Introduction
Rethinking Leadership
The constitutive claim, and why it needs six chapters
Overview
The introduction sets out the book's central claim: leadership and strategy are fundamentally narrative in character. Narrative is not one tool among many that leaders may choose to pick up. It is the medium through which strategy becomes shared, change becomes intelligible and leadership becomes real to those enacting it and to everyone else.
Two metaphors frame the difference between kinds of change. Strategy as a castle: occupy a position and defend it, with change as fine-tuning. Strategy as a microscope: incrementalism is turning the fine wheel to bring a still slide into focus, while transformation is spinning the wheel and somehow holding focus while the slide itself moves. Restated without the metaphor: incremental change adjusts what an organisation does; transformational change alters what it is.
Three contributions are claimed, as points of emphasis rather than wholly new ideas. Narrative is constitutive rather than instrumental — there are no story-free zones in organisations. The vocabulary of leadership does political work, and calling someone a leader rather than a manager is a narrative move with ideological content. And classical resources, particularly Aristotle on rhetoric and ethics, are integrated with contemporary narrative theory rather than cited decoratively.
The introduction is also candid about method and voice: it is written in the first person, it is an argument rather than a literature review, and it includes an explicit account of how AI tools were used in preparing the manuscript alongside a warning about AI as a flattering mirror that reflects our assumptions back to us and congratulates us for holding them.
Key questions
- What story are we currently inside, and who authored it?
- Is this change adjusting what we do, or altering what we are?
- Where does the existing organisational story fail to account for what people are being asked to do?
- What would it mean to treat communication as constitutive rather than as the final step?
Central concepts
Cases in this chapter
Work with it
Related lens: All six lenses
Related tools: Change Type Reflection
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required