team found their AI answered business questions correctly about 21% of the time on its own. Once they gave it the codified context or ontology, accuracy ran past 95%. The model didn’t get smarter. It got a stable language layer to stand on.
Now multiply that across a company. A growth stage tech platform pointed a fleet of agents at a message that changed every quarter, and got 40 versions of itself running at machine speed, each one a slightly different company. Because AI amplifies clarity. It also amplifies confusion, and it will chew through whatever language you leave unattended.
One durable narrative is the only thing that scales cleanly across the people and the machines both.
Leave the Good One Alone
A sharper version will always show up.
When it does, the question isn’t whether it’s better. It’s whether the one you’ve got has had long enough to compound. Name the one version of your narrative that’s load-bearing, and give it a quarter before you touch it. Let it travel. Does your language travel without you in the room? That’s the test that actually counts.
This is the layer we’ve been building toward with Storied AI: the narrative work I do with clients, now callable tools inside your own Claude, working on your real drafts, the raise, the board update, the all-hands. Not to spin up more versions, but to find the one durable enough to compound and hold it across every agent you run.
Want to early beta access? Hit reply.
Michael
P.S. Baseball, hot dogs, cracker jacks. That’s one story we can still all agree on.
P.S.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