A nested narrative is a story hidden inside or threaded through another story. This is of particular importance when storytelling for enterprise. When there are multiple stakeholders, often there’s a need to tell more than one story at the same time.
In storytelling for entertainment, this concept manifests overtly in what’s called the B-story (and C-story and D-story). Typically the A-story is the “work” story, reflecting a goal/obstacle pairing in the external world, and the B-story is a “love” story, reflecting a goal/obstacle pairing in more of an internal world.
According to the principle of equivalency, there will be congruency in the goal/obstacle pairings for the A and B stories. In the context of story structure, the B-story is threaded through the A-Story and often intersects at moments such as the midpoint and climax.
A nested narrative in a business story is typically not as obvious as a B-story, so it’s useful to consider the principles of depth and perspective when thinking about how to nest a narrative.
I worked on a project for a multinational manufacturing company that needed to upgrade their global technology infrastructure. This hadn’t been done in a while, and the level of technology varied widely between different satellites and company headquarters. The problem was getting everyone aligned around a specific solution, and the satellites most in need of the solution, because they would have to adapt the most, were also the most resistant to it.
What I did was create a narrative in three layers. The primary layer was the core narrative about the benefits of the technology upgrade. As subtext, I incorporated a framing narrative rooted in the global trends in manufacturing driving the need to adapt. Then there was a nested narrative about how workers who fear displacement due to automation would be needed to manage that automation within their areas of expertise – moving from “blue collar” worker to “white collar” manager.
What made this nested narrative effective is the hero of the story wasn’t the displaced workers. It was the executives at the satellites who managed those workers, who didn’t want to fire any of them, who didn’t even want to talk about new technology because it would be so threatening to their workforce. Those executives needed a positive way to talk to their teams about the inevitable technology change.
Storytelling for enterprise is where nested narratives are especially important. Enterprise projects tend to go through many layers of review and “socializing ideas” tends to result in sales decks built by committee. The unfortunate result is, essentially, not telling a story, and instead, serving a buffet – making sure there’s a concept or two for everyone.
Nesting narratives is not easy and you can only go so many layers deep (perhaps a little like Inception). However, a little strategy and subtlety can go a long way.