I’ve just spent a week in London, reading the British newspapers, watching the news on European time, recording interviews for my podcast StoryWork and marvelling at the peculiar enthusiasm of Londoners for drinking on the pavement outside the pub.

Somewhere between coverage of a British bank ordering its employees back to the office, footage of Paris on fire and a conversation about luxury watch advertising, I found myself thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. And how remarkably reluctant we are to change them, even when the world around us is changing at extraordinary speed.

In business, the most consequential stories aren’t necessarily the ones we tell our customers. They’re the ones we tell ourselves about how the world works, which rules we’re supposed to follow, which institutions we’re supposed to trust and what we can reasonably expect in return.

These are stories that become so deeply embedded in our understanding of life that eventually we stop thinking of them as stories at all. They become accepted common sense, received wisdom, the natural order of things. All of which is fine, until they’re no longer true.

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Take NatWest, one of Britain’s biggest banks, whose institutional ancestry stretches back almost two centuries. During my week in London, it emerged that around 13,000 employees who had been working predominantly from home would now be expected to come into the office twice a week, rather than twice a month.

The bank explained that being together helps people collaborate, build relationships and learn from one another. Which all sounds perfectly sensible. Until you consider the interruption to the story those 13,000 people and their families have been living since Covid.

For them, the 20th-century story that work was inextricably linked with a physical workplace had been shattered by the events of 2020. Working from home had gone from being an emergency arrangement to part of the architecture of their lives. They’d organised childcare, commutes, caring responsibilities and household budgets around it. Now the institution that had helped establish those expectations was changing the rules and asking them to accept a dramatically different story.

I’m not especially interested in adjudicating the great working-from-home debate. I can see reasonable arguments on both sides. What interested me was the collision between two fundamentally different stories about how employment is supposed to work. And the uncomfortable reality that one side of that relationship has rather more power to rewrite the story than the........

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