Written by At the end of a narrative co-design workshop I ran at the Educate Plus Building Futures conference this year, my last slide was a Miro board covered in Post-it notes, each with just one word each. Every one of them had come from the delegates themselves, gathered across the whole conference through a storytelling challenge app. I explained that the storytelling challenge they had been working on throughout the conference was the source of these words.
I asked whether the words resonated with them or meant anything to them. People nodded, saying yes. They told me the words resonated, and that more than one person felt genuinely seen. Words carry far more power than we often realise. When you gather the right ones and hold them in front of the people who said them, the reflection is validating.
Designed as a gamified engagement experience, the Storytelling Challenge collects stories during a conference to highlight key moments for attendees. Throughout the event, we delivered a series of fill-in-the-blank prompts via an app. Day one focused on intention-setting, with delegates crafting brief stories about their hopes to discover fresh ideas to bring back to work or build new connections. When prompted at the close of the event to reflect on their overall experience, participants offered a deeply emotional, rich picture of their transformation and what they would do differently when they return to work.
Stories on their own are insightful, but the connective tissue that brings it all together, the narrative, is what makes them powerful. It moves from being insights into qualitative data. The first step in moving through the multitude of stories is to break them down. Focus on repeated words for emotional insight into the delegates’ state of mind. On day one, the repeated words were ideas, new, learn, work, share, and connection. On their own, none of those will surprise anybody, but taken together, they show the energy with which people arrived. As one person in the workshop observed, it was the value they wanted to gain from the conference. This was a room that arrived hungry to think differently, to learn from one another, and to build relationships with people doing the same work. You get the mood of the entire event in a handful of repeated words. That is more insightful than a feedback form rating a session on a scale of 1 to 5.
These recurring terms offer a quick temperature check of the room, uncovering genuine insights into the attendees’ lives. Yet, some of the most profound realisations came from words mentioned far less frequently. Take “confidence”, though it only surfaced a few times; the stories in which the word appeared gave it immense power. Attendees were not searching for another quick tool or strategy; rather, they sought confirmation that they were moving in the right direction. Since many of these individuals operate in isolation as single- or two-person teams, stepping into a room filled with peers encountering similar hurdles and asking the same questions provided a sense of reassurance. They felt they were on the right path, while reminding them that others share their exact concerns and challenges.
Something else emerged when I put the beginning and the end of the conference side by side. The intentions people set on day one read as cool and planning-focused, all aspiration and forward motion. The reflections at the end of the week read as warmer and far more emotional. Words like excited, amazing and supported came through, along with an honest thread of nervousness from people attending for the first time or finding the size of it all a little overwhelming. What stood out the most was that connection was the primary motivator for being there. The hope of meeting people and making new friends, so present at the start, had become a language of networks and professional relationships by the end. Those relationships were what actually delivered the ideas and the learning people had come for in the first place.
This work is about understanding the words themselves. It is at the heart of how I approach this work. A word on its own tells you very little. The story sitting behind it is where the meaning lives. Take innovation, which has to be one of the most overused terms in professional life, and it can feel like it means nothing at all. When I looked at the stories sitting behind, they came alive. One person described sitting in a keynote and realising that the things they had been doing for years, almost without thinking, were not common knowledge to everyone else in the room. In that moment, they thought, perhaps I am more innovative than I ever gave myself credit for. That is not a hollow buzzword. That is a person recognising their own value. This is something you only find when you look underneath the surface.
That is why the room felt seen. Their own words, reflected back to them, told a story about who they were and what they valued better than any conference feedback form. Words provide emotional anchors for the insight that the stories give you. This is qualitative insight. If you want to understand what an experience really means to the people who lived it, their stories are both a window and a mirror. A window for conference organisers to observe and a mirror for the delegates.
Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations 