Why I Don’t Teach the Hero’s Journey

And the dangers of giving people what they want

Many years ago, I was listening to a podcast called Imaginary Worlds. It dives into many aspects of storytelling and sits at the intersection of popular culture and speculative fiction. It is great at showcasing how storytelling in film, media, and trends is evolving in real time.

In episode 117: The Hero’s Journey Endgame, the host, Eric Molinsky, questioned the hero’s journey and if it was losing the hold over Hollywood it once held.

It is as common in the film world as in the business world. I have seen this framework in everything from leadership courses to communications plans.

But I had never taught it in my workshops. I had been aware of it since studying it in college, but I have never taught it. Listening to the podcast, I started to understand why when I heard this statement –

“You know it’s easy to fall into the trap of going like, he came from nothing and then he, you know, had this spark of talent and then he faced all these problems and then eventually he overcame them, and now he’s reached his peak.” – Abraham Reisman, Pop Culture Writer, Vulture.

I understood; it was a trap!

Where the Hero’s Journey Starts

Joseph Campbell was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College from the 1930s to the 1970s. He lectured on mythology and spent his career studying stories from cultures around the world, looking for the common threads between them. In 1949, he published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he argued that myths across human history share a common structure, the monomyth.

The pattern goes like this. An ordinary person living an ordinary life receives a call to adventure. They resist at first. They cross into a new world with the help of a wise mentor. They face tests, make allies, and encounter enemies. They reach a moment of darkness where all seems lost. They find an elixir, usually knowledge or insight, and use it to complete their journey. They return to their normal world transformed.

Campbell’s work was respected but relatively obscure until George Lucas cited it as a foundational influence on Star Wars. Suddenly, this retired liberal arts professor became a cultural phenomenon. He became a storytelling guru, or Yoda if you prefer. He appeared in a celebrated interview series on PBS with journalist Bill Moyers. A generation of screenwriting teachers took his observations and turned them into bullet points, which became manuals and which became rules applied to every other film that emerged from Hollywood.

The hero’s journey stopped being an idea that echoed around the halls of dusty academia and became the only structure for telling a story. Instead of the monomyth, it became the mono-film, presentation, advertising campaign and more. It was the default shape that all good stories are supposed to take.

The business storytelling world enthusiastically picked it up and still hasn’t let it go. Make your customer, product, or company the ‘hero’.

It does have appeal. It is simple and easy to teach. It gives people a template.

But a template does not make a great story. And the monomyth was never universal.

The Harm in Giving People What They Want

In the Imaginary Worlds episode, the host puts the standard defence of the hero’s journey in simple terms. People in Hollywood will say it works. People love it. What’s the harm in giving people what they want? And with the insane costs of production, they can’t afford not to produce blockbuster films.

The guest on Imaginary Worlds, pop culture journalist Abe Reisman’s answer to the harm in giving people what they want, was eye-opening.

The harm, he said, is that the monomyth is a machine designed, intentionally or not, to make you a narcissist. It is all about how a singular entity has the entire universe laid out for him, and of course, it is usually him, and everything that happens is only relevant insofar as it affects him. That is a mindset that, the older he gets, he thinks is the cause of a lot of problems in the world. It leads to a sense of avarice and covetousness.

He then points to a moment in The Matrix that has stayed with him for twenty years. Neo asks Morpheus about all the other people he is killing. The guards at the bank. Morpheus’s answer is essentially: they’re not evolved. Don’t worry about them.

That is the hero’s journey logic taken to its conclusion. Everyone else is a supporting character in your story. Their lives, their complexity, their deaths are only meaningful insofar as they serve the hero’s arc.

In a film, that is a narrative choice. In an organisation, that is a culture problem.

One Perspective Dressed Up as Universal Truth

Campbell drew heavily from Greek, Roman, and Western European mythology. The hero at the centre of his framework is almost always an individual. Almost always male. On a journey of conquest, transformation through conflict, and triumphant return.

This is acknowledged with the Imaginary Worlds episode. Most of the heroes in the classic montage of hero’s journey films are men. That is not a coincidence. In the original monomyth, women showed up as either a goddess or a temptress.

Reisman also points to Aboriginal Australian storytelling as a powerful counterpoint. Everything is cyclical. There is no linear arc from beginning to end. There is the Dreamtime and the notion that everything repeats with variation. There is no triumphant individual return. No singular hero is saving the world.

