Written by Sometime late last year, strategies went on the back burner. Which is understandable, given the amount of disruption in the world. Decisions were getting deferred or not being made at all.
Things are now shifting. Practitioners I know who work in facilitation and leadership told me they were booked solid at the start of 2026, with workshops, facilitation, and change programs, which is fantastic. I am so happy to hear that strategic thinking is resurfacing.
At the end of a period of strategic thinking and planning, I normally hear from leaders who want a narrative strategy. When they start managing the process of rolling out the strategy.
They ask to tack stories onto the strategy. But this is not ideal. The stories should be embedded in every step of the process. From listening, collecting, collating, and activating your narrative.
Especially now, in this time of convergence of changes. AI is reshaping how work gets done. Instability is rewriting assumptions about markets, supply chains, and workforce planning. People are carrying personal disruption into professional spaces in ways that are hard to ignore. Change is not arriving from one direction. It is arriving from everywhere at once.
The Story of Now
We say hindsight is 20/20 because making sense of the present has always been hard. We did not call it World War I until there was a World War II. The Hundred Years’ War was not named until someone looked back and realised the same conflict had been playing out for a century. We require distance from the thing before we can name it. That is the human condition. And honestly, why consultants exist. Fresh eyes are important.
But that does not mean we give up on trying to understand the moment we are in. It means we try harder. Because right now, not talking about what is happening, not gathering the stories of this moment, not sitting with people and asking what they are experiencing and what meaning they are making, is not a misstep we can afford to take.
You cannot build a strategy for a new tomorrow if you do not understand today. Planning for a future without first making sense of the present results in a direction that floats free of any lived reality. People do not want a story of what comes next that doesn’t feel connected to what is happening now. We understand the world is complex; we are living in it. But not acknowledging fears, hopes and identity shifts of the present moment will lose people. Asking people to live in a gap between what leadership says and what they are experiencing every day is counterproductive.
We will understand our current moment in retrospect. That is true. But that is not permission to stay silent. The only way we make sense of what is happening is to start telling stories about it. And listening to them. That is how human beings have always navigated the unknown for time immemorial.
What We Know About Sensemaking
The existing research on sensemaking through storytelling is well established.
Organisational theorist Karl Weick introduced the concept of sensemaking in his landmark 1995 work Sensemaking in Organizations, arguing that people make meaning of their environments through an ongoing, retrospective process of constructing plausible narratives. Weick and his colleagues later defined sensemaking as the process of turning circumstances into a situation that is understood explicitly in words, and that serves as a springboard into action (Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld, 2005).
Critically, sensemaking does not decrease during disruption. It intensifies. Research by Maitlis and Christianson (2014) in the Academy of Management Annals established that ruptures, discontinuities, shocks and interruptions all trigger sensemaking activity. The more destabilised the environment, the more actively people construct narratives to explain what is happening to them.
Christianson confirmed this again during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that periods of dynamic uncertainty produce exactly the conditions in which sensemaking is most critical and most difficult to accomplish (Christianson, 2021).
There are stories already in motion in your organisation right now. The question is whether you are listening.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Communication Management found that storytelling is an effective mode of communication for organisations seeking to help employees make sense of change, but only when those stories are grounded in what people are actually experiencing. Stories handed down after a strategy is finalised do not function as sensemaking. They feel like spin and alienate the very people you need to connect with.
According to Gallup research, only 13% of employees strongly agree that their organisation’s leadership communicates effectively with the rest of the organisation. In a study of 20 high-performing corporations with clearly articulated public strategies, only 29% of employees could correctly identify their employer’s strategy from a list of six options.
When a strategic direction doesn’t reflect what people think, feel, and believe, the cognitive dissonance is too big a leap for people to connect to. Communications get drafted to support a direction decided based on an ideal, rather than what is felt as real. The narrative lands flat because it has no connection to the reality people are living.
Story First, Strategy Second
Sequencing can derail a strategy that lands. Every piece of narrative development work I do starts with story discovery. You must listen. Surface the stories already circulating. Discover what people believe is happening, what they are afraid of, what they are hoping for, and what meaning they are already making. That is the raw material of true narrative intelligence.
Using true qualitative insight, we can build a narrative that connects what people already believe to the strategy. Not the other way around.
If you are leading change, launching something new, or trying to bring your people with you through a period of uncertainty, start by listening.
What story are people already telling? What are they making of what is happening right now? Find the existing story that already aligns with your desired future state and start building from there.
Get the right voices, stories and experiences documented. Build your change, strategy, and employee value proposition from there.
You Are What You Eat
If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then narrative is what feeds the culture. You cannot shift a culture without first understanding the stories running through it.
One final word, for the love of all that is good in this world, NO SURVEYS. There are better platforms for collecting and collating stories. Curious? Get in touch, and I will tell you more.
Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations 