Position three
Read the story
For employees, followers, board members, investors, advisers and citizens: how to interrogate a leadership or strategy narrative rather than simply receive it.
This is the position most books about leadership neglect, and the one nearly everyone occupies. Every member of an organisation reads the narratives circulating within it. Every board member is reading a story the executive team is constructing. Every investor is reading a story the organisation is presenting.
The question is whether that interpretive work is being done consciously, with analytical tools, or unconsciously, defaulting to whichever narrative template feels most familiar and most comfortable. Reading unconsciously is both common and costly, and the cost is usually paid by people who were not in the room.
Eleven moves
Recognise the strong plot
Strong plots are narrative templates so embedded in a culture that they function as anchors to reality rather than as choices. Organisational life runs on a few: the transformation narrative in which a visionary rescues a failing organisation; the growth narrative in which expansion is both inevitable and virtuous; the efficiency narrative in which cutting is restoration of health rather than reduction of capacity; the innovation narrative in which disruption is celebrated as an end.
Each has genuine application somewhere. The question is whether the plot fits this situation, or whether the situation has been shaped to fit the plot — or whether it is simply the narrative leadership wishes were true.
Examine the unstated premises
Every narrative leaves premises unstated and relies on the audience to complete them. Often this is not concealment: the narrator shares the premises so completely that they do not appear as premises at all, only as background reality.
The habit worth developing: when reading or hearing an organisational narrative, ask what belief, never stated, would I need to hold for this to land the way the narrator intends? Then ask whether the audiences around you would supply the same thing.
Identify who is absent
Any narrative is partly defined by what it does not say, and any figuration is partly defined by who is outside it. Those exclusions are not incidental — they are structural features of how narratives and organisations work.
So: which actors have no presence in this account? Whose claims predate the dispute being settled? Who was not in the room, and would the account be different if they had been?
Inspect the use of leader and leadership
Naming is performative. Calling someone a leader does not report a property; it casts them in the hero slot and imports a narrative logic — a quest, obstacles, a resolution, and followers who are by definition not the hero.
Run the substitution. Replace leader with manager, executive, coordinator, employee or group, and follower with worker or colleague. If the argument survives unchanged, the leadership vocabulary was doing less analytical work than it appeared to — while installing a hierarchy that the plainer words make visible.
Ask what is figure and what is ground
Dominant accounts make an individual the figure and the system the background. That arrangement is not a neutral analytical choice: it makes structural and material conditions recede, and it makes collective work disappear into an individual's biography.
What has been made central here? What has been treated as context? Which conditions — resourcing, history, market position, the labour of a lot of people — have quietly become scenery?
Examine who receives agency
Who acts in this story, and who is acted upon? Who appears as hero, helper, victim, villain, resistor or audience? Is collective work being attributed to one person — and if so, is that attribution doing anyone any favours, including them?
Identify what is presented as inevitable
Strategy is inherently made — in the etymological sense, something fashioned — even though it is almost always communicated as inevitable. Future-oriented statements are not false, but they do not carry a simple truth value either.
So look for the places where a choice has been dressed as a necessity, and ask who made it, when, and what alternatives were live at the time.
Ask what question the story prevents
Every dominant narrative determines not only what can be said within it but which questions are structurally prevented. A story can be built so that awkward questions feel slightly vulgar — as though raising them signalled a failure of sophistication or loyalty. The narrative does not answer the question. It brackets it.
Identifying the suppressed question is the single most useful analytical move available from this position.
Treat resistance and informal stories as knowledge
Gossip is not reliable as fact and frequently is not accurate. That is not the point. The gap between the official account and what circulates informally marks where the official story has failed to supply people with a vocabulary for making sense of their experience — which is information a board member or investor needs.
Resistance deserves the same reading. Some is inertia, best met with clarity and demonstrated results. Some is narrative critique: people who can see that the new story does not yet make sense from where they stand, or that it forecloses something they need to keep open, or that it casts them as minor characters in someone else's quest. Distinguishing the two is a governance capability.
Read from the board or governance position
A board combines significant authority with structural distance from the everyday narrative life of the organisation. It receives formal communications and formal documents. That makes it powerful and partially blind at the same time.
Three things a board can do that others cannot. Compare formal and informal narratives, and treat divergence as signal rather than noise. Track the arc over time — a story that grows more specific and better grounded is working; one that acquires qualifications, retreats from commitments and shifts its frames without acknowledgement is emplotment running in reverse. And name the question the current frame prevents.
Then the hardest one: what part has the board been cast in — witness, sponsor, endorser, or genuine scrutineer? Noticing the role you have been given in someone else's story is the first step in deciding whether to accept it.
Consider the ethics of interpretation
Critical reading is not cynical reading, and the aim is not to catch anyone out. Leaders constructing narratives under pressure and in genuine uncertainty are not always well placed to judge whether their story has integrity — which is why this position matters and why it carries obligations of its own.
Your review is also produced from a position. Someone standing elsewhere would write a different one, and the difference between them is usually more informative than either alone.
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required