organization
Stories carry culture
The stories organizations tell about themselves — their founding myths, their hero narratives, their cautionary tales — encode cultural schemas in a form that is memorable, transmissible, and emotionally resonant. Stories carry culture more effectively than policies because they engage narrative cognition: the brain's natural capacity for encoding information as cause-and-effect sequences with characters, conflict, and resolution. A policy tells people what to do. A story shows people what the organization values by dramatizing a moment when a value was tested and upheld.