Crossing into another world

I trained as an actor at the Oxford School of Drama.

Theatre opened up a completely different world to me. But I quickly became interested in more than performing.

I wanted to understand how stories worked.

Why did some stories stay with us? Why did we identify with some characters and reject others? How could a shift in perspective completely change our understanding of a situation?

That curiosity took me from acting into writing and directing.

I joined the Young Vic Directors Programme and also began directing Shakespeare. I have now spent around twenty years working with the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, alongside developing and directing my own work.

But another strand was beginning to emerge.

Going deeper

Those questions eventually took me to the University of Cambridge, where I completed an MSt in Writing for Performance.

It gave me an opportunity to step away from simply making work and look more closely at what I had been doing for years.

I began bringing together ideas from narrative theory, psychology, schemas and mental models, thinking and attention, behaviour change and the ways in which human beings construct meaning.

I also returned to something I had worked with throughout my career in theatre: the structures beneath stories.

Myth, archetype and narrative structure had always interested me as a writer and director. Now I became interested in whether some of those same ideas could help us understand the stories through which people organise their experience of the world.

The further I went, the more my original question changed.

I had started by asking:

'How can we use stories to create change?'

Increasingly, I found myself asking:

'What if we first need to understand the stories through which people are already making sense of the world?'

The stories we live inside

That became an important shift in my work.

For years, I had been thinking primarily about the stories we create.

Now I was becoming increasingly interested in the stories we carry.

Stories about ourselves.

Stories about other people.

Stories about what matters.

Stories about what is safe or threatening.

Stories about how the world works.

Stories about what we need to do within it.

These aren't necessarily stories we consciously tell ourselves. They can be embedded in assumptions, expectations, habits, relationships, culture and previous experience.

But they can still influence what we notice, how we interpret what is happening and how we respond.

I began to think of this as a narrative lens.

Narrative Lens Theory

Those ideas have continued to develop through my research and practice and now form the basis of Narrative Lens Theory.

It is a framework for exploring why a situation makes sense in the way that it does to a particular person or group, and what might need to shift for something different to become possible.

It explores our Safety Narratives: the stories we hold about what it means to feel safe, secure, seen, heard and connected.

It explores our Value Narratives: the stories we hold about what matters.

It explores our Control Narratives: the stories we hold about what we need to do in order to protect, secure or fulfil those things.

And it explores Capacity States: our capacity to recognise, hold and integrate perspectives beyond our own.

I'm particularly interested in what happens when these things interact.

What happens to our ability to see another perspective when something fundamental to us feels threatened?

Why do narratives that once protected us sometimes continue operating when they are no longer useful?

Why can something look completely unreasonable through one narrative lens and entirely reasonable through another?

And what might allow a different story, perspective or possibility to become available?

Bringing it back

For me, this is where the journey comes back to practice.

I'm not interested in developing theory simply for the sake of having a theory.

I want to know whether it helps us look at difficult problems differently and whether doing so allows us to develop better responses.

In some ways, that takes me back to where I started: into rooms with people, stories and difficult questions.

But I now enter those rooms with a different set of questions.

Sometimes I'm brought in to explore a problem before anyone knows what the intervention should be.

Sometimes I design and deliver workshops, training or facilitated experiences.

Sometimes the right response is a film, a story, a conversation, a creative project or a longer programme of work.

Sometimes my role is simply to help people look at a familiar problem through a different lens.

Whatever form the work takes, I tend to begin in the same place:

'What are you trying to change?'

'What do you want people to think, feel, know or do differently?'

And:

'What might currently be getting in the way?'