Four storytelling mistakes leaders make and how to fix them

Executive overview

Most leaders default to data and slides when they need to move people — but organisations are emotional systems, not rational ones. Story is the brain's native language for making sense of the world, and leaders who skip it leave their most powerful communication tool unused.

David Hutchens identifies four mistakes: not telling stories at all, telling stories without a clear outcome, stripping out emotion, and failing to build story as a deliberate capability.

The fix is not performance — it's reconnecting to the language you already have and using it with strategic intent.

Mistake 1: not telling stories at all

• Leaders default to data decks because they feel professional; stories feel informal or off-topic.
• The "geek question" unlocks narrative in data-driven people: "What was the part of the work that was cool?"
• A NASA scientist went from 50 slides of climate data to a vivid story of coordinating spectrometers from a plane and a Jeep — and the story was more compelling than all the slides.
• Story is the brain's operating system for sense-making; it is not a performance skill, it is a natural language everyone already uses.
• The objection "I'm not a storyteller" is the most demonstrably false objection in the work — everyone tells stories at dinner.

Mistake 2: telling stories without strategic intent

• Leadership storytelling differs from entertainment storytelling: leaders must state what the story means, not leave it open to interpretation.
• Believe, feel, do is the structure for connecting a story to an outcome: what do I want the audience to believe, feel, or do differently?
• Steve Denning at World Bank spent years failing to get traction for knowledge management using slides. One 90-second story — a health worker in Zambia finding malaria treatment on the CDC website while World Bank's own knowledge wasn't available — flipped the audience from confused to demanding action.
• The connection at the end can take the form of an invitation: "Imagine if we had this capability. Think what an organisation we could become."
• Without the explicit connection, even a strong story lands flat.

Mistake 3: removing emotional content

• Leaders, especially in technical and European contexts, step up on stage and tell stories with no emotional content — the result is flat and ineffective.
• Pro tip for reluctant leaders: say emotion words even if you don't change your expression. "I was proud." "The team was sad." "The client was frustrated." Those words are enough.
• When you say "pride" or "dignity", the listener recalls what those feelings feel like — they experience emotional context for interpreting your message.
• A senior NASA scientist rediscovered his own story of standing on a beach at midnight, feeling the sand, realising he wanted "science you can touch" — his wife, overhearing the session, told him she hadn't heard him talk like that in years.
• The objection "my boss is a numbers person" is a false binary — data is a story. Story is data with a human soul. Even data-focused leaders want context, which is what story provides.
• If the story has clear strategic intent and is told concisely, data-oriented audiences rarely push back.

Mistake 4: expecting it to just happen

• Deciding to tell stories more is not enough — behaviour change, skill building, and cultural intentionality are required.
• Build story development into the project plan: when preparing a new client pitch, strategy rollout, or innovation launch, schedule time to find and develop the narrative assets alongside the data.
• Story Dash is a facilitated process for teams to surface, develop, and connect stories to specific messages — the output is a set of ready-to-use narrative assets.
• Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from senior strategy meetings at Amazon: "I didn't hire the smartest people so we could stare at a spreadsheet. Bring your stories."
• Amazon institutionalised this as a cultural expectation, with senior leaders preparing stories in the weeks before major meetings — not just during them.
• The Story Canvas (free resource from David Hutchens) is a visual framework for building a story backwards from its strategic intent — define the outcome first, then construct the story to reach it.