Story Work
How comms leaders shape tech discourses
What role do comms professionals at tech companies play in crafting and spreading particular discourses? That was the question that spurred my recent research at the Oxford Internet Institute.
My answer – born out of interviews with a dozen senior comms leaders at huge Silicon Valley companies – is a process I call “story work”. It starts with comms execs taking inputs from multiple internal and external sources, then translating and performing them into persuasive outputs that change how people view the world.
I now see this process almost everywhere in the tech industry. When a thought leader’s once-fringe idea gets mainstreamed by a new startup (witness Peter Thiel’s recent influence). Or a billionaire CEO’s new corporate manifesto drives industry conversation (Dario Amodei and Travis Kalanick providing just the latest examples). Story work is a core task of comms professionals, even if much of their labour is invisible to the world outside.
A new mental model for discourse creation
After 20 years working in tech comms, I knew that the tech sector was besotted with the power of stories. You can see that manifest in every product launch, investor deck, and vision statement. But I wanted to understand exactly where these discourses and the ideas behind them came from. That drove my return to academia.
As my supervisor emphasised, I was “doing science, not journalism”. A few anecdotes wouldn’t make for a convincing thesis. I was expected to create a theoretical framework with explanatory and even predictive power. Fortunately, my interviews with Silicon Valley comms leaders provided rare and unvarnished insights from inside the world’s biggest tech firms.
What I heard has given me a new mental model for how the tech industry’s discourses get created. Operating at the intersection of their organisation and the outside world, comms professionals play a key role in turning often obscure industry ideas into compelling stories for mass consumption.
Phase 1: inputs
Story work begins with inputs, which comms professionals absorb from four main sources. First, there are “tech thinkers” – the thought leaders, TED Talk-ers and Silicon Valley intellectuals who popularise cutting-edge concepts. There are also internal research teams, often made up of computer scientists, psychologists and even philosophers, who provide their companies with proprietary insights into how technology and business are changing.
Then there are the product and engineering teams – the Jony Ives of the world, who design and build the software or hardware these firms sell and whose beliefs determine how those products work. Lastly, we can’t forget company CEOs, who are often heavily involved in shaping corporate discourse and can act as “chief storyteller” for the business (especially if they’re a founder).
Phase 2: acts of translation
Comms professionals then turn those inputs into a story compelling enough to engage outsiders, such as customers and policymakers.
Comms leaders consistently described this as an act of translation, interpreting technical language and corporate jargon so it makes sense to their audience. Like any good interpreter, they have to edit judiciously, choose the appropriate words, and even redefine things a little as they go. As thoughtful executives, they don’t simply take what they’re given – they regularly reflect on whether their story is sufficiently differentiated and consider ways it might need to adapt as the world changes.
Only then is their work ready to be “performed” by the company or its leaders, whether in a keynote presentation, industry event or media interview. This is the most visible part of comms professionals’ work to the outside world. But most of their labour has already happened, during those preparatory stages inside their organisation’s walls.
Phase 3: outputs
The final stage of the story work process is in their outputs. It’s here that technology companies present us with an image of an increasingly tech-enabled future. They tell us that soon everything will run on software, almost every physical task will be digitised, and every organisation will become, in effect, a tech company.
A lot of this vision is born from the fact that tech companies use themselves as both a laboratory and their own best case study. They regularly build tools to solve internal problems before realising they can sell them to their customers. And they bring prospects and media into their facilities to show off how they work. The result is to embed “the logic of tech” as the standard everyone else should copy.
Embracing theory
As an industry, comms is notoriously resistant to embracing theory. But by listening to the experience of comms leaders from major firms, I hoped to create a framework we can all recognise. One that acknowledges both the factors we’re bound by and the profound influence our role still has – in shaping the stories of our collective future.
 | A guest post by
|