You see glimpses of it in how Epic Games evolved from game engines to virtual worlds to digital marketplaces, or how Stripe started as a payments processing platform but expanded into publishing books on technological progress, funding atmospheric carbon removal, and running an AI research lab.

Think about what an operating system is: the fundamental architecture that determines what's possible within a system. It manages resources, enables or constrains actions, and creates the environment in which everything else runs.

The dominant view looks at narrative as fundamentally extractive: something to be mined for short-term gain rather than built upon. Companies create compelling stories to sell something, manipulate perception for quick wins, package experiences into consumable soundbites. Oil companies, for example, like to run campaigns about being "energy companies" committed to sustainability, while their main game is still extracting fossil fuels. Vision and mission statements claim to be the DNA of a business, when in reality they're just bumper stickers.

When a narrative truly functions as an operating system, it creates the parameters of understanding, determines what questions can be asked, and what solutions are possible. Xerox PARC's focus on the architecture of information wasn't a fancy summary of their work. It was a narrative that shaped their entire approach to imagining and building things that didn't exist yet. The "how" became downstream of that deeper understanding. So if your narrative isn't generating new realities, you don't have a narrative. You have a tagline.

Most companies think they have an execution problem when, really, they have a meaning problem.

They optimise processes, streamline workflows, and measure outcomes, all while avoiding the harder work of truly understanding what unique value they're creating in the world. Execution becomes a convenient distraction from the more challenging philosophical work of asking what their business means.

A narrative operating system fundamentally shifts this dynamic from what a business does to how it thinks. The business itself becomes almost a vehicle or a social technology for manifesting that narrative, rather than the narrative being a thin veneer over a profit-making mechanism. The conversation shifts, excitingly, from “What does this business do?" to "What can this business mean?" The narrative becomes a reality-construction mechanism: not prescriptive, but generative.

When Stripe first articulated their mission to "increase the GDP of the internet" and “think at planetary scale”, it became a lens to see beyond just economic output. It revealed broader, more exciting questions about what makes the internet more generative: not just financially, but intellectually and culturally. Through this frame emerged problems worth solving that stretched far beyond payments:  What actually prevents more people from contributing to the internet's growth? Why has our civilisation's progress slowed? What creates the conditions for ambitious building? These questions led them down unexpected paths that seem obvious in retrospect. Stripe Atlas enables more participants in the internet economy by removing the complexity of incorporating a company anywhere in the world. Stripe Climate makes climate action as easy as processing a payment by embedding carbon removal into the financial infrastructure itself. Their research arm investigates why human progress has slowed, from the declining productivity of science to the bureaucratisation of building. And finally, Stripe Press—my favourite example—publishes new and evergreen ideas about technological progress.

The very metrics meant to help the organisation coordinate end up drawing boundaries around what it can imagine [1]. The problem here again, is that we’re looking at narratives as proclamations rather than living practices.

I don’t mean painted slogans on walls and meeting rooms—I mean in how teams are structured, how decisions get made, what gets celebrated, what questions are encouraged, and even in what feels possible to imagine.

The question to ask isn't always "What story are we telling?" but also "What reality are we generating?”

Patagonia is a great example of this. Their narrative is, quite simply: “We’re in business to save our home planet”. It shows up in their unconventional decision to use regenerative agriculture for their cotton, yes, but also in their famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" Black Friday campaign, and in their policy to bail out employees arrested for peaceful socio-environmental protests. When they eventually restructured their entire ownership model to "make Earth our only shareholder," it felt less like a radical move and more like the natural next step in their narrative's evolution. The most powerful proof of their narrative operating system was that these decisions felt obvious to insiders long before it made sense to the outside world.

Most narrative operating systems face their toughest test when they encounter market realities and competing incentives. There are players in the system—investors, board members, shareholders—who become active narrative controllers but often have fundamentally different ideas about what the company should be. The pressure to deliver quarterly results, to show predictable growth, to fit into recognisable business models: all of these forces push against maintaining a truly generative narrative.

