Help replot the story

Make the current story visible

A leader who arrives stuck is usually stuck inside a story: an account of their constraints, their organisation, their own capacity or their past decisions that forecloses options they would otherwise see. The first task is to make that story visible as a story — a re-presentation of events, not the events — and to do it without evaluating it yet.

This is more precise work than paraphrasing content back. You are identifying the narrative choices doing the most work in the account.

Narrative coaching Map their landscape first

Find the beginning, the anticipated ending and the turning points

Where does the story start? A leader who begins an account of a failing transformation at the point resistance appeared is telling a different story from one who begins at the strategic decision, even where every event described is identical. The starting point decides which things become causes and which become consequences — among the weightiest choices any narrator makes, and almost never made deliberately.

Then: what ending is anticipated, and what has been selected as the turning point? Which events did not make the cut?

Emplotment Chapter Six

Identify the genre or strong plot

A leader narrating the situation as tragedy has already decided how it ends. One narrating it as a problem to be solved expects a technical answer. One narrating a quest has a destination they consider worth reaching; one anticipating exile and return has powerful expectations about redemption.

These generic choices are rarely conscious, and they shape what kinds of action feel available and which endings feel reachable. Naming the genre out loud is often the single most productive move in a session.

Strong plots Structural analysis

Distinguish changing content from changing plot

This is the distinctive contribution of a narrative approach, and the thing most easily lost. Revising the content of a story leaves its structure intact: new facts inside a tragedy produce a tragedy with new facts. Replotting renegotiates what kind of story is being told, where it begins, and how it could end.

A protagonist whose obstacles are entirely external has limited agency by construction. A replot that locates some of the obstacle inside the protagonist's own choices or assumptions usually opens more possibilities — and sometimes the most useful move is helping someone see themselves in the helper role rather than as the hero.

Rewrite the plot The hero slot

Reveal contradictions and assumptions

The Socratic elenchus works in three stages: an account is offered confidently; questioning extracts its implications until they contradict other things the person believes; and they arrive, through their own reasoning, at the recognition that the account does not hold. The state it produces — aporia, productive not-knowing — is uncomfortable and is the condition for anything new.

Its practical advantage in coaching is that it surfaces social scripts without the direct challenge that hardens positions. The person is not being contradicted; they are following their own argument to a place they had not looked.

The elenchus What its absence costs

Explore alternative plots

Once the structure is visible, alternatives can be tried on. What would this look like if the beginning moved earlier? If the antagonist were a condition rather than a person? If the ending were not resolution but the establishment of something that continues?

Prospective emplotment is the most practical instrument here: ask the client to narrate the future before it happens — how the transition will feel as it progresses, where the hard moments will fall, how it resolves. This is not wishful thinking. It is the deliberate construction of a story that can guide action and absorb disruption.

Prospective emplotment Diagnose the change with them

Use Socratic questioning well

The elenchus is deliberately savage, and what it saves someone from is worse: the continued operation of a false account. But it is destructive without a holding environment — a space that can contain the stress of having certainty dissolved.

Part of the coach's work is spatial before it is discursive: creating and maintaining the conditions in which a difficult question can be asked at all. Where that space does not exist, questioning is simply sidelined.

Holding environment The reading position

Preserve the client's authorship

The coach's role is not to supply a better story. It is to make the current one visible, create conditions in which it can be examined, and leave the authorship where it belongs. A replot handed over by someone else is another script to inhabit — which is the problem, not the solution.

Defamiliarisation is useful here and often gentler than challenge: ask the client to describe their situation as if to someone with no context, or as if encountering their own organisation for the first time. Making the familiar strange restores detail that habituation has stripped away.

Defamiliarisation Coaching tools

Attend to the ethics of narrative coaching

What makes this work powerful is what makes it hazardous. If narrative merely conveyed meaning, misuse would be a matter of spin. Because it is constitutive, a false story builds a world people then live and decide inside.

So the obligation is not only to ask whether the story is effective but whether it is honest. Are the roles it offers real, or is everyone a supporting part? Are the costs named alongside the promises? Are the interests of the people who will be worst affected acknowledged anywhere in it? Does it resist premature closure — stabilising before the real uncertainties have been worked through, in a way that will need expensive revision later?

Ethics of narrative The teller's obligations