There are many plural or collective storytelling cultures in the world. One of my favourites is Bollywood. There is usually a boy and a girl who are involved in a love story. But the couple cannot be together without the support and actions of both of their families. They are part of a bigger story. And everyone has a role to play. It is a completely different understanding of how stories work and how they should be told. This is not about one person getting what they want. These stories are about people working together to create a unified decision.

This is only one of many narrative traditions from around the world does not align with the monomyth.

Why This Matters for Business Storytelling

Organisations are not monolithic. Teams are made up of people from different cultural backgrounds, different relationships to individual achievement, and a multitude of ages and experience levels.

To teach the hero’s journey as the only valid storytelling structure excludes the meaning-making traditions of some cultures, effectively communicating that their methods are not suitable for professional communication.

The hero’s journey is the story of an individual’s transformation, but most organisations operate in a collective space. The focus should be on building a shared understanding across teams, communicating change to those who didn’t choose it, and uncovering the stories that define a culture, not on a single person’s triumph.

None of that maps onto a hero’s arc. And forcing it onto the framework produces exactly the kind of hollow, formulaic communication that is ubiquitous and predictable. The complete opposite of good storytelling and communication.

On the podcast, Reisman makes another observation that showcases the pervasive, deep reach of the monomyth. He notices that profile writing in journalism has become hero’s journey-ified. He came from nothing, had a spark of talent, faced problems, overcame them, reached his peak, and went into the cave of darkness until he emerged transformed. It is a formula that flattens real human complexity into a shape we have been trained to expect.

The same thing happens in organisational storytelling. The company origin myth. The founder’s struggle. The pivot that saved everything. These stories get told and retold in the same arc until they seemingly meld into a mono-story. Nothing feels unique or very memorable.

What Gets Lost

The most interesting critique in the Imaginary Worlds episode comes from a discussion of Grant Morrison’s comic series The Invisibles. Early in the story, the heroes shoot a guard. Morrison later dedicates an entire issue to that guard. His full life. His complexity. His abrupt and completely unjust death.

That issue explores the question the hero’s journey never asks. What about everyone else? What about the people whose stories do not get told because they are not the protagonist?

In business, the people whose stories do not get told are usually the ones most affected by the decisions being made. Employees navigating a restructure. A community impacted by a new policy. The team members who worked behind the scenes on a large project. The clients whose needs shaped the product but whose voices never made it into the case study.

A framework built around a single hero’s transformation will consistently miss those stories. Losing these stories has real consequences for trust, for engagement, and for genuine organisational change.

What I Teach Instead

I have spent thirteen years working with organisations creating narrative strategy. The most powerful stories I have encountered rarely follow a hero’s journey arc. They are collective. They are specific. They are honest about complexity rather than resolving it too quickly.

I teach people to find the story that is actually there, not to fit their experience into a shape designed for someone else.

That means starting with genuine curiosity about the audience. Not the hero, the audience. What do they already know? What do they need to feel? What story will move them and why?

It means working with the full range of narrative tools available, not just the ones that come from one cultural tradition. Metaphor. Foreshadowing. Story thinking. Speculative narrative. Design fiction. Circular frameworks that open up possibilities rather than close them down into a single arc.

And it means being willing to tell stories that do not focus on the transformation of one person. They focus on the transformation of the many, the way we work together. To harness the honest and authentic stories that are built on trust and are remembered.

The Journey Has Value

The hero’s journey is not without value. As a lens for understanding certain kinds of stories, in certain cultural contexts, it has its place. But a lens it is. It is not a framework that every myth in the world follows. It is one man’s quest to find a universal story, a bigger picture we are all part of. For that, I love Joseph Campbell. He gave me some of the tools I use today. To look for the patterns. The larger meaning that ties multiple stories together. The beating heart of what makes us human. This is what I do when shifting through the individual stories that come together to create a bigger narrative of change, culture alignment, and workplace transformation. I look for the connective tissue, the bigger narrative that they are part of. I am grateful for every opportunity to do it.

The diversity of the world’s narrative traditions is not a problem to be solved by finding the common thread. It is a resource. It is where the most interesting, most resonant, most genuinely human stories live.

This is my quest, my journey, not because I am a hero. But because I want to find my place in the collective. That is simultaneously what and why I teach.

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