The link between storytelling and startups’ failure
by Keren Beit Cohen5 min read
Capsule tag:
Good stories are based on good stories, and not on good storytelling skills.
Structure:
1) Storytelling is fine.
2) It’s bad if you get trapped in your own story.
3) It’s even worse if you don’t really have a story to tell.
4) Blindly adopting corporate concepts into the startups world is ridiculous.
Capsule:
Storytelling is a wonderful thing. It connects sequences of events, adds reasoning and gives them a logical flow. If it’s a ‘good’ story, it also provides a layer of interest, amusement and something to remember. If we’re telling our own story, it makes us feel as if we’ve managed to ‘figure things out’, and our listeners will most likely accept that readily too. People, both evolutionarily and historically, like stories – and they also bring them closer to the characters and plot.
No wonder, then, that storytelling is very popular in the startup world. Within many programmes and accelerators you’ll find a ‘storytelling’ unit and a charismatic speaker who will talk about how every good story starts with a beginning, continues to an obstacles-and-problem-solving part, and ends up with a winning closure. He or she will also provide great tips on how to add some dramatic elements to your story in order to make it more inspiring, and will normally give examples of other companies’ stories. Most of these, unsurprisingly, are hardly startups anymore, but more established and mature companies (which, unlike the young founder listener, actually have a story to tell).
These storytelling workshops are also often the most fun ones on the programme, aren’t they? I for one find the high-quality speakers in this field very interesting and inspirational – to the extent that I almost get trapped in the story of the importance of storytelling too.
‘So what’s your problem then?’ a perceptive reader might justifiably ask. I have no problem with stories – in fact, I love them – but from what I’ve witnessed, storytelling brings with it a risk of damaging one’s development and of creating a false feeling of ‘closure’, which in my opinion shouldn’t exist at all – especially not in startups, particularly early-stage ones. The problems with storytelling mainly arise when: 1) We fall in love with our own story; and 2) We try to tell our story while there’s not much yet to tell (or: take the first problem and make it ten times worse).
Problem number one: when we fall in love with our own stories
a) Separate yourself from your story – A story is a simplification, a summary which often leads to a reduction of processes and ideas. For presentation purposes it’s fine, but in other respects a ‘bottom line’ mentality is risky – for example when you consider your work to have certain meaning and depth. It’s important to bear in mind that your story isn’t you, it’s just an ad-hoc, true-for-now-only representation of what you’ve been through, summarised in a (preferably) amusing way for others to consume. While your story freezes in time once it has been ‘closed’, you (or your startup) should continue to evolve.
b) Remain open – When we manage to connect a series of events and wrap them all up in a nice little linear tale, we think we ‘understand’. Our impression of ‘figuring things out’ harmfully increases, at the expense of the notion of ‘not knowing’ – an integral element in startups’ state of being. Startups develop by repeating the processes of testing assumptions, getting feedback from the outside world, and improving. That means that there should always be some space for scepticism in what we do, and we shouldn’t take our stories as a final representation of things.
c) Mind the context – Making our business presentations amusing and fluent is useful. However, when we go back to work on our product, team and business development (our main and most important tasks), we should forget about stories and stick to data, information and facts, and rethink. This is how stories are built and rebuilt.
Problem number two: When there’s not much to tell (yet)
a) Let your story build itself up – Good stories are based on, well, good stories, and not on good storytelling skills. The potential damage of storytelling is particularly acute when it comes to early-stage startups that don’t have much to tell. It’s not rare to find young startups telling a story of how their passion led them to create the most amazing product and at the same time have no traction indicators to back it up. A story normally consists of a plot and a hero who undergoes some development stages. If the hero is our product, and the plot describes its development, then we need a thing or two to happen in relation to its development in order to start telling its story.
b) Mind what’s yours – It’s pretty common to hear ‘storytelling experts’ amazed by how many startups lack storytelling skills – a problem which, according to them, might cost them their chance of success. These experts are missing the fact that most early-stage startups find it hard to tell their story for the sole reason that they don't have one to tell yet! The combination of founders feeling they ‘must’ heroically tell stories, together with missing parts in the plot, leads to an awkward dissonance often resolved by deploying the wrong type of creativity: inventing parts in the story or beautifying facts which might not yet be very appealing to the listener.
c) Be honest – Telling a story which is partly invented creates an ethos of falsehood. If we choose to accept this, it might increase our anxiety levels – not only while pitching in front of audience, but also for the longer term. Paradoxically, sticking to the small, incomplete story we’re able to tell right now is the best way to remain authentic and reliable – qualities which are most appreciated by experienced angel investors, for example. It also helps us to build up our entrepreneurial experience and confidence (or at least doesn’t damage it).
Storytelling in a business context originates from ‘brand storytelling’ and ‘narrative marketing’ – well-known concepts for established and mature companies, and the corporate world. It’s time for the startup community to think critically about the concepts, models and ideas it automatically adopts from the old-economy organisational body of knowledge. After all, we’re not here for that purpose, are we? It’s efficient to use existing practices, but we should do so in a more sophisticated manner and mind the (fortunate) difference between what has gone before and us, 21st-century company builders.
I’m Keren Beit Cohen, founder of the 3P Model (2014), Founder CEO of Free Founders (2020) and a business-and-personal development consultant for entrepreneurs.
This post is dedicated with appreciation to one of my most influencing mentors, Dr. Yaron Mazliach.