Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations
Helping organisations solve communication, engagement and change challenges through story
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.
Strategic narratives are revealed, not designed. Organisations are made up of people telling stories all day, every day. They are sharing stories of their business, customers, projects, teams and direction. There is much to be learned about an organisation in the language teams use to describe their work, and in the moments they share about…
Roughly 80% of our daily communication is some form of storytelling. Not epic novels or keynote speeches. Small moments of your day, fragments of thoughts or anecdotes that illustrate a point of view. We toss around messages embedded in a story in meetings, conversations, and Slack channels. We are telling stories all day, every day, because that is how we understand each other and absorb information. It is how humans are wired.
A senior leader at a global employee experience company opened what she expected to be a routine email marking her fifteenth work anniversary. What she found instead made her cry. Her husband walked in, saw her on her phone in tears. He asked her what was wrong.
Narrative Strategy and Storytelling for Organisations 