Jyoti Guptara – What Leaders Can Learn from Great Fiction

Guest article by Jyoti Guptara:

Many leaders read business books, research and industry reports – but rarely novels. Yet great fiction develops precisely the capabilities modern leadership requires: imagination, empathy, clarity, resilience and curiosity.

People with significant responsibility tend to have little time. When leaders read, they usually choose business books, management literature or the latest research. Fiction is often dismissed as entertainment – or even escapism. That is ironic, because many of the challenges leaders struggle with today – miscommunication, disengagement, misalignment and disconnection – are precisely the issues great fiction has explored for centuries.

As a novelist who later moved into corporate advisory work, I became fascinated by a simple question: What can leaders learn from great fiction? Quite a lot.

Imagination helps us escape trapped thinking

Fiction does not merely take us away from reality. It can help us see reality more clearly. Stories expose us to alternative worlds, different perspectives and possible futures. That makes imagination particularly valuable for leaders dealing with profound change.

Reason works extremely well when we are talking about what is already known. But when we venture into the unknown – a new strategy, business model, technological disruption or societal shift – reason alone is not enough. We also need imagination. Before we can create something new, we need to be able to picture it.

The same is true for organisations. Many systems, business models and management practices we take for granted today were once merely ideas. Someone first had to imagine that things could work differently. Leadership, therefore, is not only about analysing reality. It is also about making a possible future visible.

Abstraction Bias: the invisible leadership trap

Leaders constantly use words such as innovation, trust, excellence, collaboration, transformation, AI and customer centricity. They sound precise, but they are abstract. Ten people may interpret “innovation” in ten different ways – or fail to picture anything at all.

This creates an underestimated communication problem. I call it Abstraction Bias: our tendency to use language that feels perfectly clear to us while remaining vague to others.

Steve Jobs provided a useful illustration. After returning to Apple, he told his teams to “focus.” Everyone agreed – then continued pursuing their own priorities. Eventually, Jobs wrote ten product ideas on a whiteboard and crossed out seven. This is focus.

In a single moment, an abstract word became something people could see and act upon. That is exactly what leaders can learn from fiction writers.

Show, don’t tell

One of the best-known principles of creative writing is: Show, don’t tell. Do not merely make a claim. Make people see it.

A writer can say: Jack was sad. That gives us information. Or the writer can describe Jack wiping his eyes, crushing the tissue into a ball and throwing it into the bin. Now we have an image. We observe the behaviour and draw our own conclusion.

That difference matters enormously. Leaders can tell employees that customer focus, courage or trust are important. Or they can recount a specific situation in which someone demonstrated exactly that behaviour. The second approach is often far more powerful because people no longer need to take the message on trust. They can see it.

Why smart leaders fall prey to abstraction

Paradoxically, the more someone knows about a topic, the greater the communication challenge may become. Psychologists refer to the Curse of Knowledge. Once we understand something, we struggle to remember what it was like not to know it.

A leadership team may have spent months developing a new strategy. They understand all the background, alternatives and decisions behind it. Then they present the result in a handful of slides and expect everyone else to reach the same understanding immediately.

The leaders are already standing on the mountaintop. Everyone else may still be in the valley. A story takes people by the hand and leads them up the mountain step by step until they can see what the leader sees.

1. Fiction develops empathy

The first step towards being understood is understanding others. Great fiction constantly asks us to see the world through another person’s eyes. We experience the thoughts, conflicts, hopes and fears of characters whose lives may be very different from our own.

Perspective-taking is also fundamental to leadership. The higher people rise within an organisation, the greater the distance often becomes between them and those responsible for implementing their decisions. Altitude provides perspective, but it also creates distance.

Leaders therefore need to come back down the mountain and view situations from the perspective of employees, customers and partners. Fiction can help strengthen that ability.

2. Stories make knowledge memorable

Stories do more than convey information. They create a kind of vicarious experience. When we read a novel or watch a film, we emotionally participate in events. We anticipate what characters might do and imagine ourselves in their situation.

