Behind every important decision you make as a leader is a narrative you’ve constructed from facts, experiences, and beliefs, often without realizing you’re doing it. These stories shape how you interpret a colleague’s behavior, evaluate a job candidate, or assess your organization’s capacity for change.
There’s nothing pathological about this. It’s how every human mind makes meaning from a cloud of disparate information. Brené Brown, whose research on vulnerability and shame has shaped a generation of leadership thinking, offers one of the most useful phrases a leader can learn to say out loud: “The story I’m telling myself is…” It’s an act of intellectual honesty — naming the narrative before acting on it.
Stories do necessary work
Humans have used stories to make sense of the world since the beginning of conscious thought. They help us recognize patterns, avoid past mistakes, and move quickly in complex situations. A leader who once hired a writer on resume pedigree alone, skipping a writing sample, and later regretted it, now carries a story: impressive credentials don’t guarantee performance. That story is useful. It’s a shortcut built on real experience.
The problem arises when that story quietly expands. Suddenly it’s not just about one hire. It’s about resumes in general, or your own judgment, or the scarcity of good writers everywhere. The story has become fact-making.
We construct our own reality
No matter how many empirical facts contribute to it, our view of reality is subjective. Personal experience, bias, and cultural background shape what we see and what we miss.
Daniel Kahneman’s foundational work in Thinking, Fast and Slow describes the mind’s powerful tendency to reach for a coherent story even when the evidence is incomplete. He calls this “jumping to conclusions” and identifies it as one of the most reliable features of human cognition. We accept the most available explanation, not necessarily the most accurate one. Nassim Nicholas Taleb extended this thinking with the term “narrative fallacy” in The Black Swan, describing our compulsion to retrofit a tidy story onto messy, random events. Together, their work is a useful reminder that the story that feels most true is not always the story that is most true.
Leaders face a compounded version of this problem. The more authority you hold, the fewer people around you feel safe enough to challenge your version of events. Your stories go untested. Over time, they harden into organizational fact.
Questioning the story
When you find yourself triggered by a difficult employee, a resistant board, or a funding setback, slow down before acting. Stories are shortcuts, and shortcuts can move you in the wrong direction fast.
Try to separate the story from the facts underneath it. Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and author of Think Again, argues that leaders who perform best over time treat their beliefs as hypotheses rather than conclusions. They stay curious rather than certain.
Ask yourself: What am I actually seeing here? What might I be missing? Whose story is this, really?
That last question matters more than it sounds. Many of the stories operating inside your organization don’t belong to you. They belong to the founding culture, a long-ago setback, or a decision no one remembers making. “We don’t do lobbying.” “We can’t build membership in that region.” These narratives persist not because they’re accurate, but because no one has had the courage or the curiosity to ask whether they still apply.
Holding two things at once
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the mark of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind simultaneously while still functioning. The same is true of stories. A mature leader can trust her read on a situation and question it at the same time. She can act with conviction while staying genuinely open to being wrong.
That is not weakness. It is the discipline that separates good leadership from great leadership, and good decisions from costly ones.
The story isn’t the enemy. The unexamined story is.