The magic of "what could be" gets sacrificed for the certainty of "what already works." Initiatives that don't show immediate commercial potential get killed. Questions about meaning and possibility get replaced by questions about efficiency and optimisation.

a narrative operating system's true worth shows up in stranger, more interesting places than a balance sheet.

adaptability and interpretive range. How many different domains can the narrative be applied to? Can it generate unexpected connections? Does it create new questions more than provide answers? What kind of novel use cases or applications outside original context can it generate, while maintaining a clear through-line? Does it have what I call a ‘narrative surplus’: ideas and initiatives that might not fit current market conditions but expand the organisation's possibility space?

rate of internal idea generation. How many ideas come out of the lab? And how many of them don’t have immediate (or direct) commercial viability? A truly generative narrative creates a constant bubbling up of possibilities, not all of which will make sense in the current market or at all.

evolutionary resilience, or how well the narrative can incorporate new developments and contexts while maintaining its core integrity. Generative narratives should be able to evolve without fracturing at the core.

cross-pollination potential. How effectively does the narrative enable different groups to coordinate and build upon each other's work? The open source software movement shows this beautifully: its narrative about collaborative creation enables distributed innovation and actively generates new forms of cooperation we couldn't have imagined before.

There are, of course, other failure modes of narrative operating systems. What happens when narratives become dogmatic and self-referential? When they turn into mechanisms of exclusion rather than generation? When they become so focused on their own internal logic that they lose touch with the realities they're trying to change? Those are meaty questions that deserve their own essay.

The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words has two popular origin stories. One version credits advertising executive Frederick R. Barnard, who attributed the phrase to an ancient Chinese proverb. The closest Chinese equivalent translates to “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once.” In other words, the Chinese Origin was made up: “…the Chinese derivation was pure invention. Many things had been thought to be ‘worth ten thousand words’ well before pictures got in on the act;”

the true origin of the proverb is not Chinese but adspeak.3 It shows how the phrase has morphed into a commercial, facile cliche.

Letting images and pictures compete for supremacy reduces the complex relationship between images and words into a direct, quantifiable comparison. Words and images function differently

A few carefully chosen words can say what 1,000 stock images cannot. The right image can counter cynicism, closed-mindedness, or an automatic dismissal of a convincing argument.

Tell your audience how you interpret the image. What the image means.

Use images to complement, not repeat or overshadow, the text. Get rid of images that are just there to add color.

Stock images are clichés. Clichés can be easily turned on their head because of their simplistic topic. You want to communicate that you’re diverse and you end up telling people that you’re a company run by a minority. Or you want to communicate success, but the focus on two middle-aged white people ends up communicating their privilege.

Whether you like it or not, people will read into this picture as well and they won’t find a lot of valuable or advantageous information in it. It again mostly says: “This boring website thinks that I don’t see that this is a meaningless stock image.”

Pictures have an impact when they tell a story that only a picture can tell.

Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.

Visuals can stir up feelings or paint a scene in an instant. However, they may not always nail down the details or explain things as clearly as words can. Words can be very precise and give you all the information you need. Yet, sometimes they miss that instant impact or emotional punch.

For each visual you add to your presentation, you should ask yourself “What does it really say?” And then check: Does it enhance the meaning of my message, or is it purely decorative? Does it belong at this point in my presentation? Would it be better for another slide? Is there a better image that says what I want to say?

Computers don’t feel, and that means: they don’t understand what they do, they grow images like cancer grows cells: They just replicate something into the blue. This becomes apparent in the often outright creepiness of AI images.

AI is really good at making scary images. Even if the prompt lacks all hints of horror kitsch, you need to get ready to see or feel something disturbing when you look at AI images. It’s like a spell. Part of the scariness comes from the cancer-like pattern that reproduces the same ornament without considering its meaning and consequence.

Placing pictures next to each other will invite comparisons. We also compare images that follow each other. Make sure that you do not inadvertently compare apples and oranges.

When placing multiple images in a grid or on one slide after the other, ensure they don’t clash in terms of colors, style, or resolution. Otherwise, people will focus more on the contrast between the images rather than their content.

Repeating what everyone can see is bad practice. To make pictures and text work, they need to have something to say about each other.

Don’t write next to the image what people already see. A caption is not an ALT text.

The most powerful combination of text and image happens when the text says about the image what you can’t see at first sight, and when the image renders what is hard to imagine.

Do not be boring or overly explanatory. The visual should attract their attention to your words and vice-versa.

If a visual lacks meaning, it becomes a decorative placeholder. It can dilute your message, distract from what you want to say, and even express disrespect to your audience.

The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It's just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.

Signposting what you're going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.

Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.

Openings need tension – paradoxes, unanswered questions, and unresolved action

Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.

"Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of..."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity."A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker

Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.

Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one

Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.

Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.

Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays. We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.

Williams suggests we try to state our problem and then ask a series of so what?'s to get at the underlying problem

For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone

When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.

Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.