Story drift and the quarterly review

Section Five. Keeping the system alive, because stories that are not maintained quietly stop being true.

The wince is data

Stories drift. The company changes, the telling fossilises, and the gap between them widens a few millimetres a month, until one day you hear yourself deliver a line you have said a hundred times and feel a small internal wince, because it is no longer quite true. That wince is data. So is the moment you notice your team telling last year’s story with full conviction, because nobody updated them, because nobody updated the source. Drift is what happens to every living company, and the only defence is a maintenance habit.