7th September 2026
First iteration.
Capture Business Stories
In the Capture Business Stories step, we ask the Subject Matter Expert to tell us what happens in the organisation, as a story, as a narrative, using natural language.
We want real-life narratives of how work happens, in the organisation’s own words. The same stories we hear when we follow a customer’s journey or walk a process from end to end.
“A customer places an order for one or many products through a channel, the website or a store. They pay for it. The warehouse picks the products and an employee delivers them to the customer’s delivery location. When stock runs low, an employee raises a purchase order with a supplier, and the stock gets restocked into a warehouse.”
How do we get our expert to tell us the relevant story?
Ask the Subject Matter Expert one question: “walk me through what happens, from the beginning”. Then be quiet and write down or record what they say, in their words. Not in your words. And certainly not in the data platform’s our technical systems words.
A Business Story / Narrative sounds like the customer order story on the left hand page. Unremarkable, and that is exactly the job. It is how the expert would explain the organisation to a new starter over coffee.
No system names, no table names, no acronyms. If one creeps in, gently ask “and what actually happens in real life when that system does that?”
Some Subject Matter Experts can talk all day from one question, perfect!. Others need another way to begin.
Choose a protagonist. A person, a new customer, or even a thing, a credit card, a product. Follow them through their journey inside the Scope you have already chosen. “How does someone become a customer? Who do they meet?”
Follow a process. Skip the diagrams and ask the expert to narrate it in their own words. “Who does what? What is being processed?”
Walk backwards from the result. Start from the thing we most need to understand. Take churn. “What does a churning customer actually do, or stop doing, in real life?”
Capture a handful of stories, not one. The happy path first, it establishes the spine. Then the variations that make the expert grimace, “they return part of a delivery”. Variations surface Concepts and rules the happy path hides.
We both did this step unconsciously for years. Never conciously doing it caused us no end of problems when we came to draw the Concept Map together for this guide.
So make the stories explicit, and keep them. Every step that follows reuses them, and Step 11 walks the Concept Map back through them. When someone challenges the Concept Model in a years time, the stories are our evidence.