The Story People Enter
3-minute read
Let us tell you a story.
Imagine a leader who cast such a compelling vision of the future that thousands adopted it as their own, continued building it after he died, and, decades later, are still expanding it.
Many of them even wear mouse ears. Voluntarily.
It’s Walt Disney, of course.
Earlier this month – 60 years since Walt’s passing – Disney announced the largest slate of expansion projects in Walt Disney World’s history. New lands. New experiences. New ways for guests to step inside the stories Disney tells.
There’s a lesson for us here, and it’s more than a refresher on the power of a terrific tale.
While Walt Disney was one of the last century’s great storytellers, his particular genius went beyond telling stories.
He made stories inhabitable.
He didn’t invent Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. He made old stories new again. Then took one audacious step further: He built physical environments where people could experience those stories in real life. They could see the castle, meet the characters and become participants in the story themselves.
Want tea with Alice? A hug from Pooh? Enter Walt Disney’s world.
This is the epitome of world-building. It is storytelling at the highest level.
It is also leadership at its best.
Worlds that weren’t there before
Disney is far from the only great world-builder of our modern age.
Kennedy captivated America with a story about humans walking on the moon. Jobs imagined personal technology as an extension of ourselves. Edison saw not simply a light bulb, but a sprawling electrical system that could illuminate entire cities.
Each made an unseen future vivid enough that others chose to enter the story – and eventually write its next chapters.
In our day of AI frenzy, economic rollercoasters and workforce challenges, organizations are awash in dashboards and tactics. And rightfully so. But it’s not enough.
An enduring enterprise needs a unifying story – one that pulls us back from the daily brushstrokes to reveal the larger picture.
World-building stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living – not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience,” says legendary screenwriting teacher Robert McKee.
NYU professor Scott Galloway puts the business case more bluntly: “Data may be more truthful, but in the battle between narrative and numbers, most of the time humanity picks narrative. The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.”
That’s not an argument against facts and plans. It’s wisdom for understanding and energizing humans.
From initiatives to story
Healthcare has initiatives aplenty. AI transformation. Workforce redesign. Affordability. Experience. Clinical integration. Margin improvement.
Put them together on a PowerPoint and you have a plan that no one will read.
But a story? No. Plans organize activity. Strategy creates coherence. Story makes that coherence human.
A world-building leadership story must pass two tests.
- It creates cohesion. It weaves what can look like a chaotic collection of initiatives and goals into a comprehensible whole. It answers the cry of every overwhelmed employee: Make it all make sense!
- It invites participation. People can find themselves inside the story. They aren’t passive bystanders to the CEO’s adventure. They have a role in what happens next and agency in shaping it.
The leader’s story becomes our story.
If your staff’s response to your ambitious plans is to say “good luck with that,” you’ve failed the world-building test.
At Disney, employees are “cast members” staging a show. In NASA legend, even the custodians in Cocoa Beach understood their work as helping put Americans on the moon.
Has healthcare lost the plot?
Healthcare’s story is older than Hercules (or Homer’s Odyssey, for that matter).
Sick people should receive care.
And the people who care for them should be cared for, too.
Yet amid growing public distrust, we must ask the uncomfortable question: Is healthcare simply struggling to tell its story or have we, in some ways, lost the plot?
On the big canvas, our story is simple. But it, and our telling, can become obscured by the accumulated complexity of modern healthcare.
Healthcare doesn’t need a origin story.
It needs a contemporary rendering of the ancient one – a world-building story capacious enough to make sense of AI, affordability, workforce change, financial sustainability and new ways of providing care.
And vivid enough that patients, caregivers, colleagues and communities can find themselves inside it.
Walt didn’t invent Cinderella. He interpreted the story for a new audience living in a new world.
A lasting story must be told and retold, translated for new circumstances and eventually entrusted to new storytellers. This hard work, or better yet, relentless work, is where the magic lies.
When asked when Disneyland would be finished, Disney famously replied that it would never be completed “as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
So, too, is our story.
And best are the ones other people choose to enter and make their own.
