Consultancy & Development

Working with organisations to explore the narratives, values and assumptions surrounding an issue, understand what may be enabling or preventing change, and develop approaches that can shift understanding and behaviour.

Creative Interventions

Sometimes the best way to reach an audience isn't another presentation, policy document or training session. I design narrative-led interventions using theatre, film, story-telling, performance and other creative approaches to help people experience an issue rather than simply be told about it.

Research & Methodology

My work sits at the intersection of narrative, psychology, cognition and creative practice.

I'm interested not simply in stories themselves, but in what stories do: how they shape attention, organise experience, influence identity, reinforce values and affect the way we interpret other people and the world around us.

My practice has developed through more than 17 years of creating and delivering narrative-led work alongside continued academic research, most recently through my MSt in Writing for Performance at the University of Cambridge.

There isn't one single theory behind the work. I draw from a number of interconnected areas of research and use them as practical lenses for understanding audiences, designing interventions and thinking about change.

Narrative and sense-making

Human beings don't encounter every situation from scratch.

We organise experience into patterns. We connect events, infer causes, anticipate what might happen next and construct explanations for why things happen. Over time, these become part of the stories through which we understand ourselves, other people and the world.

Narrative is therefore much more than storytelling.

An organisation has narratives. A profession has narratives. Families, communities and cultures have narratives. We carry narratives about success, failure, strength, vulnerability, belonging, authority, fairness and change.

Often these stories are so familiar that we stop noticing they are stories at all. They simply become how things are.

Part of my work is making those narratives visible.

Schemas and mental models

We all develop mental frameworks - often described as schemas - that help us process an extraordinarily complicated world.

They are useful. Without them, every new situation would require us to interpret everything from the beginning.

But schemas also influence what we notice, what we ignore and how we interpret new information. When something fits an existing understanding of the world, it can be absorbed very easily. When it challenges that understanding, simply providing more evidence may not be enough.

This matters when we are trying to create change.

Rather than beginning with What information do people need?, I am often more interested in asking:

What might people already believe about this?

What story does the new information have to encounter?

Thinking, attention and intuition

My work is also informed by research into how we think and make decisions, including dual-process models often described through the shorthand of System 1 and System 2.

Much of our everyday thinking is fast, intuitive and automatic. Slower, more deliberate reflection requires considerably more attention and effort.

That creates an important challenge for anyone trying to communicate complex ideas or create change.

We can produce perfectly rational arguments, policies, presentations and evidence and assume that people will carefully evaluate them. In reality, the message is arriving in a mind already full of experiences, associations, assumptions, emotions and competing demands for attention.

Narrative can create an opportunity to slow that process down.

A story can allow us to encounter an issue before immediately deciding what we think about it. It can make an abstract idea concrete, invite curiosity and create enough distance to consider another person's perspective.

Values and perspective

One of the questions that most interests me is why intelligent, thoughtful people can encounter exactly the same situation and reach completely different conclusions about it.

Often the difference isn't simply knowledge.

People may be viewing the issue through different values, experiences, identities and priorities.

Something framed around freedom may resonate strongly with one person and create anxiety for another who places greater importance on security or order. A message about achievement may motivate someone while alienating somebody whose primary concern is belonging or fairness.

Understanding these differences doesn't require us to agree with every perspective.

It does require us to recognise that our own way of seeing an issue isn't the only way it can be seen.

That principle sits at the heart of much of my facilitation work.

Narrative Lens Theory

My ongoing research has led to the development of Narrative Lens Theory: a practical framework for exploring the different lenses through which people make sense of themselves, other people and the world around them.

The framework is informed by Integrative Meta-Theory, particularly the idea that people can understand the same situation in fundamentally different ways depending on the values and perspectives through which they view it.

Narrative Lens Theory approaches those values through the lens of story.

At its simplest, I think of a value as:

a story we tell ourselves about what is important

We might place particular importance on feeling safe, belonging to a group, being strong and capable, creating order and stability, growing and achieving, or finding balance between competing needs. These aren't necessarily things we consciously articulate. They become part of the underlying narrative through which we interpret what happens around us.

From these value narratives, we develop what I call control narratives: stories about what we need to do in order to secure, protect or fulfil the things we value.

If my underlying story is I need to be safe, I might develop a control narrative that says If I stay in control, I will be safe.

If belonging is particularly important, the story might become If I keep everyone happy, I will remain part of the group.

If strength is central, it might become If I never show vulnerability, I can't be hurt.

These narratives can be enormously useful. They help us navigate the world, make decisions and respond quickly to situations. But they can also become restrictive when a strategy that once worked becomes the only story available to us.

This gives us a useful way of thinking about change.

Rather than asking simply 'Why won't this person change?', we can become curious about the narrative underneath their behaviour:

What matters to them? What are they trying to protect or achieve? What story makes their current response make sense?

Narrative Lens Theory groups these underlying value orientations into six broad lenses:

Survival · Belonging · Strength · Order · Growth · Balance

None is inherently better than another. Each can be expressed positively and each can have a shadow when it becomes dominant, threatened or inflexible.

The framework then adds a second dimension: our capacity to recognise perspectives beyond our own.

We can experience the world largely through a single lens, recognise that other perspectives exist, hold several competing perspectives at once, or develop an increasingly integrative ability to move consciously between them.

So the aim isn't to identify somebody's 'type' or put people into six boxes.

It is to become more curious about the stories through which we are all making meaning - and to increase our capacity to recognise, understand and work with stories other than our own.

For me, that is where narrative becomes particularly powerful.

Stories allow us to temporarily inhabit another way of seeing the world. We don't have to agree with that perspective or abandon our own. But for a moment, we can experience how the world might make sense from somewhere else.

And sometimes, seeing through another lens is enough to make a different response possible.

From research to practice

I don't use these ideas as abstract theory.

They influence how I design the work.

If the aim is to raise awareness, I might think about what existing narratives could prevent the information from landing.

If the aim is to build connection, I might create conditions in which people encounter one another beyond their professional roles or existing assumptions.

If the aim is behavioural change, I want to understand the gap between knowing something and actually doing something differently.

If an audience may find an issue uncomfortable or challenging, narrative might allow us to approach it indirectly before asking people to examine their own attitudes.

The research helps me ask better questions.

The creative practice gives us ways of exploring the answers.

An evolving practice

I don't regard this methodology as finished.

My thinking continues to develop through research, collaboration and - importantly - through what happens when these ideas meet real people in real rooms.

Every project becomes part of that process.

What works? What doesn't? Where did people engage? Where did they resist? What assumptions did we make about the audience? What surprised us?

That continual movement between research, practice and reflection is central to the way I work.

The aim isn't to develop a formula for changing people.

It's to understand more deeply how people make meaning - and use that understanding to create thoughtful, ethical opportunities for change.