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When I started StoryWorks in 2013, the hardest part of moving to the vendor side was rejection. In corporate life, I never had 70% of my proposals turned down. Getting used to that was tough.
What kept me going was a belief that stories at work would benefit everyone, speaker and listener. What kept me going was purpose.

But I had it easy. We were a very small organisation.

In large organisations ask a CEO what the company's purpose is and you'll usually get a clear answer. Ask someone two levels down and you often won't.

While most of us believe purpose matters, ensuring everyone understands and resonates with the purpose is not always in every leaders must do list.

Gallup found that only 41% of employees strongly agree they know what their company stands for. Most companies communicate purpose the way they communicate a policy. A slide, a poster, a town hall, repeated until people stop hearing it.

But there is a better way which was demonstrated through a few experiments conducted by Adam Grant.

Listen on.

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Nearly 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War:

“Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.”

A much milder version of this often happens in organisations.

A new strategy is announced. But the old one continues, just in case. The sales team is told to sell differently. But the old targets and measures remain. We say we are changing direction, but we keep the old option open. And because we know it is there, we never fully commit to the new one.

Having a Plan B feels safe. But it can also divide our attention.

Every hour we spend keeping the old option alive is an hour we are not spending on the new one. And when things get difficult, as they inevitably will, it becomes very tempting to go back to what we already know.

Of course, some risks need a backup plan. That’s just sensible.

But keeping an exit open simply because we haven’t fully committed is different.
Today’s story focuses on the power of no Plan B.

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The other day, my wife forwarded me an ad for a phone-locking device. You put your phone inside and it stays locked for a set time. There are plenty of them online.
Her message said, "You might want to use this."

A few months ago, I had bought myself a basic feature phone to use post office hours. That experiment didn’t work.

So when I saw the phone-locking device ad, I smiled. I also felt a little guilty. I know how much time I spend on my phone, and I've always put it down to my own lack of discipline.

Then I read today’s story and realised there might be a different perspective.

Listen on.

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There’s a particular kind of competitor that can be very intimidating.

They have more money, more people, better technology, a bigger brand, and access to expertise you can't afford 

So the natural conclusion is: how do we compete with that? Perhaps that’s the wrong question.

Because resources determine how much you can deploy. They don’t necessarily determine how quickly you can learn. A smaller team can try something on Monday, discover it doesn’t work on Tuesday, change it on Wednesday and try again on Thursday. A larger organisation may still be getting approval for the first experiment.

Over time, those small cycles begin to compound. And after fifty such cycles, the smaller competitor may know something the larger competitor simply doesn’t.

We often talk about competitive advantage in terms of what an organisation has — capital, talent, technology, distribution, data.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to what an organisation does.

How quickly does it turn experience into learning?

Because when you can’t outspend your competition, there is still another possibility.

You can outlearn them.



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Stories At Work is back with our Saturday stories. The StoryWorks Academy Cohort 1 is sold out. Next cohort starts on 10th January 2027. Some seats in that too are taken. Reach out if you want in. 

In 2005, Robert Kaplan and David Norton, writing about a 15 year study observed that on average, 95% of a company's employees were unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy. If employees are unaware of the strategy, they surely cannot help the organisation implement it effectively.

Through today’s story you can reflect on the gap between knowing your current position and knowing your direction and what you can do to correct it. 



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Many years ago, an electric utility ran a simple experiment. It started telling households how their electricity use compared to their neighbours’ average.

It worked. Heavy users cut back.

But something unexpected happened as well. Households already using less energy than their neighbours saw the same comparison and started using more. If everyone around you is using more, then why hold back?

The solution to the “boomerang” problem turned out to be almost embarrassingly small. The company added a smiley face to the bill of anyone using less than average, and that one addition wiped out the backfire completely.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein tell this story in their must-read book, Nudge.

Telling people what’s normal is a powerful lever. It just moves behaviour in whichever direction you point it.

This week’s story looks at two real attempts to pull that exact lever, one in a hotel bathroom, the other in a national park hundreds of miles away. One worked beautifully. The other nearly tripled the very problem it was trying to fix. These examples are from Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence.

Listen on.

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Like all of you, I have driven through a roundabout a thousand times. One rule makes it work: the driver entering gives way to traffic already moving inside. No stop sign, no one directing you. Just smoother, safer flow. Smoother, in fact, than four traffic lights at a crossroad.

I never thought a roundabout could hold the answer to how we tackle Shadow AI.

Today's story says otherwise.


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"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
 
Last Sunday, I chanced upon an interview with John Kim, author of the recent book ‘The Tao of Fundraising’, that brought this old adage alive.
 
Kim, an investment professional credited with raising more than $70 billion over his career, said something that stuck with me: most fundraisers are good at capturing attention and building interest. Many can even use logic to walk a prospect all the way to "yes, this makes sense" and still hear no.
 
The reason, he says, is the gap between belief and trust. That’s exactly what the IBM adage captured. Buyers often believed a competitor's product was better or cheaper, but they trusted that choosing IBM would never make them look reckless.
 
The interview sent me down an internet rabbit hole on the difference between belief and trust. And deep in that rabbit hole, I found a story, from a summer morning in 1859, that brings this gap alive like nothing else I've read.

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A 1st of July CNBC article titled “Employers who laid off workers citing AI are already starting to regret it”

It talks about how automaker Ford is rehiring hundreds of experienced human engineers to work on quality issues automated systems couldn’t address. The same article talk about similar reverses in companies like Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM.This is what happens when "now or never" replaces "let's actually think this through."
Over the last year or so, I've watched almost every organisation I talk to say “AI or Die”. And it always sounds like the salesmen who say "this deal's only good for the next hour; act now or lose it."

There is no doubt AI is changing the world but I also feel the urgency instinct is on a few gears too high. I am not alone. Forrester's 2026 Future of Work report found that 55% of employers who laid off staff citing AI now admit it was the wrong call. Gartner predicts half of all AI-driven layoffs will be reversed by 2027.Today’s story is a cautionary tale about our urgency instinct from Hans Rosling’s fabulous book - 'Factfulness'.

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Back in the late 1990s, as a brand manager at Hindustan Unilever, I was in a briefing for a Jai soap ad shoot. The creative person from the agency was describing a beach volleyball scene — “and there’s a man in a hat, umpiring the game.” I sat there quietly thinking, who wears a hat to umpire beach volleyball? 

It was only when he pulled out the storyboard that I saw what he actually meant — a baseball cap. I remember laughing about it later, but it stayed with me for a different reason: it showed me exactly why a storyboard matters. 

The writer, the client and the cinematographer need to be picturing the exact same scene — not two versions of “a hat.”

Today’s story is about storyboards, but a very different use case. Listen in.

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