When Your Story Stops Working
On Minding Our Myths
What do you do when what you say isn’t what people heard?
Every organization has a story it tells itself about why it works. A myth, if you will.
It could be something like: “We’re scrappy. We figure it out.” Or “We move fast. We don’t wait for permission.” And for a long time, that story is true. It’s the reason it works. It’s what attracts the right people, shapes how decisions get made, and becomes the thing everyone’s super proud of.
The problem is that stories don’t stay still.
It isn’t because anyone changes them on purpose. It’s because as a company scales, the myth gets interpreted… then reinterpreted… then handed down…then diluted.
The result?
Slowly, what may have once meant “be resourceful and move with conviction” starts to mean something else entirely. Something more like: “Spend as little as possible everywhere. Commit to nothing fully. Don’t get caught holding the ball.”
Which, if you think about it, is like the time I was 5 and dressed up as The Hulk for Halloween but everyone thought I was the Jolly Green Giant. Two completely different stories. Same outfit. One sad little green child.
If you lead something that’s grown, you can relate. The language you hear still sounds like the company you built. People still say the same words in the same meetings. But underneath, the myth has quietly drifted. And the drift is almost impossible to name from the inside, because nothing looks wrong. It just stopped working and nobody can figure out why.
This is what I’ve started calling myth repair.
And once you start to notice it, you realize it’s everywhere. In products. In campaigns. In the way a brand shows up.
There’s a super successful skincare brand my daughter and her friends use. They makes acne patches. But instead of hiding the blemish, they turn it into something you can’t miss, something you’re almost asking people to notice—these bright, colorful little stars.
It’s a small thing. But it’s doing something deeper.
It’s taking the old myth (hide what’s imperfect) and rewriting it into something else entirely.
That’s myth repair too.
Not replacing the myth. Not burning it down. Just noticing that it hasn’t caught up with who you’ve become. That the story you’re living inside has gotten too small for the thing you’ve grown into. It isn’t wrong. It’s just unfinished.
Most of the leaders I work with don’t need a new strategy. They just need a way to recalibrate the myth underneath the strategy...the one that’s subtly shifted…in ways that are almost impossible to catch in real time. Because that’s what myths do. They morph, often without permission.
But here’s where it gets really interesting… This is the part I could give a passionate Jimmy-Stewart-style filibuster on for days…
Myths that are aligned are what make things scale.
Think about some of the world’s most proven and beloved brands—Disney, LEGO, Apple, Nike—or properties like Batman, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings. The thing that keeps these from becoming one-offs and instead, transforms them into global franchises is the meaning system behind them…
…this legible set of values that gets embedded and passed down over and over again. At a certain point, these properties stop building the brand and start stewarding the myth.
Why?
Assets can be copied.
Meaning has to be carried.
This is the meat and potatoes of my latest podcast episode. It’s about how the myths we inherit can carry us for years and help us grow, what happens when they start to morph, and what it looks like to repair them without losing what made them true in the first place.
It starts with a sloth, passes through Rudolph…and ends somewhere I didn’t entirely expect.
Listen/ Watch Here: