I once worked with a team that had a habit of “polishing” their stories. At first, it seemed harmless—rounding up numbers in a presentation, exaggerating timelines to sound more efficient, skipping over small failures when reporting progress.
No one complained. In fact, the stories sounded smoother, sharper, and more inspiring. But slowly, the polish became the standard. What started as minor tweaks turned into a culture where people were less willing to admit setbacks or share the messy middle of the journey.
That’s normalization of deviance in storytelling—the slow slide from truth to almost-truth until the almost becomes normal.
The phrase comes from sociologist Diane Vaughan’s study of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. NASA engineers had noticed small risks in the shuttle’s design, but because nothing bad happened immediately, those risks were repeatedly ignored. Over time, the abnormal became normal—until tragedy struck.
The same thing happens in business storytelling.
The danger? It doesn’t just shape how stories are told; it reshapes how people behave. A culture that normalizes “small storytelling shortcuts” ends up normalizing shortcuts in practice too. People stop raising hard questions, stop owning mistakes, and stop trusting what they hear.
The shift, however, is possible. When storytelling returns to honesty—sharing both wins and struggles—it rebuilds credibility. Leaders who tell stories that are raw and real inspire more than polished perfection ever could. And in business, credibility is the soil where healthy culture grows.
The lesson: Pay attention to the small deviations in how stories are told. They don’t just change the narrative—they can quietly change the culture of the entire business.
