What Kept Running

In September I paused The Narrative Intel. I said it was for now, and I left the archive up. I'm back sooner than I expected, for a reason I didn't anticipate then. Contentful was acquired by Salesforce, and at the end of this month I'll be leaving to return to consulting.

The two developments are connected by a habit. When I went in-house, I let my consulting practice go dormant instead of closing it. The company and its website stayed in place, and so did the relationships. Maintaining all of it required very little, but it made all the difference. What might have been a fresh start now feels more like a refresh.

The clock on my shelf

My father-in-law worked at IBM for more than 30 years. He retired with a pension and an Atmos clock. I inherited the clock, and it sits on a shelf in my office. 

It doesn't need winding or batteries. It runs on small changes in the room's temperature over the course of a day. 

Its mechanism needs remarkably little to keep going, as long as the air around it continues to shift. 

For his generation, a clock like that marked the end of a long career at one company. On my shelf, it has come to represent something else:how little it takes to keep something alive. 

A dormant consulting practice works much the same way: a few relationships kept warm and some ideas shared in public. Enough small movements that the mechanism doesn't seize while you're busy with a day job.

The question people are asking

Since the news, several people I work with have asked me about consulting. Most of them would be starting from zero, and the timing is the biggest challenge. 

From the first conversation to the first paid invoice, income from a new practice can be six to eight months away. Building something while you depend on it puts pressure on every conversation, and prospects tend to notice.

That’s why the best time to start a consulting practice is before you need one. Starting doesn't have to mean quitting your job or making a major commitment. Starting may mean one side project with your employer's blessing or a habit of writing down what you know.

In The Wish List, I wrote that surviving a disruption and choosing where to land are different skills. A dormant practice keeps the second option open without forcing a decision prematurely.

Where this goes next

For most of the past 20 years, companies published to be found. Search rewarded volume, so marketing teams produced content to win the click. Along the way, different teams developed their own ways of describing the company, its products, and its value. And each team described the company in its own way. 

Answer engines are changing the audience and the rules.  

When someone asks an AI tool about your company, instead of sending them to your homepage it assembles an answer from whatever it can find, pulling from your support documentation as readily as from review sites and forum threads you've never seen. That answer is a version of  your story, whether or not you wrote it.

In Optimization Without Story Is Just Noise, I argued that chasing AEO without substance behind it fails. What interests me now is how much of that substance lives outside marketing. Engines assemble an answer from whatever it can find. A support article might describe the product differently from the website, or a sales team might still pitch a positioning that marketing retired a year ago. Product may have introduced capabilities that the rest of the organization hasn't incorporated into its story. A human buyer can sometimes reconcile those, but an answer engine blends them, and the result usually comes out less coherent and blurry.

That's why the storytelling and narrative ideas I've been writing about here feel more valuable to me now than when I started. What used to be a marketing advantage is becoming a requirement for every team, because every team shapes what customers experience, and every team contributes to the story customers hear. 

The same issue made the point that this applies to people as well as companies, and answer engines make that more literal. A prospective client or hiring manager can ask an AI tool about you and get a confident summary built from your LinkedIn profile and whatever else you've left online over the years, from old conference bios to podcast appearances.

If those sources describe different versions of you, the summary will reflect that.

That's another reason the writing mattered while my practice was dormant. My job titles changed, but what I published under my own name kept describing the same person, so anyone looking me up, human or machine, would find one consistent story.

Going forward, expect more on what narrative coherence looks like when the audience includes machines that read everything. 

• For companies, that means getting every team to tell a consistent story. 

• For individuals, it means carrying a coherent narrative across jobs, roles and careers.

Both are increasingly important. Both are also areas I'll be working on with clients.

Berkson's Bits

I’m seeing the term “unfair advantage” in a lot of startup pitch decks these days. What do they think they are trying to say? If it is unfair, should they really have it?!!?

What I'm Listening To...

I can’t remember how I first found Nine Sparks Riots but I love their jazz/funk sound. It’s not often you have trombone-led bands. Here’s one of my favorite tracks: I Thought About You. 

I'm glad to be writing here again. If you've asked an answer engine about your company or about yourself lately, I'd like to hear what came back. Did it sound like the story you think you're telling?

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan