Since starting at Staffbase, one thing I’ve noticed is that the platform has to accommodate narratives, not just content. So much of internal comms isn’t just “publish this thing” – it’s more, “how do we get people to understand and relate to this thing over time?”
So, this might be half-baked (ha! as if that ever stopped me…), but I dusted off an old deck where I was mapping out some content and information structures that a CMS might have to handle. I had a conversation with Frank Wolf yesterday that convinced me there was some value to it.
For years, I’ve harped on “editorial fidelity,” which was the ability for an editor to use the tools in a CMS to create something that was faithful to their vision for THAT content.
Now I’m starting to think more about “narrative fidelity,” which speaks to a CMSs ability to help an editor create and maintain a continuing narrative about a topic or concept, which transcends an individual content item (“unit,” in this deck). The narrative is an emergent property of multiple content items working together, assembled in relation to each other, and in relation to the larger, over-arching narrative (if that even explicitly exists – often, that’s just an assumed thing lurking in the background).
This is something Staffbase has to manage. Internal comms isn’t just about formatting and making a single landing page look good. It’s more about figuring out the larger purpose of what you’re trying to communicate, and how to structure all the bricks in that wall.
Again, this deck is not completely thought out yet, but there’s a conference talk lurking in here somewhere. (cc: Janus Boye… Prague?)
(If this interests you, consider Frank’s book, The Narrative Age: How leaders can inspire change in a polarized world. It got me thinking in new ways about this.)