Lens 6 of 6 · