The narrative of narratives
The term "narrative" has become a meme of its own. the term is used so often that the real pwoer of it has been diluted.
I believe the overuse is due both to the surface understanding of its power, and also as a vacuum for thinking and talking about how things work in a time of uncertainty.
But the narrative that is telling a truth can be assuring and compelling.
A narrative that hides the truth, or is ultimately revealed to be a false narrative, could have legs in teh short run, but will eventually be found out and that could be a negative spiral.
So, let's first start with what is a narrative?
And to do that, we should look at narrative as an extension of the underlying product; perhaps it is a product, in and of itself.
And to that end, the narrative needs to solve a problem.
And if it is solving a problem, we should understand who is the person or persons who have said problem?
I think narratives (let's start in crypto for now, but I do believe it extends to all products), has three audiences:
- The customer or user
- The builders or employees making the project with the narrative
- The market or investors, speculators, financial backers
These all have different general problems, and I would say the fourth quasi persona who needs the narrative is the product itself.
So what do I mean by the product is the Persona and it has a problem?
Products want to be useful; they don't want to be bloated; they want to express its true essence as soon as possible; it wants to find a market and fit tightly; it often wants to grow.
I think the Product itself, even if a crypto project, inf act, I would say especially with a crypto, truly decentralized project, "speaks" and has a Persona that wants to come out.
In some ways, Conways Law can be expressed differently.
The Product reflects the Narrative it, the porudct, holds of itself.
This personification of a Product is probably really strange. The most natural instinct is to treat a Product as a lifeless, inanimate object that is directly controlled and dictated to by human actors.
Nobody can have a conversation with the Product.
Or can it.
What's beautiful about Bitcoin is thahat through the mythology around Satoshi Nakamoto, the Product that has very limited changes does have a voice. There is no real Satoshi, yet imagining what would be wanted of the product and seeing behaviors on the protocol level give it a level of intelligence that I think should shift the relationship man has towards the products they build.
A similar consciousness is o ccurring with the rise of LLMs, where humans can now speak directly to a product about itself (albeit with limited usefulessness).
So as strange as this concept may be, I do believe we are seeing the elements of talking to a product about itself, and the product having some ability (perhaps not in reality, but as a way to frame things) about itself.
And if you, as a leade or product person, would envision a conversation with your product or protocol to be lik etalking to a psychoid, then perhaps there's a real problem.
Your Product is Talking to You!
If we acknowledge that is possible for your protocol or project to talk to you, what is likely the thing that it will talk to you most oall?
I imagine that the short answer if you are interrogating it is its primary directive or in my preferred language, the objective function.
Protocols have objective functions, and I like the mathematical clinicalness of the term butecause it helps to cut through much of the distracting, faux-narrative, cluster-fuck language that passes off for good narrative, but really has come down from bad practices of Industrial Corporate communications.
Those things have much more to do with Mass Brainwashing than true story telling, and that many of the people who continue to profer this feels like the viral version of doublespeek.
Narratives are what the protocol would say if relaxed and asked in more friendly, unlocking prompt, along the lines of "Tell me your story."
Protocols need such a story. It is poo pood by technologists largely because those who master hard subjects, hard meaning things like hard sciences, look down on things that appear soft....because soft is seen as easy.
Unfortunately, there's a Twit Meme somewhere, that soft things are often treated as easy, and as a result attract people who aren't good at anything genuinely hard. This is another newsleter topic.
But the narrative of a protocol solves its own problem of defining what it will do, how, and how to tell people what it will do.
Narratives are as much about product strategy as they are about marketing.
So, seriously, if your protocol were to tell a story, what would it be.
Bitcoin is a great p roject, perhaps you can start there with whatever your perspective about Bitcoin.
But that narrative will have some key flavors.
If Bitcoin were to tell its story, it would likely start with its own genesis, around the great financial crisis, and perhaps talk about what it observed during this time as problematic: the printing of money, the counter party risks in the credit marektsand the misaligned incentives of ratings agencies.
Perhaps it would talk a bit about the desire for individual sovereignty to escape a flawed and captive banking system.
I don't know, but your protocol probably has something else.
This is where mythologizing should NOT be there. There needs to be truth telling, mand this is why I think truth seeking cultures are critical for this c=kind of work.
Inevitably there are personalities that prefer, instinctively, to tell the public facing version, the manufactured mythology, the thing that makes them look like geniuses from the beginning when they did not have foresight. This is not right. This is not the right way to start your narrative.
Now, a narrative can change. A narrative can say, along its journey, something emerged and be an authentic part of the journey.
