Taking story outside the theatre

Over time, my work began moving beyond conventional theatre.

I became increasingly interested in what happened when the tools of storytelling were applied to real-world issues.

For more than 17 years, I've created narrative-led work around some extraordinarily complex subjects: exploitation, radicalisation, abuse, coercive control, safeguarding, relationships, mental health, leadership, organisational culture and change.

I've worked in schools and universities, with local authorities and the NHS, with the military, police and social care, and with organisations trying to communicate things that matter to people who don't necessarily want another presentation telling them what they ought to think.

The subjects changed. The audiences changed. The form changed.

But I kept encountering the same problem.

Knowing something doesn't necessarily change anything.

You can give somebody the evidence. You can explain the consequences. You can produce the guidance, deliver the training and make a perfectly rational argument.

And people can remain exactly where they were.

I became increasingly interested in why.

A question I couldn't leave alone

Gradually, the question behind the work became more important to me than any particular project:

What makes somebody see something differently?

I had spent years watching narrative work - and sometimes not work - with very different audiences.

Why does one story change the way somebody sees an issue while another leaves them untouched? Why can two people encounter the same story and take entirely different meanings from it? What role do our existing beliefs, values and experiences play in determining what we hear? And why is knowing something so often insufficient to change what we actually do?

Those questions began to change the way I thought about story.

I'd spent years thinking about stories as things we create.

I became much more interested in the stories we carry.

Stories about who we are. What matters. Who belongs. What strength looks like. What is fair. What is dangerous. Who can be trusted. What someone like us does in a situation like this.

We don't just tell stories.

We look through them.

Two different ways of exploring the same question

Eventually, I wanted to go deeper.

More than three decades after leaving school at 16, I found myself at the University of Cambridge studying for an MSt in Writing for Performance.

The degree gave me the opportunity to explore writing, performance and dramatic form at a much deeper level, but I arrived with a particular set of questions of my own.

Those questions became the lens through which I approached much of my work at Cambridge.

Alongside the study of writing and performance, my own research increasingly drew me towards narrative theory, cognitive psychology, schemas, attention, dual-process thinking and the ways in which we construct meaning.

At almost exactly the same time, I began another, very different journey through Stalking the Rebel Soul - a year-long programme exploring mythology, archetype, ritual and the role story can play in understanding ourselves and our place in the world.

Where my work at Cambridge allowed me to analyse and interrogate narrative, Stalking the Rebel Soul invited me to experience story from another direction.

Working with ancient stories, myths and archetypal patterns, it explored the idea that the stories which resonate with us can reveal something about what we value, what we fear, what we are searching for and the narratives through which we understand our own lives.

I found having those two experiences alongside one another fascinating.

On one side, I was exploring contemporary thinking about cognition, psychology and narrative. On the other, I was engaging with ways human beings have used story, myth and metaphor to make sense of themselves for thousands of years.

Increasingly, I became interested in where those two traditions might meet.

What might cognitive psychology help us understand about why an ancient story still resonates? What might myth and archetype illuminate that a purely analytical approach can miss? And could both be describing, in very different languages, aspects of the same fundamental human process — our need to create meaning from experience?

I didn't want to choose between them.

My practice increasingly began to occupy the space between research and story, cognition and imagination, analysis and experience.

Bringing the pieces together

That journey eventually brought me back to something I'd been encountering throughout my career.

I'd spent years thinking about stories as things we create and tell.

I was becoming much more interested in the stories we live inside.

The stories we tell ourselves about what matters. The stories we construct about what we need to do to protect the things we value. The stories we inherit from families, organisations, professions and cultures. And the stories through which we interpret people whose experience of the world may be very different from our own.

Those ideas now feed directly into my practice and into the continuing development of Narrative Lens Theory.

Narrative Alchemy is where all of those different strands now come together.

I'm less interested in defining myself by the form the work takes.

I might be facilitating a Story Exchange with a group of senior leaders, working with an organisation to understand the narratives surrounding change, speaking about story and cognition, developing a creative intervention around a complex social issue, or directing actors in a rehearsal room.

The form is different.

The underlying questions aren't.

What stories are operating here?

What do people value?

What are they trying to protect?

What lens are they looking through?

And what might allow them to see something they couldn't see before?

Where next?

I don't see this as the end point of that journey.

Quite the opposite.

I want the next stage of my work to sit increasingly between research and practice: continuing to investigate how narrative shapes human understanding while testing those ideas with real people, in real organisations, rehearsal rooms and communities.

I want to work with organisations facing difficult questions about culture, values, behaviour and change. I want to continue developing Narrative Lens Theory. I want to research, write, teach, facilitate and speak about these ideas.

And I want to keep making stories.

Because after all the theory, research and frameworks, I still believe in something I first discovered in a theatre:

sometimes the most powerful way to help somebody see the world differently is to let them experience it through somebody else's eyes.

In many ways, I've spent my career moving between two questions:

How do we tell better stories?

and

How do the stories we tell shape who we become?

Narrative Alchemy is where I get to explore both.