Written by “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
Robert Burns wrote this line of poetry in 1785, after a mouse’s winter nest was destroyed by his plough. Why has this line attached so deeply to our psyche that we forget it came from a poem and not from a moment in our own lives? Because it simultaneously conveys two pivotal frameworks for storytelling.
The reversal and the reveal.
Aristotle lays out the rules of storytelling in the Poetics, one of the oldest texts on the mechanics of storytelling in the Western tradition. The first rule is peripeteia, the reversal: the moment a situation becomes the opposite of what we expected. The second is anagnorisis, the recognition, or the reveal: the moment a character crosses from ignorance into knowledge and sees what was true all along. Aristotle explained that every story contains either a reversal or a reveal, and the exceptional ones include both. Like the poem by Robert Burns.
The reversal happens to the mouse. The nest was supposed to keep them warm and safe during a long winter. When it is destroyed, this plot twist turns the mouse’s life upside down.
The plough blade turns the soil and destroys the mouse nest. The reveal happens when Burns sees the truth that we are all affected by plot twists we did not see coming.
Aristotle called the reversal peripeteia, the moment the situation flips. He called the reveal anagnorisis, the moment ignorance becomes knowledge. Nearly every story contains one or both. The best-laid plans line is famous because it captures them in a single, concise line.
Examples of best-laid plans going wrong are very easy to see in our personal lives. But what about our working lives? Restructures, migrations, and reorgs are all perfect examples of best-laid plans going awry. Addressing the reversals and reveals in work life is just as dramatic, if not more so, than our personal lives. The biggest difference is how we recover from the reversals and the reveals. Breaking up with our partner right before going on a cruise together does not result in pulse surveys, feedback channels and facilitated listening sessions. No, we talk with a friend over a bottle of red to figure out what to do next.
But what if we did dive into storytelling to help us process what is happening in our work life? What if narrative can convert the reversals and reveals into knowledge we can use? Science can now explain why storytelling helps a distressed brain in a way that a pulse survey can’t.
What the neuroscience actually says
On a recent episode of Hidden Brain, host Shankar Vedantam spoke with Daisy Fancourt, a psychobiologist at University College London and the author of Art Cure. Fancourt spent years watching the arts calm patients in hospital wards, and then researched why it works. Two of her findings focus on how storytelling helps us move through the reversals and reveals of life.
The first is how we process a hard emotion. Fancourt describes a study in the US where researchers deliberately induced distress in participants, then compared two ways of coping. One group did structured, mechanical tasks like copying shapes and working through puzzles. The other group was given creative freedom to draw or write expressively about what they were feeling. The people with creative freedom regulated their emotions better and faster. People with the structured tasks did not decrease their distress. Shaping the experience into something expressive is what helped people work through it.
The second is finding distance. Fancourt explains that examining a painful or frightening emotion through art or story allows us to experience it safely through observation. She calls it aesthetic distance. We contemplate the emotion instead of reacting to it. The brain is a prediction machine that uses stories as a rehearsal space. We can run the scenario, test responses, and better handle the real version next time.
That is what a team needs after a setback. Not to rate it on a scale of one to ten, but to frame it in a story to observe it.
According to Fancourt’s research, story structure provides a versatile toolkit for emotional regulation. While cathartic venting is often our default response, stories also enable distancing, mindful focus, and cognitive reappraisal. A subtle perspective shift where a challenge is re-examined and revealed to be entirely different than first assumed. By using structured narrative, we can unpack all the ways art creates room for healing, reflection, and progress.
In one large cohort study, Fancourt and her colleagues tracked tens of thousands of people. They found that people who regularly engage in the arts have roughly half the risk of developing depression over the following decade, even after accounting for wealth, health, genetics and background. Over time, structured story-based processing builds genuine psychological resilience.
From poem to protocol
Let’s take a typical process for a feedback session and compare it to a story-based method.
A sense-making session is built from the foundations of the reversal and the reveal. You identify the peripeteia, the exact point of the plot twist. And you engineer the anagnorisis, the moment the team sees what it could not see while it was still inside the crisis. This converts raw frustration into insight.
Venting versus structured sense-making
| Feature | Feedback Process | The narrative rehearsal (sense-making) |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | The obstacle and the feelings | The choices and the turning points |
| Role of the team | Passive victims of the circumstance | Protagonists navigating constraints |
| Emotional arc | Escalates or flatlines in anger | Moves from tension to insight |
| Outcome | Temporary relief, feeling that something was accomplished | Renewed agency and shared agreements |
The four-step team sense-making framework
Science and Aristotle’s structure create a workshop that is run in four steps.
Step 1: The raw fact versus the emotional fog
Goal: Separate the objective event from the confusing missteps around it.
Facilitation prompt: “If a neutral security camera had recorded the last three weeks of this project, what would it actually see? What are the bare facts, stripped of adjectives?”
This is where to apply aesthetic distance. You are not denying the feelings. You are setting them aside to see the events clearly. The facts are smaller and more workable once they are laid out.
Step 2: Mapping the fork in the road
Goal: Pull the team out of victim mode by locating where decisions were made. This is your peripeteia, the reversal.
Facilitation prompt: “Every story has a moment where the plot turns. Where was the exact point we made a choice, missed a signal, or hesitated?”
Victimhood lives in the belief that things simply happen to us. Agency is discovered when a team pinpoints the moment of a plot twist. The team looks at the choices so they can learn from them for next time.
Step 3: Rewriting the scene
Goal: Use aesthetic distance to test better responses without anyone reaching for the finger of blame. This is anagnorisis, the reveal.
Facilitation prompt: “If we could replay that exact 48-hour window with everything we know now, what is the specific conversation we should have had? What needed to be said out loud that stayed unsaid?”
Because the team is working on a scene rather than defending itself in real time, people can be honest. The reveal lands here: the shared recognition of what was really going on that wasn’t clear at the time. That recognition is the insight the whole session exists to produce.
Step 4: The future operating rule
Goal: Convert emotional insight into a new rule the team can use. This is the moral of the story.
Facilitation prompt: “What is the one operating rule we set right now so that when this situation happens again, our default reaction is different?”
A story with no takeaway is just an anecdote. This step is what stops the exercise from being a meeting with no outcome.
Facilitator guardrails for leaders
The framework works, but only if you hold the room. These three rules ensure it stays useful after the session has ended.
Rule 1: Name the emotion, then move on. Give people five minutes to say how they feel. Then move to the timeline and the choices. It is important to examine the events, not the feelings.
Rule 2: Focus on the micro-interactions. With storytelling, the devil is in the details. Likewise, change programs look perfect at the strategy level. It is the smaller moments where things break down. Keep the stories grounded in specific moments that have a beginning, middle and end.
Rule 3: End on a protocol, not a platitude. A session ending with “we need to communicate better” is vague. Look for an operational change. For example: “If a ticket is blocked for more than four hours, we jump on a five-minute call instead of firing off a second Slack message.” This changes behaviour, which is the desired outcome.
The real shift
A survey is not sense-making. To make meaning from the murkiness of life, a team must become the protagonist, navigating constraints, making choices and learning lessons to carry forward.
Fancourt’s research keeps showing that the story we rehearse is the one the brain believes.
If your team is midway through a hard change and things feel stuck, the fix is not another survey. It is in understanding the reversals and reveals of their story.
Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations 