needed to make it happen. One of the problems of conventional business planning is that it has become dominated by highly rational and often numbers-based thinking, which creates an illusion of certainty through detail. There is nothing wrong with this in its place but it should be seen as one outcome, rather than the whole point of the planning process.
Instead, we can think of a good plan as being like a story. A story takes us into a different reality which may be the future, the past or an alternative version of today. A story has a plot or storyline, characters, actions and movement. A story is narrated in a way that holds the listener's interest. Even if the story is a fantasy, if it works it is 'believable' or credible and convincing in its plot, characters and narration. Increasingly the academic literature, both on entrepreneurship and business management more generally, is taking storytelling and narra-tive seriously (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004). We can use the 'art' of storytelling to develop our ideas for the opportunity and to communicate these to other people more effectively than through a detailed plan alone. If you aim to use a venture plan to gain partners, investors or customers then it is essential that they believe your story.
Shaping the story
-The story has a structure including a beginning, a middle and an end.
-There is a plot or storyline which involves change and movement, so we do not know at
the beginning what will have happened by the end.
- The story has characters - believable people who make things happen - and things happen
to them which they do not expect.
- There is a storyteller or narrator.