I like reading books about corporate dysfunction when they come in the shape of a compelling (fictional) narrative. Business writers know how storytelling can spice up dry theory and support their argument. Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Gene Kim’s Unicorn and Phoenix projects are good examples. It works for popular science too. In Snakes in Suits, psychologist Robert Hare, a renowned authority on psychopathy, explains for a lay readership the manifestations and biological foundations of this dark human design flaw. He interweaves the science with a chilling fictional narrative of a parasitic young suit slithering his way up the corporate ladder. So, when a coworker told me the other day about an especially glib colleague who lied, cheated, charmed, and flunked his way to job security, I immediately thought: psycho!

In software, any rule or recommendation, whether it’s the Law of Demeter, SOLID principles, or the Agile Manifesto is the distillation of years of experience, spirited discussion, and plenty of compromises. Observing how teams work has led us to certain recommendations that boil the specific down to the generic. Stories are a wonderful aid to explain and justify such rules because they can show how the rules were arrived at in the first place. They supply the back story that reconnects the specific back to the generic. You need these to know and respect the justifications behind a principle. It’s not enough to learn a rule by heart if you want to apply it well. Concise lists of opinionated statements make for pithy posters, but the necessary back story is missing from the text.