One of my favourite stories from computing history takes place in 1969. Xerox chairman C. Peter McColough stands before the New York Society of Security Analysts and makes what probably seemed like a strangely abstract declaration: Xerox would develop "the architecture of information" to solve the problems created by the "knowledge explosion." Then, he turns to his head of R&D and says, "All right, go start a lab that will find out what I just meant."

I love this story because what happened after is extraordinary. Over the next decade, Xerox PARC would become the wellspring from which modern computing would flow. Their fingerprints would end up all over the foundations of the digital world: the graphical user interface, the mouse, ethernet networking, laser printing, object-oriented programming, even the colourful weather maps on TV. On the surface, they seem like disparate tech breakthroughs. But when you look closer, you’ll see they’re all manifestations of a singular narrative: to develop the architecture of information. 

Once you start looking for this pattern of disparate initiatives orbiting the same sun, you’ll find it in only a handful of companies. 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. Neither of these are what you’d call conventional companies, and much of that is down to the fact that each new initiative feels like a natural extension of a deeper organising principle.

I think what sets these organisations apart transcends brand cohesion and corporate identity. They’re operating on a different frequency altogether, where new verticals aren’t just products or services, but manifestations of their view of how the world could (and should) work. They're running on what I've come to think of as narrative operating systems.

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.

Narrative operating systems work the same way: they're not stories organisations preach about themselves, but the deep architecture through which they process reality and determine what's possible.

I think this is worlds apart from how most businesses approach narratives today. 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.

The reality-construction OS

Most companies think they have an execution problem when, really, they have a meaning problem. They perfect their ability to build things without first answering the more essential question: should we be building this at all? I think this tendency to focus on execution over meaning reflects a deeper organisational pathology. Companies spend enormous energy doing things right instead of doing the right things. 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.

A narrative OS generates possibilities from the inside out. 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. Commissioning Editor Tamara Winter put it best:

“...we want to create a better landscape for entrepreneurship. But we also want to catalyse research and development. And we also want to, in general, inculcate the idea that big problems in the world are tractable.”

What is all that if not in service of one clear through-line: thinking at a planetary scale about human potential?

While most companies remain bound by technological limitations and market demands, those operating on a narrative OS see these constraints differently. The walls become doors waiting to be opened. Every friction point becomes an opportunity to build something new. Each initiative peels back another layer of the proverbial onion. To outsiders, these moves might seem random or scattered. But to those working within the system, they feel inevitable. A narrative operating system doesn't seek possibilities within existing boundaries—it redraws the map entirely.

Death by a thousand decks

As companies scale, there's an almost gravitational pull toward the median. The original generative narrative—so powerful in the early days—gets diluted with each new layer of organisation. Before you know it, everyone is playing a game of telephone, where meaning degrades at every relay point. What started as a powerful lens for seeing the world differently becomes bullet points in an onboarding deck.

This is where most narrative operating systems meet their end: not in dramatic failure, but in death by a thousand decks. The challenge isn’t just scale, but distribution. The pressure to grow quickly forces a kind of narrative compression. Complex ideas that emerged organically through years of discussion get reduced to what can be packaged into onboarding documents and quarterly reviews. There is very obviously the intent to disseminate the narrative, but it’s tripped up by the need to coordinate across hundreds or thousands of people, and the organisation naturally gravitates toward what can be easily taught and measured.

This is where middle managers—who should be the narrative's most crucial translators—often become its gravediggers instead. Tasked with making things "actionable," they reduce bold but tangible ideas about reshaping the future or reimagining possibilities into either quarterly targets and KPIs or lofty-sounding statements that nobody really buys. 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.

In reality, there should be no way that a new employee misses the narrative powering the organisation; short of infusing it through the air vents, it should be everywhere. And 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. When a company’s narrative truly functions as their operating system, you should be able to feel that undercurrent the moment you walk into their office. 

 What would it take to preserve generative narrative at scale? How do you ensure that the 5000th employee feels the same generative potential as the founding team?

I think the key is to treat that narrative as a dynamic, contested space—not a fixed document, but a continuous act of collective imagination. I understand that feels a little paradoxical, because the core of something typically never changes. But what does change are the expression and interpretation of that core narrative. It’s what prevents the narrative from becoming ossified or reduced to empty marketing speak. 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. But it did, eventually. This line from an HBR essay lands it: “Patagonia moved ahead anyway because they knew—almost like it was endemic—that this was who they are”.

I think what makes Patagonia's example so remarkable is how rare it is. 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.

This is where most organisations stumble. Even when founders and early employees fight to preserve the narrative, the pull of market expectations proves too strong. 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.

In light of that, Patagonia's solution was radical but telling: they systematically removed these competing pressures. Restructuring ownership to make "Earth the only shareholder" was more than just a bold statement. They rewired the power dynamics that typically erode narrative operating systems. They created a governance structure that legally binds the company to its original narrative, making it impossible for future leaders to prioritise profit over purpose. 

Signs of life

I think it’s safe to say that there was probably a lot of wrangling and haranguing behind Patagonia’s closed doors about their commitment to their narrative. We’re so used to measuring anything in terms of its financial and economic value that every other reasoning feels untethered, like castles in the air. But a narrative operating system's true worth shows up in stranger, more interesting places than a balance sheet.

For one, its 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? 

Second, the 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.

The third is 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. 

The fourth is 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.

The bigger game

We often forget that technology businesses are part of the social fabric; the stories they operate on today become the realities many of us operate in tomorrow. And so their most lasting impact isn’t restricted to the products they ship. It's also in how they reshape our collective imagination about what's worth building in the first place. Beyond commercial success, a narrative operating system faces a more thrilling existential challenge head on: can it expand the boundaries of what we dare to imagine possible?

[1] 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.