Teaching and facilitation

Reading pathways

Executive education, one session

Introduction and Chapter Six. Run the Change Type Reflection individually, then compare readings in groups — the disagreement is the lesson.

Postgraduate, a term

Chapters in order. Chapter Five is the natural anchor for a methods session; Chapter Three works well paired with a corpus or discourse exercise.

Coaching and mentoring development

Chapter Two and Chapter Six Part Two, with the replot pathway as a session structure.

Board and governance development

Chapter Six Part Three, with the Critical Narrative Review applied to a real board paper the group brings.

Draft seminar questions

A small starting set. Each is answerable from the book and none has a settled answer.

1. The book claims narrative is constitutive rather than instrumental. What would count as evidence against that claim?
2. If naming someone a leader installs a hierarchy, what should we call the people currently called leaders — and what is lost either way?
3. The author argues that rethinking leadership is a different project from dismantling it. Is that a defensible position or an accommodation?
4. Which of the book's cases would look most different if read through a lens other than the one applied to it?
5. When is refusing to resolve a question leadership, and when is it evasion?
6. Whose interests are served by treating narrative work as something anyone can do on a spare afternoon?

A workshop shape that works

1. Surface (20 min). Participants write the story their organisation is currently telling about a live change, in six sentences.
2. Defamiliarise (15 min). Rewrite it as if describing the organisation to someone who has never encountered it.
3. Structure (25 min). In pairs, identify beginning, anticipated ending, turning point, genre, and who has no role.
4. Interrogate (25 min). Swap stories. The partner runs the reading position: strong plot, unstated premises, absent actors, suppressed question.
5. Replot (20 min). Move the beginning. What changes about what is now possible?
6. Ethics (15 min). Whose interests does the replotted story serve, and who carries the risk?

Using the tools in a room

All four tools work on a phone and print cleanly, so they can be used individually and then compared. They store nothing, which matters when people are writing about their own organisations. Ask participants to keep entries general enough to read aloud.

Status: drafted for the site, grounded in the manuscript · author review required · not yet classroom-tested