For example, a company which originally has a narrative of providing security against denial of services attacks; and it seeks to do so by providing efficient, servers around the world; but along the way, realizes that a global network gives them so much more. they can then do so much more if authentic is actualy very compelling.
Now, what degree does authenticity need to be there, I leave for you.
The birth of AWS, for example, was said to have been that the retail unit Amazon.com, needed such a thing. And as a result of Amazon.com actually using AWS services in a service-oriented approach the aha moment was that perhaps other companies could use it was a very compelling one.
But in conversations I've had and also read about that Amazon.com itself was slow to adopt AWS services perhaps suggests some of this was manufacturered.
Similar myth making is said to have occurred around eBay. The narrative begins that the founder createdit to help his girlfriend find Pez dispensers. Anecodotally, people have shared that this was a PR stunt written post founding.
My encouragement is to find the truth. The narrative can be marketinized later.
So, where was I?
So the narrative starts with genesis, and that genesis will eventually crystalize around a proboem.
An the great narrative, as in any other story, eventually sets forth some Enemy as part of this problem. The bigger the Enemy, the bigger the stakes, the bigger the narrative.
Bitcoin, again, has set up one of the Biggest and Baddest enemies: the central banks.
As a result of the central banks, people fae theft by infaltion.
A powerful and compelling narratibe has a great Enemy, one that people can rally around and that your protocol can believably address. Again, the hard part is the truth telling.
I would argue that this is hard for many founders to do, not because it is a "har" thing to do from a learned skillset perspetive; but biologically and psychologically, because many founders probably have some level of sociopathy. That sociopathy will drive ego inflation by creating both an Enemy and a false narrative about whether one truly yields the Sword from the STone, the Excalibar in their battle.
This isn't due to lack of skills.
This is due to lack of empathy, self-reflection, authenticity, humility, and a truth seeking culture.
But lets say you can overcome this hurdle without some displacement of the power assymetry, now what?
Well, now there needs to be a Promise, a promise of hope and a future.
Bitcoin has done this masterfully with a world of lower fees, sovereign control over money, freedom from inflationary theft.
Is the bridge between your product, customers real problems, and this promised land atually achievable?
This is the intersection with product. Product in some ways must be empowered to fulfill this truth sekeing and truth making role.
The narrative should be amplifying some kernel of truth.
A dislocation through a runaway narrative will be what gets shipped -- a dislocated product, dislocated from the market and its own narrative.
Okay, so then whats next?
Milestone and markers.
How will we get there.
This may take place over months, years, but it should show the Long March to go from present day towards this beautiful future.
Without this, these tangible, believalbe capabilities to fulfill such a future, you can have people spinning around, living in clouds and eventually demoralized. And if your narrative is true, and there is in fact an Enemy, your troops and your people will be scattered.
I think something lost in modern leadership, carrying over from leaders who look at CEOs like Jack Welsh, and think they can run over their people in the sake of value maximizationm this narrative needs to speak to the people actually building the project.
It's not just about the customers anymore, and in fact, I would argue its more important than ever to blur the distincdtion beause, in a web3 world, those distinctions are blurred. Users should become Owners sho want to be builders.
But if you're living out a false narrative, where the real paid "employees" who are also Builders are treated like trash, and you turn your split personality outward to the external world and shedd unicorn farts in their direction, one day you'll spin yourself upside down and shit on your community.
In the hive mind of open community, the truth will be found out, even if it is just through a shared consciousness.
I call this The Road Forward, and it should be a reasonable way to get there.
I believe Leaders incept a vision but also Own the Workback.
Dislocations occur when there's no road forward, and the fidelity depends on the frequency and distance of the leaps in the road forwardd.
The Call is that part of the customers and the employees, and if they need to be separate messages, then so be it; but the closer they are, the better.
There is a power in a shared belief, and narratives are ery much a part of this. But clling out who these people are to be is a link to the individuals who, ultimately, make a part of the protocol. Forgetting that at the end of the day, anything built is tied to Humanity; yet so much of leadership and technology has lost its way in this regard.
This call can be poetic, such as "you are salt of the earth." What that means is context dependent, but its a pithy illustration of such a call.
See, the power of a narrative is that itf truly successful, becomes a means by which someone, an actual human being, informs their identity.
Truth telling and truth seeking play a role here. Because once an individual starts to incorporate the narrative into their identity, straying from this identity or shapeshifting by leaders or people key to this, will imperil this link to humanity.
Then it becomes a "rules for thee, but not for me" (and I'm not saying identity is about rules, but this phraseology ilustrates the justified outrage and rebellion in teh face of it).
Those are the big bones.
I think IF you can have more bitcoin elements, like an Inciting Incident or the Flame, it gives a point in time that you can keep coming back to.