This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.comI almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free for all subscribers — find more of my work on corporate narratives under the Professional Communication section in The Library.This is the first in a three-part series on how founding narratives shape power.Each piece examines the same linguistic mechanism operating at a different scale. This one shows why origin stories constrain everything that comes after. The next explores how organisations narrate pivots to look strategic. And the final piece reveals what recognising this pattern gives you in any context where narrative matters.Every founding story follows a pattern. There’s a moment of vision. A problem nobody else saw. An ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through struggle and insight. These narratives work because they’re structured in ways that feel inevitable, almost mythic. Joseph Campbell called this the monomyth — the hero’s journey that appears across cultures and contexts. The structure makes the story feel true before you’ve checked whether it actually is.But founding stories aren’t true or false in the way facts are. They’re narratives that do work. They establish legitimacy. They determine what an organisation believes about itself and what futures it can imagine. Once you’ve built your credibility on a particular founding narrative, changing that story becomes extraordinarily difficult.

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