What can storytelling do for project management?

A lot, actually! As a person who’s had multiple PM roles in the past, and someone who’s worked with highly experienced PM professionals before, I have seen many instances where storytelling was helpful in the various stages of project management. Here are a few:

In the initiation phase, when you are trying to determine the nature of the project, foundational stories are helpful to set the stage for the project. The actual skill needed here is for the PM to ask the kind of questions that will elicit the right foundational story to get the project off to a good start; so, in project management, storytelling is helpful because it allows "wayfinding", which is what you need in the initial phase. The foundational stories help you find your way at this stage.

Once you have identified the right foundational story, that narrative will influence the next phase of the project. In this case you are using the story to explain the decisions you will make in the planning phase, when you are thinking about time, cost and resources. If you use that foundational story to influence some of your planning decisions, you give the story some agency. That is, you are using storytelling as a “sense-giving” resource to plan your project. This is even more apparent when you map it out with a whiteboarding tool like Miro or Mural.

I could list many other examples of ways you could use storytelling to support project management. In addition to sense-giving, storytelling can be a highly effective “sensemaking” tool at the production/execution stage of the project. And, at the closing phase, using stories to create the living and recorded memory of the project is an invaluable skill PMs should learn. Unfortunately, there is not much time here to give more details and examples, and to talk about all the other ways PMs could use storytelling to support their work. But I’m working on that…

Are you a PM? Do you have your PMP? Have you used stories in your work? Tell me about ways in which you have used stories to enrich your PM process? What did you think of my examples? We could all learn from each other!