Peter Barton
14 January 2025
Lessons in reality, from Henry VIII
There are two subjects in a reference story: the customer and the client. The challenge is to make both look good. Today and tomorrow.

Very much enjoying series two of the BBC’s Wolf Hall. The script, performance and pacing (plus candlelight and creaky floorboards) continue to make a familiar story gripping. At times you almost believe Thomas Cromwell might make it through safely.

Some story threads are well signposted, however. The role of Hans Holbein the Younger as the King’s Painter/visual propagandist, foretells the trouble with wife #4/Anne of Cleves. Henry VIII was happy for his portraits to exaggerate his attributes – longer legs, broader shoulders, striking codpiece, but was less than pleased when in-the-flesh Anne failed to live up to her Holbein-painted picture.

Which brings us to the tone of customer storytelling. There are two subjects in a reference story: the customer and the client. The challenge is to make both look good. How to strike a balance between unbelievable positivity and unvarnished truth?

In my experience, few customers want a story that shows them, prior to their engagement with the client, to be inefficient, chaotic and with an alarmingly weak approach to cyber security. This may have been the case, but they don’t want it put in writing and published for the whole world to see. But neither do readers want a story set in a world of unicorns and fluffy clouds. There needs to be some grit.

The best course is to focus on the future, and the exciting possibilities therein. Don’t dwell on the problems of the past, but do point out the difficulty of the journey ahead. Show how hurdles are being overcome. Detail the changes being made that have improved the lives of the personal and the collective. Set the client’s solutions in the context of a business that is moving forward.

This is key. Clients are not the hero of the piece. It is not their decision to say how dire the situation is/was for the customer. The customer understands they are signing-off a piece of content that may have a long, online shelf-life.

It is not always an easy balance. Returning to portraits, a little over a hundred years after the death of Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector and executor of Charles I) commissioned his own portrait. Seeking to break with the traditions of the past, he insisted the artist include “pimples, warts and everything.” A phrase since shortened to “warts and all”.

It did Cromwell little good. Things got even uglier. Three years after his death, his body was dug up, and beheaded. His decaying head was placed on a 20-foot pole and displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall for the next 20 years. In life, as in customer storytelling, that would not have been a pretty sight.

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