A few years ago I stood in front of the leadership team of a large, serious company, dimmed the lights and put Finding Nemo on the screen. I was tempted to hand out popcorn too but thought that may be taking this a little too far.
There was a moment, as you might imagine, when twelve senior executives looked at me as though they were wondering whether my day rate really was worth it. At least one of them asked if they were in the right meeting.
I was there to talk to them about storytelling.
The scene I showed them comes near the end of the film. Dory and an entire school of fish have been caught in a fishing net. The net is rising. Everyone is panicking. It has all the familiar ingredients of a corporate crisis: confusion, helplessness, people doing different things and nobody quite knowing what the plan is.
Then Nemo swims into the middle of it. He works out something the others haven't: if they all swim down, together, aligned in motion, they might be able to pull the net apart.
So he tells them to swim. Down. Together. And, after the usual part in which nobody believes the small fish with the plan, they do. The whole mass of fish begins pulling in the same direction until the net gives way and they are free.
It's a lovely scene. It is also, rather annoyingly, an excellent lesson in leadership. But that wasn't why I showed it. I showed it because Pixar understands something most organisations routinely forget:
people make sense of things through stories.
Humans love a good story
We are storytelling creatures. Give us a collection of events and we'll turn them into a narrative almost immediately. We decide what happened, who mattered, what it meant, where things changed and what happens next. If information is missing we have a remarkable habit of making things up too. We love a good story.
This is true of companies too. The trouble is that nobody thinks they're writing a story while they're doing their work on a wet Tuesday in Basingstoke. They're just working.
A meeting on Tuesday. A difficult conversation on Wednesday. A new hire the next day, followed by a missed target at the end of the week. A decision that seemed insignificant two week's ago comes back to cause rework this week. A Friday afternoon coffee with somebody who has been there for fifteen years.
None of these things arrives on a coloured script labelled important plot point. They are simply a day at work. But put enough Tuesdays together and something happens. A story emerges.
You can usually see it more clearly afterwards. Looking back, the shape becomes obvious in a way it never was from inside it. You can see the chapter you were in, what it was really about, where the turning point came, which decisions mattered and which things you spent six months worrying about that turned out to be completely irrelevant.
The same is true of a career. At the time, you don't think: Ah yes, this is the chapter in which I learn that I'm much better at making things than managing them.
You think: I've got a horrible meeting at three.
Only later does the pattern appear. And organisations are no different.
Every company has a story. Not the story on the website, or in the marketing copy, nor the one in the annual report. Not the carefully engineered version in the employer-branding presentation with the photographs of people laughing and playing table football.
The actual story. The one being written by what people do every day in the organisation. Every decision adds a sentence. Every hire adds a character. Every promotion tells you what the organisation values. Every tolerated behaviour becomes part of the plot. Every time somebody says that's just how we do things here, another line gets written.
This is why culture is so difficult to manufacture. You can announce values. You cannot announce the story, and the story is what people experience.
And the rather uncomfortable thing is that everybody is writing it, every day, in everything they do. Which means an organisation is not really something that has a story, it is something that is continuously writing one.
And this changes the question. Instead of asking, What kind of organisation are we? Ask: What chapter are we writing?
Is this the chapter about growth? The chapter about survival? The chapter where everything got a bit too comfortable? The chapter where we finally stopped doing something stupid? The chapter where a handful of people changed the direction of the whole thing for the better, or worse? The chapter where we became the company we kept saying we wanted to be? Or the chapter in which we hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons?
And, perhaps most interestingly:
What do you want your chapter to say?
That was the question I eventually put to the twelve leaders in the darkened room, after we'd watched a cartoon fish escape from a fishing net. Without popcorn.
You see, it sounds like a question about storytelling but it isn't, not really. It's a question about authorship. Because the strange thing about a working life is that you rarely get to choose the whole story. Markets change. People leave. Projects fail. Competitors appear. Lots of things happen that you frankly had never contemplated.
But you do get to choose what you add to the page. And right now, whether you've noticed or not, you're writing a chapter. The only question is whether you're writing it deliberately.
A chapter is just a period of time you decide about
The framing is deliberately simple. A chapter is a stretch of time – roughly a year, give or take, the boundaries are always a bit fuzzy – defined by four things: the challenge you faced, the team you gathered, the direction you chose, and what had happened to the people inside it by the end.
A startup is scribbling its early chapters, all discovery and uncertainty and crossings-out. A century-old firm is carrying whole shelves of accumulated history and identity and stories. Both are books still being written, and your job – whether you're brand new to the role or twenty years deep – is to decide what this chapter becomes.
