You Moved. Your Story Didn't.

There are stretches where work dominates everything, stretches where some other part of your life takes over. The goal isn’t perfect symmetry. It’s that, over time, things roughly hold. The same is true for this newsletter. 

Recent issues leaned analytical - narrative debt, orphan stories, feature competition—these are complex topics, and I got excited about them. If you stayed with me through those, thank you. But the balance needs to hold here too. This newsletter started as observation: patterns I notice, ideas that surface in conversation, things that don’t quite let go.

So this week, back to that.

The Outdated Profile

So here's what happened this week.

I updated my LinkedIn profile this week.

No trigger. No upcoming meeting. I just hadn’t looked at it in a while. When I did, it was obvious: it was telling last year’s story.

A year ago, I was building out my consulting practice, writing a book, and launching this newsletter. The profile reflected all of that. An advisor and strategist in motion, building something, not yet sure where it would land. 

The profile reflected that—someone in motion, still defining the destination.

A year later, a lot has changed. The book is published. The newsletter has a full year behind it. And I took a role at Contentful that I'm genuinely excited about. My profile didn't reflect any of it. It wasn't wrong, exactly. It was just describing someone who no longer existed in quite that form.

Why I Didn't Notice

The thing that struck me wasn't the update itself—that took an hour. It was how long the gap had been there without me noticing.

And the reason I didn't notice is obvious once you think about it: I'm living the current version of my story. My LinkedIn profile wasn't. Every change felt incremental to me. The book coming out. Starting at Contentful. The newsletter finding its rhythm. Each one happened in sequence. I experienced the transitions. My LinkedIn profile didn't. It was still sitting there, frozen in the version of me that wrote it.

The Company Version

This is how it works for companies too.
Inside the company, the story feels current. Outside, it often isn’t.

The people inside the company know the story has evolved. They're living it every day. 

• The website reflects last year’s positioning.

• The press boilerplate is two product cycles behind.

• Campaigns promote events that have already happened.

• The “About” page captures a moment that has passed.

Nobody's gone back to check whether it still fits. None of it is incorrect. It’s just unmaintained.

The story moved. The surfaces didn’t.

I wrote about this in Make Sure What People See Matches What You Mean—the idea that your surfaces are where your story meets the world. Story → Signals → Surfaces. When the system is aligned, what people see matches what you mean. When it drifts, the surfaces start telling a story that's no longer quite true. And the drift is invisible to you, because you're not reading your own surfaces the way a stranger would.

That's the part that matters. Not that the profile was outdated—that's easy to fix. What matters is why I didn't notice.

The Vetting Problem

Before anyone talks to you, they read you.

When someone encounters you for the first time, they read your surfaces before they talk to you. A potential client, a partner, a candidate, an investor, a conference organizer, someone considering whether to reply to your email. They look you up. They scan your surfaces - profile, website, your recent posts and assemble a picture. 

If those surfaces are stale, they aren’t getting misinformation. They’re getting outdated context.

And outdated context is its own form of risk.

Conversations start in the wrong place. Or don’t start at all.

That’s what makes it dangerous.

There’s no alert that your story and your surfaces have drifted apart. No metric that flags narrative staleness. The cost is silent—and shows up downstream in missed opportunities and misaligned conversations.

A few weeks ago I presented to competitive intelligence professionals about how to read narrative health in competitors—what it looks like when a company's story is strong and coherent versus when it's starting to fracture. One of the frameworks I shared was a simple distinction: what CI traditionally tracks (what a company launched, when, features, cost) versus what narrative analysis adds (why they launched it, whether it fits their story, what it signals about their internal state).

Standing in front of that room, talking about reading other companies' narrative health from the outside, it didn't occur to me that my own surfaces were telling an outdated story. I was doing the exact thing I was cautioning them about, just on a personal scale.

The Asymmetry

Here's the core problem: you always know your current story. The market doesn’t. 

You've lived every transition, every pivot, every new chapter, every step forward.  To you, the trajectory is obvious. To everyone else, it’s a snapshot.

Companies deal with this constantly. I explored a version of this in Narrative Debt—how disconnected decisions accumulate over time until the story underneath is buried. What I'm describing here is related but lighter.

The fix isn't complicated. You go look at what they see. You read your own profile, your own website, your own boilerplate as if you've never heard of you. And then you ask: does this match the story I'm actually living? Or is it still telling last year's version?

Berkson's Bits

Be curious.

In too many conversations—business and personal—curiosity has been replaced by agenda.

Curiosity creates two returns:

• Better insight

• Stronger relationships

The second compounds faster.

Stand out by being curious. It works.

What I'm Listening To...

Howard Jones was an 80's pop icon. He was a pioneer in a lot of the synth sound we hear today and can now easily replicate on GargaeBand or LogicPro. Not so easy in 1985 when this song, Things Can Only Get Better, was originally released. I remember seeing Howard Jones in concert—just him surrounded by keyboards and synthesizers. A one man show. I recently came across this beautiful "acoustic" version of that song. Whether it's synths or a baby grand piano, it still hits.

"And do you feel scared [I do], but I won't stop and falter."

Most companies don't revisit their surfaces.

Not because they don't care, but because nothing forces them to.

A stale profile doesn’t break.
An outdated website doesn’t alert you.

It just quietly tells the wrong story.

I spent an hour this week fixing mine. Take a look at yours and tell me what you see. . 

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan