Narrative Myopia — the quietest threat to alignment

Most companies don’t wake up one day and realize their story has gone stale — it happens quietly, one leadership change, one strategic shift, one quarter’s distraction at a time. 

The story that once united the company becomes background noise. Everyone’s focused on execution—metrics, deliverables, deadlines. The work keeps moving, but the story doesn’t.

That’s narrative myopia.

It’s what happens when the story loses an owner — when no one is clearly responsible for keeping it clear. Over time, alignment frays, assumptions multiply, and the narrative fills with shorthand only insiders understand.

And while everyone contributes to that drift, it always comes down to leadership. Because clarity starts at the top. When leaders stop tending to the story, the signal fades, and the company starts hearing its own echo.

Drift is what clarity sounds like when it starts to fade.

When Alignment Turns Inward

The goal of alignment is shared meaning — narrative alignment between what you stand for, what you say, and what people see. The trouble comes when that alignment becomes self-referential. The story stays coherent inside the company, but disconnected from the world it’s meant to serve.

When a company’s story stops evolving with the market around it, it becomes an echo chamber. The story sounds sharper with every repetition — but only inside the building.

Out in the world, the story starts losing its shape.

I’ve always been inspired by Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia — his argument that companies don’t fail because their markets stop growing; they fail because they define themselves too narrowly, around products instead of customer needs.

Narrative myopia is the same problem at the story level.

You define your story around what you want to say, not how people actually hear it. The longer that story sits untested, the more it drifts from reality.

Context keeps moving. Sometimes the work is to adapt to how the market hears; other times, it’s to teach it to hear differently.

The danger isn’t holding your ground — it’s standing still.

Curiosity Is The Remedy 

The remedy for narrative myopia isn’t sharper messaging — it’s curiosity. Clarity doesn’t come from better words; it comes from better listening.

Curiosity keeps your story open to the world. It’s what connects internal conviction to external reality. When you stay curious — about how your story lands, how the world is shifting, and what new signals are emerging — you ensure your narrative doesn't get stale.

Clarity wins. 

It keeps you from confusing internal agreement with external understanding. It turns coherence into a practice, not a performance.

A good story doesn’t need constant rewriting, but it does need constant re-anchoring — to people, to perception, to context.

Where Blind Spots Hide

You can’t see your own reflection without a mirror. The same goes for your corporate narrative. Blind spots appear wherever feedback loops fade:

• Customer Signals: When prospects describe what you do and it doesn’t sound quite right, that’s not misunderstanding — that’s drift.

• Employee Sentiment: New hires fill the gaps with guesses. Veterans fill them with memories. The story everyone thinks they’re telling isn’t the same one being heard.

• Market Conversations: The people who should be echoing your story — partners, press, investors — each describe a slightly different company.

These aren’t communication problems. They’re perception problems. Everyone’s still telling the story — they’re just telling different versions of it.

Seeing What You Can’t See

You can’t fix a blind spot from inside it.

The remedy isn’t louder messaging or another rebrand. It’s recalibration — reconnecting what you say with what people see, guided by your vision and grounded in how the world now understands you.

Recalibration doesn’t change the vision — it sharpens it. If your vision shifts every time the world does, it wasn’t much of one. What changes is how you show impact — proof that your story still matters in the world your customers live in.

Curiosity is what bridges those perspectives: how you’re seen, what you stand for, and the difference you make.

Start by asking questions that keep all three in view:

1. When people talk about us, what story are they actually telling — and how close is it to the one we tell ourselves?

2. How do customers explain why they work with us, and what do they say we make possible for them?

3. Where do our actions, priorities, or tone contradict what we say we believe?

4. What’s the one belief about our company that feels outdated — but keeps getting repeated?

5. What signals — inside or outside — suggest the market’s understanding of who we are is shifting?

These aren’t survey questions — they’re sensemaking questions. They reveal whether your story is still doing its job: aligning perception with vision and vision with reality.

The goal isn’t perfect agreement. It’s awareness. You can’t eliminate blind spots, but you can build systems to detect them early — so your story stays anchored in meaning and relevant to the moment. As I argued in “People Like Bad Pizza,” context always wins.

Berkson's Bits

The Hidden Cost of Clarity

We talk about clarity like it’s always good. But clarity costs something. When you define what you stand for, you also define what you’ll walk away from.

That’s why most “brand confusion” isn’t about bad messaging — it’s about fear of exclusion. Clarity makes growth harder before it makes it easier.The first curve of expertise is knowing how things work.

What I'm Listening to…

Grammy-winning R&B artist and soul icon D'Angelo passed away this week. Besides a memorial binge of his work, I'm listening to this insane mashup tribute to Stevie Wonder of Superstition and Living For The City by D'Angelo and Tony King at the 1996 Grammy Awards.

Every story lives inside a larger context you can’t always see. The question is whether you’re still paying attention to it.

That’s the real work of leadership — staying curious when the world shifts, and humble enough to adjust without losing your center.

When clarity fades quietly, curiosity brings it back into focus.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation…

Alan