corporate folklore

I am an unapologetic Swiftie. In the summer of 2020, my wife and I had just had our first baby. We were pandemic-locked in the house with a newborn figuring out a completely new dynamic in every aspect of our lives. Taylor Swift's folklore was on repeat in our house for about six months. I remain obsessed with this album.

folklore is about stories that outlive their authors. Swift stripped away every inherited rule about what her music was supposed to be: how it would play in a stadium, whether radio would pick it up, what her audience expected. She described removing all those parameters and just making whatever came out. What came out was the best record of her career.

What she stripped away was the folklore of her industry. Instructions passed down from label executives, prior success, the music industry's accumulated mythology about what a Taylor Swift album had to be. Nobody defending those rules was malicious. They were just retelling a story whose original author had long since moved on. Taylor said no to it.

Every organization has its own version. Processes nobody designed on purpose. Approval chains that made sense once, in a meeting three years ago, for a reason that has since evaporated. Forms with seven fields when four would do. Policies that solve problems nobody has anymore.

The oral tradition of business. "That's how we do it here."

Told with authority. Accepted without question, because challenging it costs more social capital than most people are willing to spend. And often because the person who built the thing is still sitting two chairs down from you.

The stories aren't malicious. Most of them started as real solutions to real problems. The mythology formed over time, in the retelling, as the original context fell away and what remained was just the practice.

The problem is that the story doesn't know it's a story. It presents itself as fact. As the way things are. And organizations that accept it without interrogation carry the weight of every outdated decision every person before them ever made.

Swift dropped the weight and made folklore.

The question worth asking in any organization is what your version of that weight looks like, and whether you're carrying it on purpose.

note: Did I just write a “Everything I Know about B2B Sales I Learned from Taylor Swift” article? Yuck. But I do like the metaphor.