Welcome, Fellow Traveller—

I’m Steve, founder and Principal here in our lovely house.

Narrative cognition is our most innate sense-making skill. And it is embodied: If you’re watching a film and hear a line of dialogue that doesn’t “ring true”, you pull away in disbelief. Just like that, the magic is gone. You’re “thrown out” of the story. You stop believing.

It’s the same with CEOs and their strategies, politicians and their speeches, speakers and their keynotes, companies and their strategic narrative, consultants and their pitch decks—people feel it whether a story works or not.

When a story does have what we call ‘narrative integrity’—when it is logical and coherent—then it “lands”; messaging “connects” and storytelling “resonates”, even “moves” you. Notice how embodied these metaphors are!

Narrative integrity has been the golden thread in my work for over 30 years—while storylining with the BBC, diplomatic speechwriting post-9/11, designing keynotes for speakers on global stages over the decades, crafting strategic narratives for civil society orgs—and supporting senior execs in startups through to multinationals such as Google.

Today, we live in a world in which the old dominant narratives—across leadership, strategy, society, AI, sustainability and more—are unfit for purpose, harmful even.

My goal now is to help others build the skills I’ve developed over the decades so we can better co-create new narratives—for the betterment of society and the planet.

To this end, my old friend and now business partner, Michiel, and I are developing a series of offerings—coaching, training, toolkit, playbooks and more—that we’ll be rolling out over the coming months.

Ours is a very applied narratology, drawing not only from decades of experience, but also from cognitive science, complexity science, and much more. 

It unfolds in three movements:

The Practical Craft.

Narrative integrity is first and foremost about logic. Not emotion or creativity—logic. It is the glue that holds everything together. Without it, a story simply won’t make sense. 

There are various forms of logic, and tried and tested principles underpinning what makes an argument strong. We help you get a grip of them so you can create impactful and lasting stories that click, resonate—and hold over time. 

The Critical Lens.

As you begin to master the practical craft, it becomes easier to ‘read’ the flaws, assumptions and blind spots in the strategies, stories and narratives of others.

As one lovely client puts it, once you start to see things like that, you cannot un-see it. It changes how you look at the world.

Narratology becomes a powerful tool for critical thinking and sense-making across strategy, leadership, AI, complex problem-solving and more.

Worlding.

As we sharpen our critical lens, more patterns emerge. Dominant narrative patterns in this part of the world tend to follow the same binary tropes, forms, and functions—obscuring other, less-travelled ways of seeing much needed in this crazy old complex worlds of ours.

At this stage we can move beyond today’s mono-culture of sense-making and—working with strategy as story—surface alternative perspectives from which you can gain fresh insight, understanding.

In doing so, you start to engage in the process of what Donna Haraway calls worlding—creating the conditions in which new, alternative realities can take hold.

So here we are.

In my experience, and that of my clients, applied narratology helps change the way you see, think, and act in the world.

You become a savvier sense-maker, a cannier strategist, a more adaptive leader, and, naturally—a more impactful storyteller.

I hope you’ll join us.

Be splendid.

—Steve