Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations
Helping organisations solve communication, engagement and change challenges through story
Some of the most important storytelling work I've done had nothing to do with a keynote or a pitch. I was helping people on work sites share safety messages so that nobody got hurt. There was no stage, just a workshop room. We focused on creating clear messages and simple stories that would land with people about to start their day on industrial sites. Here, storytelling is critical. If everyone understands, everyone goes home safely.
I was working with a client who was preparing a big presentation for the executive team. They told me they didn't know why they were bothering. "All they ever say is, ' Show me the financials. They don't want to hear a story." I told them that was fine. We knew what the exec team wanted to hear, so we put the financials first. But you still need a story. You can't put up a slide and say nothing. We have all seen a presenter do that: 'The numbers tell the full story'. No, they do not. Numbers need context. You also have a point of view to promote. While you show the financials and explain them, the story provides much-needed insight and context.
Scapegoating in its original form is a purging: an offloading of the community’s sins onto something else, which is expelled along with the guilt. The practice of transferring sins is universal to human experience. Hence the word ‘scapegoat’ hasn’t fallen out of use in 600 years. The question is why? Why do we need someone or something to project our failures or guilt onto? Luckily for me and you, dear reader, there are researchers and scientists who have been asking the same question. What they have found indicates something uncomfortable about which problems we choose to fight, and the ones we think can’t be won. Before I get into the research, let’s look at two major issues affecting humanity right now.
What do we do with stories once we have them? We turn them into qualitative data, which feels tricky. How do you add up stories? Quantitative is the first preference for a reason. Numbers feel trustworthy because the method is visible to everyone. Two plus two is four; anyone can check the work. Stories have no single formula, so they feel loose and impressionistic. It is easy to dismiss them as unquantifiable anecdotes.
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 filled with Post-it notes with words. 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.
You are the narrator; this is your strategy. I work with clients to help them discover their narrative for business or personal purposes. This means they must become the narrator. It starts with a conversation that explores your story, and I start asking questions
I was working on a digital transformation project for a large bank. My job was to create the roadshow content and the deck that would go out to employees explaining the change process. I was talking to one of the lead engineers to help me understand the ‘why’. Why this change? What would we gain? What would we lose if the change wasn’t implemented? He didn’t have an answer. He responded, “The CEO just decided. That’s why.”
Conferences are not selling satisfaction. They are building something harder to measure and more valuable: belonging, connection, intellectual momentum. Post-event surveys were designed for product testing and customer service. Their job is to measure satisfaction: did the event meet expectations, what would you score it, would you recommend it to a friend? An experience that makes someone fly interstate for three days, sit in a room with 300 people they mostly don't know, and leave feeling like their work matters.
From the venues, to the speaker curation, to the way sessions are sequenced and the moments designed into the breaks, these aren't logistics decisions. They're narrative decisions. They shape how people experience the event, what they take away, and what they tell others afterwards.
If you are a member of the comms team in government or organisations, you have heard this many times. The decisions have been made, the policy set, the announcement is coming, and the strategic comms plan has been written. The first round of content has been deployed, and this is the first follow-up with the project team. And this is the feedback.
