Every institution now believes it has a story to tell. Governments speak of national renewal. Companies discover their purpose. Leaders embark on journeys. The language is polished, the vision compelling, the arc inevitable. There is an odd coincidence at work: the more uncertain the world becomes, the more perfect the narratives get.
At precisely the moment when judgement matters most, narrative has become the dominant tool of leadership. This is not an aesthetic problem. It is a governance failure waiting to happen.
When story replaces strategy
The migration happened quietly. Narratives once explained decisions; now they replace them. Corporate strategies are justified by vision statements rather than trade-offs. Policy is framed as inevitability rather than choice. Leadership language emphasises belief over consequence. Across sectors, a pattern has emerged: narratives have become a way to avoid saying what we are actually doing.
This is not about communications. It is about power. Narratives organise consent. They create the illusion of coherence when systems are fragmenting. They offer moral cover for difficult decisions and emotional reassurance when outcomes are uncertain. In volatile environments, a good story feels like control.
The problem is not storytelling itself. The problem is when stories are asked to do the work of judgement. A good story reduces anxiety. A good decision reduces risk. They are not the same thing.
The hidden cost
When narrative becomes the primary tool, decision quality deteriorates in predictable ways. Signals are curated rather than interrogated. Dissent is reframed as “not aligned with the story”. Strategic reversals become reputational threats rather than necessary corrections. Organisations begin optimising for narrative consistency rather than reality.
Over time, this creates brittle systems—confident, coherent, and wrong. According to research by McKinsey, the rewards for delivering breakthrough strategies have never been greater—and neither have the penalties for getting strategy wrong.Boards, however, still reward eloquence over adaptability.
This is how reinvention fails: not through inertia, but through overconfidence in the story of change. The transformation programme sounds magnificent. The execution never quite matches the deck.
A global pattern
This is visible across systems. Governments prefer narrative unity to policy adaptability, even when circumstances shift. Corporates choose symbolic moves over operational ones, because symbols fit the story arc. Markets reward storytelling momentum—until reality asserts itself and they don’t.
The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report noted that institutional credibility is declining precisely as institutional messaging becomes more sophisticated. The gap between what leaders say and what systems deliver has never been wider. This is not a communications problem. It is what happens when narrative discipline replaces decision discipline.
Every major platform now has a story about responsible innovation. Few have made the trade-offs that responsibility actually requires. The European Commission’s Digital Services Act enforcement data shows that companies with the most elaborate governance narratives often lag in actual compliance metrics. The story is perfect. The judgement is absent.
What comes after
The alternative is not storytelling’s absence. It is its proper place. Decision-led organisations share certain characteristics. They make trade-offs explicit and clearly owned. They prefer thresholds to slogans. They are comfortable with provisional decisions and visible correction. Most radically, they explain choices in terms of constraints rather than aspirations.
This sounds unglamorous because it is. Maturity is not the absence of story. It is the refusal to hide behind one.
When Shell revised its energy transition strategy in mid-2024, dropping certain renewable targets, the market response was surprisingly positive. Not because investors oppose transition, but because constraint-based explanation (“given capital allocation realities”) proved more credible than aspiration-based narrative (“our journey to net zero”). Honesty about trade-offs builds more trust than narrative consistency.
The same pattern appears in government. Estonia’s digital governance model succeeds not because Tallinn tells a better story than other capitals, but because it makes explicit the trade-offs between privacy, efficiency, and security. As the OECD’s Digital Government Index demonstrates, countries scoring highest on actual performance often score lowest on narrative sophistication.
Why 2026 will matter
This year will expose the difference. Volatility is compressing feedback loops. Reality will respond faster than reputation. Systems built on narrative coherence will struggle to adapt. Systems built on decision quality will look less elegant—but perform better.
This will be misread as a failure of leadership. It will actually be a failure of judgement discipline. The Bank for International Settlements has noted that in previous periods of rapid change, institutions with clearer decision frameworks outperformed those with stronger cultural narratives by significant margins. The next twelve months will likely repeat this pattern.
Geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, and economic volatility create an environment where narrative lag—the gap between story and reality—becomes rapidly costly. Companies still explaining last year’s strategy will struggle. Governments still committed to yesterday’s consensus will flounder.
A modest proposal
Here, then, is a suggestion for the year ahead. Fewer stories about where we are going. More clarity about what we are choosing. The most credible leaders in 2026 may sound less inspiring—and more precise.
Success will not go to those with the best narratives. It will go to those with the fewest regrets. That requires admitting that most interesting decisions involve genuine dilemmas, not dramatic journeys. It means acknowledging that strategic clarity often sounds boring because it names trade-offs rather than transcending them.
In a world addicted to storytelling, judgement has become unfashionable. That may soon prove costly. The organisations that thrive this year will not be those that told the best story. They will be those that made the best calls. There is a difference. It is about to matter rather a lot.
Photo: Dreamstime.
