Designing strategic narratives for change. Seeding stories for a thriving world.
Regenerative story strategist, narrative experience designer, editor and writer.
We belong to a storied world. Stories are alive and relational. They are felt and experiential. They ripple through us, involve us, and evolve with us. They weave together to frame all that we know, sense and feel. We humans are storytelling creatures, so storytelling matters. It’s powerful stuff. So powerful that it shapes how we understand the world, how we interact with others, our sense of self and our behaviours, beliefs and worldviews. When we create shared stories, cultures are formed. The aliveness of stories means that culture is dynamic and emergent. We shape cultures through our storytelling, and we are invited to influence them in their evolution.
Stories can be the seeds of regeneration. They can disrupt and reframe people’s ways of knowing and disturb structures that uphold degeneration. I work with organisations to craft their stories and storytelling projects to seed and shape a thriving world. In these times, as we enter the brewing storms of interwoven crises, we must imagine beyond what is, learn from what was, and heed the call to dance to the beat of life's thrumming pulse in the continuous creation of our world.
Working with story
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The cracks are now showing in the shaky foundations that dominant cultures are built upon. What story seeds can we plant in these cracks? What root systems will rupture and crumble the ground these cultures are built on? What will bloom in the rubble?
Storytelling has the potential to alter the trajectory of cultures as they emerge. We are co-creators in this emergence. Creation can be thought of as composting: the rotting down of the old through the collaboration of beings to bring forth rich soil for the new. Therefore, creation is cyclical and relational. We can seed transformation in this compost.
I work with organisations to weed and seed narratives for them to flourish in a thriving world.
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Story goes far beyond the mechanical structures and methodologies often taught. Story tethers our inner worlds to our outer worlds. Narratives that channel through everything, weave together and feed into our understandings and experiences. Stories are systemic: they are alive, relational, nested and dynamic and hold narratives that repeat in patterns.
Semiotics are key to my work. Story worlds are complex and multimodal places. Storytelling plays with complex systems of signs and symbols that hold meaning. Meaning is diversely held but also can be collectively understood. Groups may discern meaning similarly, though never the same. This similarity enables us to curate sensoriums of shared meaning.
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Meaning is dynamic. It is forever in a state of change, transforming with context, delivery, time, place, culture and who we are as we participate in its making. Meaning is diversely discerned through the framings of our many ways of knowing and everything we each sense and feel. Therefore, meaning is subjective.
Understanding our communities (our customers, audiences, clients and users) is paramount to all communication work. We must respect that the communicative modes that comprise our story worlds may be diversely understood and are constantly changing in meaning. Sensing how different groups within our communities discern meaning can enable us to be impactful in our work.
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Stories are the melding of our perceptions and imaginations with all who surround us, both humans and more than humans. We are not originators of stories; they channel through us, from and to others, transforming and shape-shifting. Therefore, storytelling is a collaborative process.
This understanding recognises the dynamism and relationality of story and its components of meaning. Working with story requires recognition that there is complexity beyond our individual comprehension. Storytelling is not a short-chain, linear process. Story is multimodal with intersecting narratives. Creating immersive and impactful story worlds for an intended audience means playing with story systems and combinations of modalities. It means effectively strategising around this collaborative process to use chosen mediums and formats.
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Our world nourishes us. It enlivens us. We (should) reciprocate this. But in these uncertain times, we may be compelled to collapse into despair, anguish, anger and fear. Many of us are grieving as our world vanishes, its colour draining into greyness. But we will only perpetuate the collapse if we meet the world with greyness and grief. Instead, we should echo our world’s aliveness and reciprocate the joy, awe and wonder it gifts us. We shouldn’t seek to drag people into despair or rationally persuade them to take action or exude unanchored positivity. The potential is in the invitation to be entangled and enlivened by the world. Stories are this invitation.
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We hold the incredible ability to move abstractions from our minds and make them our realities. Our imaginations enable us to share in worlds beyond the physical realm. Story is the receptacle for this shared experience. Collective imagination can shape cultures and societies. In this relational creativity, we can play together at the boundaries of reality and dream into being a flourishing future. We can work to ensure that diverse imaginings may intersect, coalesce and diverge translocally to disrupt patterns that lead to transformative shifts out of the Anthropocene and into the Symbiocene, a new epoch marked by humans embodying the symbiosis of all on Earth.
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Language is not static or rigid, and its rules are influenced by all who use it. Language is ours to play with to ignite and propel cultural evolution. Cultural evolution and language evolution are synchronous. How can we work with language as a communicative mode to align cultures with living systems, challenge colonial mindsets and legacies, move away from mechanistic and reductionist thinking, and shape how people relate to the world?
I work in and with the English language. I note that English has limitations, inherent biases, inbuilt power structures and degenerative worldviews baked in. The English language itself is a colonial power, and through its continued adoption and use in an increasingly globalised world, it can perpetuate degeneration and inequality and create increasingly homogenised ways of knowing and seeing.
Working with story across languages requires care. Languages are knowledge systems. Words are units of meaning that react dynamically to context: the sentence, paragraph, text, body of work, broader landscape and culture they are in. Translating meaning from one language to another is more than translating words. When working on projects that include stories from diverse cultures and languages, I work with facilitators who act as bridges in knowledge systems.
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There are many ways to affect change and create impact. As organisations, our collective effort for change needn’t be coordinated or aligned or adopt the same messaging. We all have roles and communities to welcome into the transformation that’s needed. No one project or organisation will be the change. To be effective, we should consider the ecosystems we exist in, how our work weaves into existing story worlds, and how we may play in their dynamism.
Recognising how our organisations thread into complex ecosystems can enrich our potential to be impactful. Our positioning in these ecosystems is relational. We can opt to view this relationality through the lens of cooperation rather than competition, championing our collective potential and capability to energise shared communities. We can mindfully position our organisations and projects in ways that elevate shared ambitions for a thriving future.
I am guided by living systems thinking, regenerative design and development methodologies and frameworks, semiotic and narrative theory, systems change, intersectional justice, planetary interbeing, a deep-felt connection to the living world, and a breadth of practitioners across disparate disciplines who inspire me.