Is it stagnation? A bold reinvention? A retreat while the storm passes? A "keep my head down and hide from the problem" dramatic scene? Adventure? Action? Intent? Surprise? The chapter where it all came apart because nobody had a shared idea of what they were doing? Or the one where a group of people gathered around something genuinely hard, worked out a plan, did the difficult work, and came out the other side better than they went in?
Here's the uncomfortable part. Most leaders never actually choose. They let the chapter write itself. They field the incoming demands without stepping back to see whether these things really need doing. They firefight the problems that arrive without considering whether every problem really needs addressing.
And then they reach December holding a chapter that happened to them rather than one they wrote on purpose. It's not a lack of effort, far from it, they were flat out the whole time. It's a lack of authorship.
The story arc hiding in every organisation
The nicely reassuring thing is that meaningful stories nearly all share a shape – and that same shape turns up in almost every organisation, whether anyone's framing it that way or not.
There's a challenge that looks, at first, somewhat impossible. There's a leader who looks at it, realises they're going to take it on, knows they don't have all the answers but makes the thing compelling enough that talented people actually want to help.
A group forms around this new protagonist – different skills, different minds, different ways of seeing, different perspectives – because nobody could crack this one alone.
A plan takes shape, clear enough to point everyone the same way even if it's far from perfect. Everyone knows the part they play. The work is properly hard, because if it were easy you'd need no team at all.
Resistance shows up, as it always does, all over the place. The journey is full of trial and error, wins and losses, success and failure, highs and lows. And the challenge is finally met – or at least meaningfully shifted. And, this is the important part, the people who were part of it are different at the end than they were at the start. Better. More capable. More themselves.
This isn't cinema. It's Tuesday. In Basingstoke. With bad coffee. The only real question is whether you're seeing the story arc and shaping it, or just reacting to it as it goes by – letting someone else write the story.
The leaders who write the best chapters are the ones who make the problem interesting enough to draw the right people in. They make the problem and future of the business compelling, exciting, interesting, energising. Like minded and talented people gather to bring their experience and creative skills to tackle it. Leaders create enough clarity that everyone knows what they're actually trying to do, what success might look like and at least the first waypoint to move towards on the bigger journey. The clarity creates alignment. People are together, clear and moving as one.
They pay enough attention to notice who people are becoming along the way and help in whatever way they can to grow people.
And, importantly, they've grasped the thing that's easy to miss: the job is not only to solve the problem and move the business forward. It's to build the climate in which solving the problem makes the people who did it better.
The ending is the bit that matters most
Which brings us to the most overlooked part of the whole framework: the ending. Not whether the problem got solved, or the future was brought to life – that counts, but it isn't just the point, and it certainly isn't enough.
The bigger question is more equine in nature: who are the people inside this chapter at its close, compared to who they were when it opened?
The best chapters I've ever been part of left people more capable, more sure of themselves, and more themselves than when they started. Some of them solved the problem outright. Some got halfway. Some, to their credit, changed the problem partway through, because they finally understood it well enough to see they'd been aiming at the wrong thing.
But every one of them grew – in skill, in judgement, in the kind of hard-won scars and experience that makes the next challenge look a little more achievable.
Because here's the idea worth playing with: everyone leaves the business eventually. People move roles, change companies, wander off to start their own things, retire. That's not a betrayal, it's just the way it is. We should be pleased for people who know it's time to move on.
What you can give them, before they go though, is growth, meaning and the knowledge that their finite resources of time, energy and attention were not squandered writing a chapter that didn't really mean anything.
And that – not the numbers the organisation posted – is the real legacy of a good chapter: not what the business achieved, but who the people became while they were trying to achieve it.
There's a practical bonus to all this, too. The "chapter idea" is remarkably powerful for change too – which so often stalls not because the change itself is wrong, but because nobody has a story for why it's happening or what it means.
Frame the change as chapters and you give people a container for it, in which they can see how they play a role. Chapter one: honestly understanding where we are now. Chapter two: starting to improve how we work. Chapter three: launching the new way. Chapter four: learning from what worked and what didn't, and carrying it forward. Each one has a clear challenge, a team, a plan, a set of roles, a period of genuine difficulty, and an ending that feeds the next. People can follow a story like that. What they cannot follow – and never could – is a slide deck full of arrows, models and swim lanes.
So. You're writing your chapter right now, conscious of it or not. The work you're doing, the problems you're naming, the team you're gathering, the direction you're giving, the value you are producing, the ideas you are bringing to life – is all going onto the page, this very week.
It's not about whether a chapter is being written. It always is. It's about whether you're the author of it, or just a character it's happening to.
What do you want your chapter to say?
Where this sits in the Atlas
Orientation·Idea to Value·Communication·Creativity & Climate·Learning
