The Wall Street Journal‘s recent story, “Companies are Desperately Seeking Storytellers,” lit up LinkedIn the day it was published. Marketer reactions were heated – and split right down the middle.
Some argued that organizations already have storytellers and simply need to give them the freedom to exercise their skills. Others celebrated storytelling as a newly recognized strategic skill, essential in a world saturated with AI-generated content.
Both sides are partially correct, but both miss the deeper issue: What companies are struggling with isn’t storytelling. It’s sense-making.
Why storytelling suddenly feels urgent
The growing interest in storytelling roles isn’t just about telling tales around the campfire, creating brand myths or exercising creative flair. It’s not just that more marketers are adding storytelling skills to their resumes, or that more companies want marketers with those skills.
Rather, it’s a response to a more uncomfortable reality.
Marketing for modern businesses has become fragmented. What we knew just 10 years ago largely doesn’t apply anymore, and we’re still learning how to deal with a host of new normals, like these:
- Channels are splintered.
- Customer journeys are non-linear.
- Messaging is produced at scale.
- AI has made content cheap, fast and abundant, but not more meaningful.
What’s scarce now isn’t content or attention. Its coherence with context.
Customers, employees and investors are swimming in information but struggling to understand what it all means. When meaning breaks down, trust exits the building.
Hiring storytellers is a proxy move. It’s a signal that something feels disconnected, but leaders can’t quite articulate what it is.
The permission argument and where it falls short
One popular response to the WSJ article argued that companies already employ capable storytellers. They just need to loosen their grip on the message. Storytellers need fewer constraints, fewer style guides and fewer approval layers.
In other words, back off and let us do what we do best. They aren’t wrong, either.
Corporate environments are excellent at sanding the edges off anything human. But giving marketers permission to be more creative isn’t enough to create effective storytelling.
Being articulate or creative is important. But it doesn’t automatically mean someone can create compelling stories in a corporate environment. The skills are different. A storyteller must be able to create in a structured business environment with these requirements:
- Structure narrative across time.
- Create relevance without distortion.
- Translate complexity without oversimplifying.
- Align emotion with intent rather than manipulation.
Freedom helps marketers unleash their creativity. But it doesn’t replace the need to create understanding and context.
The strategic storytelling argument and its hidden risk
The other storytelling camp frames storytelling as a strategic business capability — something marketers can embed, scale and operationalize.
Again, not wrong. But this framing introduces a quieter danger.
Storytelling can become performative when the creativity that fuels it gets hitched to business conventions. When storytelling becomes a department, a job title or a repeatable process whose worth is measured by irrelevant KPIs, it steals the magic that distinguishes storytelling from other business skills.
Does any of this sound familiar? It harkens back to the age-old tug of war between strategy and tactics. When we use storytelling to advance a strategy, we’re more likely to create meaningful stories. When we reduce it to a tactic, we take the magic out of the process.
The result is inevitable: Organizations create beautifully written narratives that feel hollow because they optimize for output rather than belief. Explanation replaces meaning. Polished stories replace trusted ones.
This is how brands end up talking at people instead of helping them understand.
What storytelling really does in the brain
Stories in a business context don’t work just because they’re entertaining. They work because they align with how humans process the world.
Our brains are constantly asking questions like these:
- What’s going on here?
- Why does this matter to me?
- What should I expect next?
Stories organize information into cause and effect. They help us resolve uncertainty and reduce cognitive load. They allow us to simulate outcomes without risk.
In other words, storytelling isn’t a creative flourish. It’s a cognitive tool.
That’s why it shows up everywhere — in leadership, product narratives, customer experience, marketing, and culture. It’s also why its absence feels so destabilizing.
The real problem companies need to solve
Most organizations don’t need more storytellers. Here’s what they do need:
- Clearer internal narratives.
- Fewer conflicting signals.
- Shared understanding of who they are and why they exist.
- Messaging that aligns with lived experiences.
Until those foundations are in place, storytelling efforts will feel forced, no matter how talented the people are.
This also explains the irony I saw running throughout the WSJ article.
Companies want the outcomes of storytelling — trust, clarity, connection — without accepting the uncertainty that real stories bring. They want narrative control without unpredictability. Humanity without ambiguity.
But that’s not how stories work. That leads me to my final point.
Storytelling isn’t the answer. Creating meaning is.
The current obsession with storytelling is a symptom, not a solution. Whether they realize it or not, businesses are really searching for meaning:
- Meaning customers can recognize.
- Meaning employees can believe.
- Meaning that holds up under pressure.
Without meaning in these forms, storytelling becomes self-indulgent decoration. It doesn’t build brand equity or trust.
No job title, however fashionable, can fix that.
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