Tell the story

Diagnose the type of change

The first question is not how big the change is but whether it leaves the organisation's account of itself intact. Incremental change adjusts what an organisation does; transformational change alters what it is. A merger that doubles headcount while leaving identity untouched is large but potentially incremental. A shift from dependent subsidiary to self-sufficient entity may barely change headcount and be transformational.

Getting this wrong has a specific cost. Applying project management to a meaning void is not merely inadequate; it organises the logistics while leaving the actual problem untouched.

Change Type Reflection Character lens

Map the narrative landscape

By the time a formal programme begins, stories have been circulating for months. Some are broadly accurate, some are darker than reality, and some have hardened into established truth through repetition in informal networks.

Ask: what is the dominant story about what is happening and why? Who are the informal narrators whose accounts carry disproportionate weight? What does the gossip reveal about where anxiety is concentrated? Are the stories consistent across different parts of the organisation, and if not, what does the divergence tell you? What is not being said?

Narrative Landscape Mapper The methodology in practice

Name the meaning void

A meaning void is not simply uncertainty about the future. It is the interval in which the old shared account has dissolved and the new one has not stabilised. What people lack there is not information but a common architecture of interpretation — which is why the anxiety takes the form it does. The questions people ask themselves are about membership and recognition: do I still belong here, will there be a version of me in whatever this turns into, is this what I joined?

The counterintuitive move is to name it explicitly: to say that the old account of who we are no longer holds and the new one is not yet formed. This feels like an admission of weakness, and it is the opposite. People told they are in a void can tolerate it, recognise its cost, and give it a beginning, middle and end. People not told will supply their own frame, and it will usually be darker.

The meaning void Chapter Six

Anticipate the emotional sequence

Someone who has been through a comparable transition can pre-script it: how it will feel, in what order, where the low point sits, what will get worse before it gets better, and what will be possible afterwards that is not possible today. When disruption arrives, a story is already waiting to absorb it.

This is not false reassurance and it does not require promising outcomes you cannot guarantee. It is where ethos becomes operational: credibility that comes from having made the journey and being willing to describe it honestly. People in a void want something other than a flowchart: they want to hear from a person who has crossed this particular ground and will say plainly how it went.

Prospective emplotment Ethos

Identify characters and roles

Communications about change usually set out the what and the why with reasonable clarity, and consistently underinvest in the who. People do not necessarily need to be persuaded intellectually before they will commit; what they need is to find themselves somewhere in it — with a part that is genuinely theirs rather than passive support for someone else's quest.

Some people will never be enthusiastic, because their identity was invested in exactly what is being moved away from. They cannot be given false comfort. They can be given straight recognition, a plain account of what is being asked of them and why, and — where one exists — a real way into the new story rather than a managed exit from the old.

Character as role Proppian structure

Examine your aphorisms and unstated premises

A change narrative becomes shared when it can travel without its author — picked up and retold by people who were not present and do not have the slides. The smallest unit that travels at that scale is the aphorism: compact enough to be remembered, precise enough to do work when repeated, and open enough to leave the audience something to supply.

Which is also the risk. Aphorisms compress arguments with missing premises, and they can be subverted, repeated sarcastically, or completed differently by different audiences. Test yours: does it work across locations, functions and levels, or only in the room where it was written?

Enthymeme Analyser Aphorisms

Assess whether the story is stabilising

Stabilisation is a process recognisable through markers rather than an event. The clearest is that the story becomes less dependent on its principal narrator. People at every level can say what is happening and what it asks of them, in their own words, without reaching back to the original announcement. New colleagues receive from existing ones a story recognisably the same as the one leadership is telling.

None of this shows on a change dashboard. It requires moving through the organisation informally and listening to how people talk when they do not think they are being assessed.

Re-map the landscape Read it as an outsider would

Consider the ethical limits

Because narrative is constitutive rather than merely descriptive, a false story does not simply misdescribe a situation; it produces one that people then make careers, decisions and sacrifices inside. That is a different order of ethical consequence from spin.

The test is not whether the narrative worked. Did it tell people honestly what was being asked of them and why? Were the roles on offer real ones, or was everyone a supporting player? Were the costs set out alongside the promises? Did it acknowledge the legitimate interests of those who will be worst affected? Did it resist stabilising the story before the real uncertainties had been worked through?

The ethics of narrative Why you need external tests