Companies aren’t looking for storytellers. They’re looking for meaning.

The Wall Street Journal‘s recent story, “Companies are Desperately Seeking Storytellers,” lit up LinkedIn the day it was published. Marketer reactions were heated – and split right down the center.

Some argued that organizations have already got storytellers and easily need to present them the liberty to exercise their skills. Others celebrated storytelling as a newly recognized strategic skill, essential in a world saturated with AI-generated content.

Both sides are partially correct, but each miss the deeper issue: What firms are fighting isn’t storytelling. It’s sense-making.

Why storytelling suddenly feels urgent

The growing interest in storytelling roles isn’t nearly telling tales across the campfire, creating brand myths or exercising creative flair. It’s not only that more marketers are adding storytelling skills to their resumes, or that more firms want marketers with those skills.

Rather, it’s a response to a more uncomfortable reality.

Marketing for modern businesses has develop into fragmented. What we knew just 10 years ago largely doesn’t apply anymore, and we’re still learning tips on how to take care of a number of recent normals, like these:

Channels are splintered.
Customer journeys are non-linear.
Messaging is produced at scale.
AI has made content low cost, fast and abundant, but no more meaningful.

What’s scarce now isn’t content or attention. Its coherence with context.

Customers, employees and investors are swimming in information but struggling to grasp what all of it means. When meaning breaks down, trust exits the constructing.

Hiring storytellers is a proxy move. It’s a signal that something feels disconnected, but leaders can’t quite articulate what it’s.

The permission argument and where it falls short

One popular response to the WSJ article argued that firms already employ capable storytellers. They just have to loosen their grip on the message. Storytellers need fewer constraints, fewer style guides and fewer approval layers.

In other words, back off and allow us to do what we do best. They aren’t unsuitable, either.

Corporate environments are excellent at sanding the sides off anything human. But giving marketers permission to be more creative isn’t enough to create effective storytelling.

Being articulate or creative is vital. But it doesn’t robotically mean someone can create compelling stories in a company environment. The skills are different. A storyteller must have the opportunity to create in a structured business environment with these requirements:

Structure narrative across time.
Create relevance without distortion.
Translate complexity without oversimplifying.
Align emotion with intent relatively than manipulation.

Freedom helps marketers unleash their creativity. But it doesn’t replace the necessity to create understanding and context.

The strategic storytelling argument and its hidden risk

The other storytelling camp frames storytelling as a strategic business capability — something marketers can embed, scale and operationalize.

Again, not unsuitable. But this framing introduces a quieter danger.

Storytelling can develop into performative when the creativity that fuels it gets hitched to business conventions. When storytelling becomes a department, a job title or a repeatable process whose price is measured by irrelevant KPIs, it steals the magic that distinguishes storytelling from other business skills.

Does any of this sound familiar? It harkens back to the age-old tug of war between strategy and tactics. When we use storytelling to advance a technique, we’re more more likely to create meaningful stories. When we reduce it to a tactic, we take the magic out of the method.

The result’s inevitable: Organizations create beautifully written narratives that feel hole because they optimize for output relatively than belief. Explanation replaces meaning. Polished stories replace trusted ones.

This is how brands find yourself talking at people as a substitute of helping them understand.

What storytelling really does within the brain

Stories in a business context don’t work simply because they’re entertaining. They work because they align with how humans process the world.

Our brains are always asking questions like these:

What’s happening here?
Why does this matter to me?
What should I expect next?

Stories organize information into cause and effect. They help us resolve uncertainty and reduce cognitive load. They allow us to simulate outcomes without risk.

In other words, storytelling isn’t a creative flourish. It’s a cognitive tool.

That’s why it shows up in every single place — in leadership, product narratives, customer experience, marketing, and culture. It’s also why its absence feels so destabilizing.

The real problem firms need to unravel

Most organizations don’t need more storytellers. Here’s what they do need:

Clearer internal narratives.
Fewer conflicting signals.
Shared understanding of who they’re and why they exist.
Messaging that aligns with lived experiences.

Until those foundations are in place, storytelling efforts will feel forced, regardless of how talented the individuals are.

This also explains the irony I saw running throughout the WSJ article.

Companies want the outcomes of storytelling — trust, clarity, connection — without accepting the uncertainty that real stories bring. They want narrative control without unpredictability. Humanity without ambiguity.

But that’s not how stories work. That leads me to my final point.