Platitudinous charlatans

Patrick Lamb has a great post which summarises my concern about the over enthusiasm in the consultancy market for Story Telling. Investing in gathering and understanding stories from your employees and customers is not as attractive as telling them a story; regrettably there is no shortage of people, who should know better who are prepared to go along with this. Worst still is getting the employees together and influencing them to tell stories aligned with management needs.

When will people realise that narrative should be about understanding and comprehension, not propaganda? Of course if you listen you run the danger that you might learn something you need to know, but don’t want to hear. That is all to common so I can see why it may be attractive to haul in consultants who will help you tell stories. You can then have a comfortable time as the politically astute, parrot those stories and their themes back to you. Employees are not stupid, they learn linguistic conformance fast.

If you want to engage in self-deception that then there are plenty platitudinous charlatans who will sell you their services (and their souls) to help you do it. The good news is that it will fail ….