Companion site to the book
Rethinking Leadership
Leadership and strategy are narrative in character. Not because leaders should tell better stories — because there is no story-free zone in which leadership could happen instead.
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Rethinking Leadership
Kevin Morrell
Edward Elgar Publishing
Cover artwork will replace this placeholder once the publisher's approved design is available.
The argument
Stories do not describe organisational reality. They help produce it.
Most writing about leadership and storytelling is instrumental: work out the strategy, then find a compelling way to communicate it. Narrative becomes a technique applied afterwards, by someone else, to a strategy that already exists.
This book makes a different, stronger claim. Narrative is constitutive. It is part of the medium through which strategy becomes shared, change becomes intelligible, people are positioned as characters, authority is legitimated and leadership becomes socially real. Leaders certainly do things that are not stories — they allocate resources and take decisions, under structural conditions that constrain what is possible. But how those actions are understood, legitimated and made consequential to other people always depends on narrative.
Two consequences follow, and the book holds both. Narrative work deserves the seriousness organisations reserve for financial modelling. And narrative deserves the scepticism we owe to any exercise of power — because the same techniques that carry an organisation honestly across a difficult transition can obscure accountability, suppress dissent and dress one group's preferences as collective necessity.
What story are we inside, how is it shaping what appears possible, and what can we do about it?The question this site is built around
Three positions
Where are you standing?
The same claim looks different depending on your relationship to the story. Most of this site is organised around position rather than chapter number.
For anyone constructing and stabilising a narrative during transformational change: diagnose the change, map what is already circulating, name the meaning void, give people characters to occupy.
IIHelp replot the storyFor anyone working alongside someone stuck inside a story: make it visible as a story, find its plot rather than its content, and open alternatives without taking authorship away.
IIIRead the storyFor anyone on the receiving end: recognise the strong plot, find the unstated premises, notice who is absent, and identify the question the story is designed to prevent.
Explore the ideas
Six lenses
For readers, educators, students and researchers: the six directions from which the book approaches its claim. Each finds something the others cannot.
Persuasion as the medium in which leadership becomes real.
02CharacterCultivated over a career; occupied as a role in a story.
03NamingWhat the word leader does before anyone has spoken.
04Figure-GroundWhat must exist before leadership is possible at all.
05MethodMethods that can see structure, not only content.
06ApplicationTelling, replotting, reading — and the ethics of each.
Work with it
Four tools, no accounts, nothing stored
Reflective instruments rather than diagnostics. They run in your browser, transmit nothing, save nothing, and show the reasoning behind whatever they give back to you.
Is this adjusting what the organisation does, or altering what it is?
Narrative Landscape MapperMap the stories already circulating before you communicate anything.
Enthymeme AnalyserFind the premises a statement relies on its audience to supply.
Critical Narrative ReviewInterrogate an organisational narrative and print the review.
The book
Publication
- Title
- Rethinking Leadership
- Author
- Professor Kevin Morrell, Rowlands Chair in Transformational Strategy, Cranfield School of Management
- Publisher
- Edward Elgar Publishing
- Structure
- An introduction, six substantive chapters and a conclusion, with sources and further reading throughout
Publication date, ISBN, format, price and purchase links will appear here once confirmed with the publisher. Nothing has been assumed or inferred.
About the author
Kevin Morrell is Professor and Rowlands Chair in Transformational Strategy at Cranfield School of Management. The book draws on two decades of research across rhetoric, critical theory, philosophy, sociology and organisational studies — work conducted in settings including public order policing, NHS transformation, tax governance, post-conflict governance and defence.