The Art of Storytelling

What makes the good fiction book? — The plot and the Universe.
The importance of the plot is obvious. Think for a moment about the Universe of a good fiction book. The rules of such Universe are:

• clear,
• wholesome,
• non-contradictive.

This it pretty complicated to achieve, especially when the Universe becomes complex: too many parts of the system interact and generate uncertainties — like in real life 🙂.

The art of Storytelling

When reading something complicated, either a manual¹, or a good fiction², the “legend of the Universe” is inevitable. The rules need to be explained, either explicitly (think of your favorite ⚙️ manual), or as the part of the story which makes unpuzzling a good fiction so entertaining.

Despite of the legend of the Universe might sound clear and the authors contribute to this, it is not. At least, until the end or until a good part of the story elapsed. The more complicated the Universe is, the more time/effort is needed to grasp it and to grok all the nuances.

How is this applicable to the Management?

As you can assume, the Author keeps the whole legend of the Universe in mind from the very beginning, even though they share the it gradually.

I’d expect the Leader/Manager to have the consistent and wholesome idea in mind. Otherwise, they “write an unstructured book”.
➡️ The management produces the decisions.
🔮 The logically unstructured decisions lead to chaotic actions.
📉 Chaotic actions render the whole system ineffective.

The good legends

The Product Vision and the Product Goal are the good examples of the “legends of the Universe”. The more wholesome, clear and non-contradictive they are, the better the team performs.

I faced the decrease of conflicts and stress in the teams after the Goal was clearly communicated. The developers made the technical decisions (the “How”) faster when the “Why” was clear. Moreover, the decisions led to way more robust implementations: the clear “Why” justifies the right “How”.

This works not only on the macro-level:

• On the extent of one sprint, the clear Sprint Goal is a good “lighthouse” to align the day-to-day decisions.
• The personal goals can be tailwinded by the Company/Product Vision. As a manager I’m glad to suggest (and even to sponsor) learning some technology when it contributes to the Product.
• It might happen that a team member realizes that their personal goals are too far away from the Company/Product ones. In the end, such employee won’t be happy. So the faster the understanding comes, the better it’s for all the parties.

📖 Good luck with defining a good plot for your Product Story and for designing a proper legend for it!