That makes stories particularly effective for knowledge transfer. A short, concrete account of a colleague making a difficult customer decision or handling a setback well can give employees a mental model for their own future behaviour. They effectively experience the situation in advance.

Stories cannot fully replace direct experience, but they can come remarkably close.

3. Progress creates motivation

What makes a fictional character interesting? They need a goal – and they need agency. Without a goal and the ability to act, there is little development and therefore little tension.

The same principle applies to teams. People want to know what they are working towards. They also need sufficient freedom to make progress themselves. Literature therefore offers a simple principle: Goal, progress, payoff.

We keep turning pages because we want to know what happens next. In the workplace, too, progress is one of the strongest sources of motivation. It is not only the final achievement that matters. Even small, visible wins can generate energy and give people the feeling that their work is making a difference. Good leaders make progress visible.

4. Stories can strengthen resilience

Nearly every great story contains a moment when all seems lost. Plans fail, conflict escalates, characters doubt themselves. These moments often make stories especially powerful.

Fiction allows us to experience fear, loss, uncertainty and hope in a safe environment. It becomes a kind of emotional training ground. We observe characters failing, learning, changing and starting again.

That also matters in leadership. A setback does not have to be framed as the end of the story. It can become a difficult chapter within a larger narrative of development. The way leaders frame events therefore influences how people experience them.

Leadership means making meaning visible

Many of us believe we have no time for fiction. At the same time, we often lack exactly what stories develop: reflection, imagination, perspective and a sense of meaning.

Fiction brings the extraordinary into the ordinary. It helps us see things that familiarity may have made invisible.

In my Business Storytelling workshops, I often ask participants: At its best, what can a great story do for you? The answers are remarkably consistent. Stories can inspire people to live more fully. They can make us want to become a better version of ourselves.

That is also a form of leadership capital. In a world of increasing automation, our humanity does not become less important. It becomes more valuable.

Curiosity is the beginning of creativity

Why do we keep reading a novel? Because we want to know what happens next. Great stories create unanswered questions, and great writers are permanently curious.

What if? What happens if one element changes? What if a character reacts differently? What new possibility might emerge?

This mindset is just as important for leaders. Rather than merely providing answers, they increasingly need to ask better questions: What if our assumption is wrong? What could we learn if we tried the opposite? Which possibility are we overlooking?

Curiosity transforms uncertainty from a threat into an opportunity for exploration.

Great stories begin with listening

Curiosity also improves another essential leadership capability: listening. Writers observe people, situations and details. They gather material. Leaders should do the same.

The most valuable stories in an organisation often do not emerge in the boardroom. They come from the frontline – customer conversations, projects, difficult moments and everyday decisions that reveal what the organisation truly stands for.

To find them, leaders need to be present and ask questions. Simply asking employees for “a good story” often does not work. More useful questions are: What happened? What was difficult? What decision did you make? What happened next?

Stories emerge from actions, decisions, conflict and consequences. Every organisation is full of them. Leaders simply need to learn how to notice them.

What fiction teaches leaders about vision

We often assume communication has happened simply because we have spoken. But communication is only successful when other people genuinely understand.

If people cannot see a vision, it is hardly a vision. If they cannot live a value, it remains only a word.

Great fiction teaches us how to bridge that gap. It reminds us to show rather than merely tell. It combines imagination with reason. It strengthens empathy, turns information into memorable experience, creates a sense of progress and helps us place setbacks within a larger story.

That elevates Business Storytelling far beyond presentation technique. It becomes Narrative Leadership.

Ultimately, leadership is the courage to imagine what could be – and the clarity to help others see it too.

Jyoti Guptara is a bestselling novelist, Business Storytelling expert and creator of the concept of Narrative Leadership. In his book Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack, he explores how leaders can translate complex ideas into compelling narratives and align culture, strategy and behaviour.

He created The S.T.O.R.Y. Method™, works with executives and organisations worldwide and is a frequent contributor to the Global Peter Drucker Forum. He is also Managing Director Europe at momenta Group.