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Story Leadership

Are you ready to lead through story?

Learn how to harness the power of story leadership for organisational and systems change

Never have we needed strong and empathetic leadership more than we do now.
And never has the power of story been so important.

Faced with complexity and the challenges of our times, leaders must embrace new ways of navigating change, sensemaking, strategy and vision building. The ancient craft of storytelling offers the human-centered approach that we need.

Let us show you how story leadership can activate purpose and engage people in your vision for change.

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Work with us to unlock the power of story leadership

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Strategy, Road-mapping,
Leadership & Vision Building

Discover the way storytelling creates deep connection and sense making. How can story advance your mission?

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Team Engagement
& Communication

Discover how story creates deep engagement and an ability for teams and leaders to communicate with one another.

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Systemic Change
& Transformation

Discover the nexus of story and transformation, and steward your organisation into the future.

“Story can go where quantitative analysis is denied admission – our hearts”

-Harrison Monarth,
The Irresistible Power of Storytelling as a Strategic Business Tool,
Harvard Business Review, 11th March 2014

Will you rise to the call?

Harness Story Leadership for these broader initiatives

  • Strategy – building a long-term strategy or crystallising your vision and mission
  • Flexible work – creating a more caring and flexible workplace with hybrid or remote teams
  • Workforce development – leadership training and upskilling programs
  • Change management processes – culture shaping and navigating change (scaling up or down)
  • Employee or stakeholder engagement – transparency and trust-building
  • Impact measurement – reporting, communications and key messaging
  • Innovation – think tanks or creative ideation processes

Story Leadership Clinics & Experiences

Let us help you with a story-driven approach for your organisation or initiative

Story Listening Services - Listen
STORY LISTENING

Good storytelling and strong leadership both start with Story Listening. Employ Story Listening in your strategy, purpose or brand narrative develop, or stakeholder engagement.

Story Listening Services - Map
STORY MAPPING

Story Mapping is a way to visualise the field of stories, as a sensemaking process in and of itself, or a starting point to strategic work and other team building, culture building, or transformational processes.

Story Listening Services - Weave
STORY WEAVING

Story Weaving is the conscious and strategic art of working with collective story. Navigate from polarity to plurality to build team cohesion and create a sense of collective identity and shared vision.

From half or full day clinics to tailored story-driven processes for your strategic initiatives, we can help design and facilitate story listening, story weaving and story telling processes to achieve your organisational objectives.

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Professional Development, Education & Capacity Building

We also run Story Leadership workshops, seminars or programs to build capacity for your employees, leadership team or beneficiaries, or as part of your service offering to customers. We teach individuals and groups practical, applicable story skills that they can integrate into their personal and organisational practice.

Focus on Story Listening, or develop broader Story Leadership skills across the three areas of: story telling, story listening and story weaving.

Our workshops are participatory, and can be run online or in-person, for both small and large groups.

Based on your needs, participants will:

  • Learn and experience firsthand how story is processed in the brain, and why it is so powerful
  • Engage in interactive exercises and hands-on applications of Story Leadership skills, so they walk away with new skills to apply in both personal and professional contexts
  • Unpack real examples of organisations that have successfully applied Story Leadership in the field
  • Receive resources and takeaways on each of the three pillars of Story Leadership (telling, listening and weaving)

Leadership at every level

Whether you lead a community or organisation, you can lead through story

Here’s how Story Leadership can be used to amplify the impact of your organisation, community or ecosystem.

  • Foster team connection, engagement and resilience
  • Deepen levels of trust and increase wellbeing
  • Surfacing your team or community’s collective values, purpose or vision
  • Co-create and build strategy
  • Strengthen empathy and engage in problem-solving through lived experience and cultural intelligence
  • Collective sense-making, building shared context and language
  • Creating adaptability in navigating change, complexity and transformation
  • For human-led collaboration, inclusion and belonging
  • Empathy-driven design for creativity and innovation
  • Move beyond hierarchies to flatter, more democratised organisations with greater transparency

“Leadership is about being better able to listen to the whole than anyone else can” – C. Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Learning From The Future As It Emerges

Some of our Leading Through Story Projects

  • Case Study: A better world starts with better decisions each day – BizCubed
  • A ‘Story-Driven’ Process: Strategic Communication & Visioning
  • Shining A Light on Paediatric Sepsis – Paediatric Sepsis Project, Queensland Health

More on Story Leadership

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What it means to lead through story – five organisations doing it well

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Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

The underrated skill all good leaders have – the ability to story listen

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The Democratisation of Storytelling (Stories For Impact).00_00_59_05.Still007 (2)

How to create a storytelling culture and why it matters

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Illustrated by Devon Bunce, from Digital Storytellers.

Story-powered systems change – using story to imagine a more regenerative economy

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REOS Partners Journey (1)

Why story is exactly what we need to navigate this VUCA world

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Who’s been storytelling with us?

Here are some of the people we’ve worked with

Case Study: A better world starts with better decisions each day – BizCubed

A ‘Story-Driven’ Process: Strategic Communication & Visioning

Shining A Light on Paediatric Sepsis – Paediatric Sepsis Project, Queensland Health

Ready to lead through story?

Tell us about it