When Narratives Become Infrastructure
When Narratives Become Infrastructure
For a long time, narratives were treated as a layer on top of organisational reality. A way of explaining decisions. A way of aligning messages. Sometimes, a way of making strategy more palatable.
That distinction no longer holds.
In today’s organisations, narratives are no longer decorative or explanatory. They function as infrastructure: the shared frames through which complexity is interpreted, continuity is preserved, and collective direction becomes possible.
This is not because organisations have suddenly discovered storytelling. It is because the conditions under which organisations operate have changed more profoundly than many governance models, management systems, or communication doctrines are willing to admit.
The erosion of stable reference points
Institutions used to rely on relatively stable external and internal reference points. Markets moved, but slowly. Stakeholders disagreed, but within recognisable boundaries. Strategy could be formulated as a plan rather than an ongoing interpretation.
That stability has eroded.
Organisations now operate in environments marked by overlapping crises, accelerating change, and persistent ambiguity. Political volatility, technological disruption, shifting social expectations, and geopolitical fragmentation intersect rather than unfold sequentially. Cause and effect are harder to trace. Time horizons collapse. What counts as legitimate or responsible is continuously renegotiated.
In such contexts, information alone is insufficient. More data does not necessarily produce more clarity. In fact, it often amplifies confusion.
What organisations increasingly lack is not knowledge, but orientation.
Why orientation has become strategic
Orientation is the capacity to make sense of what is happening, while acting within it. It allows people inside an organisation to understand not only what is being done, but why this makes sense now – and how today’s decisions relate to yesterday’s identity and tomorrow’s ambitions.
Narratives provide this orientation.
They connect events to meaning. They link decisions to values. They allow organisations to hold together past experience, present action, and future intent without pretending that uncertainty has disappeared.
Importantly, this is not a question of persuasion. Narratives do not primarily convince; they stabilise. They create a shared interpretive horizon that enables coordinated action even when outcomes are unclear.
Without such narratives, organisations tend to fragment internally. Different units interpret reality differently. Leaders speak in strategy, employees hear inconsistency, stakeholders perceive opportunism. The result is not resistance, but drift.
Narratives as organisational memory
One often overlooked function of narrative is memory.
Organisations do not remember through archives alone. They remember through stories: about why certain choices were made, what was learned from failure, what must not be repeated, and what defines “how we act when it matters.”
In periods of rapid change, this narrative memory becomes critical. Without it, adaptation turns into amnesia. Every transformation is experienced as a break rather than a continuation. Identity becomes fluid in the worst sense: endlessly adjustable, but increasingly hollow.
Strong organisational narratives counter this by providing continuity without rigidity. They do not freeze identity; they translate it. They allow organisations to say: This is changing – and this is what remains central.
That capacity is increasingly decisive for institutional credibility, both internally and externally.
The institutional dimension: legitimacy, not branding
At an institutional level, narratives play a different role than in classic corporate communication. They are less about differentiation and more about legitimacy.
Institutions operate under conditions of scrutiny rather than choice. Their stakeholders do not merely evaluate performance; they evaluate purpose, responsibility, and coherence. In such settings, silence is rarely neutral, and inconsistency is quickly interpreted as bad faith.
Here, narratives function as a public account of how an institution understands its role in society. Not as justification, but as explanation. Not as spin, but as sensemaking made visible.
This is why institutional crises so often escalate when narratives collapse. When actions cannot be connected to a credible story about mandate, values, or long-term intent, trust erodes even if formal compliance remains intact.
Conversely, institutions that maintain a clear narrative frame are often granted interpretive generosity. Mistakes are contextualised. Trade-offs are understood. Complexity is tolerated.
Not because the narrative persuades everyone – but because it signals seriousness, reflection, and continuity of intent.
The danger of instrumental storytelling
As narratives gain importance, the temptation to instrumentalise them grows.
Many organisations respond to complexity by producing more messages, more slogans, more carefully curated “stories” designed to manage perception. The result is often the opposite of what is intended. Narratives that are too polished, too linear, or too detached from lived organisational reality are quickly perceived as artificial.
When narrative is treated as a tool rather than a practice, it loses credibility.
Effective narratives do not eliminate tension; they hold it. They acknowledge uncertainty without dramatizing it. They allow for disagreement without dissolving direction. They emerge from institutional self-understanding rather than from campaign logic.
This is why narrative work cannot be delegated solely to communication functions. It is a leadership responsibility in the deeper sense: the ongoing articulation of what the organisation believes it is doing in the world, and why that still makes sense.
Narratives and leadership under uncertainty
Leadership today is less about decision-making authority and more about interpretive authority.
Leaders are expected to act without full information, to decide under contested values, and to explain outcomes that cannot be fully controlled. In this context, narrative capacity becomes a core leadership competence.
Not the ability to tell inspiring stories, but the ability to frame reality in ways that enable others to act responsibly within it.
This includes naming dilemmas rather than obscuring them. Connecting short-term actions to longer-term purpose. And resisting the urge to constantly reframe in response to external pressure, which signals responsiveness but erodes trust.
Organisations that manage this well tend to exhibit a particular narrative quality: restraint. Their stories are not omniscient. They leave room for learning. They evolve without contradicting themselves.
Why organisations need narratives more than ever
The growing importance of narratives is not a cultural trend. It is a structural response to conditions of complexity, fragmentation, and accelerated change.
As formal structures struggle to keep pace, narratives provide the connective tissue that allows organisations to function as more than collections of roles, systems, and KPIs. They enable coordination without over-control, alignment without uniformity, and continuity without stagnation.
In the coming years, organisations that lack such narratives will not necessarily fail spectacularly. More often, they will lose coherence gradually. Strategy will become episodic. Culture will thin out. Legitimacy will erode at the margins before it is noticed at the centre.
Narratives cannot prevent uncertainty. But they can make it inhabitable.
And in an institutional landscape defined less by stability than by sustained ambiguity, that capacity is no longer optional. It is foundational.