Last week, I had one of the most interesting experiences of my career.
I spent two days with a group of senior leaders, project managers, and business professionals from an organization that has enjoyed significant success over the last few years. They had every reason to be proud of what they had achieved.
Yet within the first hour of the session, I heard statements such as:
"I don't want my team telling stories. That's a waste of time."
"We need to get to the point. I don't understand why I need stories."
"Storytelling is for companies like Google and Microsoft. It's not for us."
At that moment, I realized I had a bigger challenge than teaching a skill.
I first had to convince them that the skill mattered.
As any learning professional knows, before skill comes will. And in this case, I wasn't starting at the starting line—I was starting several kilometres behind it.
But as the conversations progressed, something important began to surface.
The resistance wasn't really about storytelling.
It was about how they viewed their role.
The Real Challenge: Service Provider vs Trusted Advisor
As I listened to the leaders describe their work, I noticed a pattern.
Their relationship with clients was largely transactional. They prided themselves on responsiveness. They picked up calls at any hour. They worked hard to solve problems. They focused intensely on delivery.
But the conversation was almost entirely about execution.
How quickly can we do it?
How cheaply can we do it?
How efficiently can we deliver it?
What was largely missing was the conversation around value creation.
How can we challenge the client's thinking?
How can we help them see something they cannot currently see?
How can we guide them toward a better outcome?
In other words, they were operating as service providers rather than trusted advisors.
And that distinction matters.
Because if your value is based primarily on speed, cost, or delivery, there will always be someone willing to do it faster or cheaper.
Many industries are discovering this reality. Once operational excellence becomes standard, it stops being a differentiator.
The real competition is not "fast and cheap."
The real competition is "better."
And better often comes from the quality of thinking you bring to the client, not simply the quality of execution.
Why Storytelling Matters More Than We Think
One of the challenges I often see in highly technical or engineering-oriented environments is an overreliance on the language of feasibility.
Feasibility asks:
"Can this be done?"
"How will we build it?"
"What is the process?"
These are important questions.
But trusted advisors operate in another language as well—the language of desirability.
Desirability asks:
"What is possible?"
"What future are we trying to create?"
"Why does this matter?"
"What could happen if we don't act?"
This is where influence lives.
This is where trust is built.
And this is where storytelling becomes essential.
Storytelling is not the opposite of logic.
Storytelling is the bridge between logic and action.
I was reminded of this during a conversation with one of my own clients. They suggested gathering their highest performers and asking them to teach everyone else how they achieve such strong results.
A purely transactional response would have been to agree and move forward.
Instead, I challenged the assumption.
Many experts are excellent performers, but they struggle to explain how they do what they do. Their expertise has become intuitive. If they cannot decode their own success, then we have no model that others can replicate.
That conversation created value.
Not because I provided an answer.
But because I helped the client see a problem they had not considered.
That is what trusted advisors do.
And trusted advisors rarely operate solely in the language of feasibility.
They help people imagine possibilities, risks, opportunities, and futures. They create desirability for a better path forward.
What Happened on Day Two
By the second day, I invited the leaders to work through a structured storytelling framework.
What was fascinating was how naturally they embraced it.
There was no resistance.
Why?
Because there was a system behind it.
There was logic.
There was structure.
There was a process they could follow.
As they started applying the framework, I could literally see the shift happening.
Faces lit up.
Conversations became richer.
Ideas became clearer.
One of the leaders who had been particularly skeptical turned to me and said:
"That was different."
Another observed that many influential leaders create desire for a future state before they ask people to act.
Without realizing it, they were beginning to articulate the very principles they had rejected less than 24 hours earlier.
And that was the most interesting part of the entire experience.
By the end of the workshop, had they suddenly become champions of storytelling?
Probably not.
Would they go back and tell their teams that storytelling is amazing?
Maybe not.
But they were now doing it.
They were using stories to create clarity.
They were using stories to build desirability.
They were using stories to influence decisions.
In short, they were storytelling without calling it storytelling.
And perhaps that is the lesson.
Many professionals believe they dislike storytelling because they associate it with entertainment, lengthy anecdotes, or unnecessary detail.
But when storytelling is understood as a structured way to help people see possibilities, make sense of complexity, and move toward action, the resistance often disappears.
They may still say they don't want storytelling.
Yet they end up using it anyway.
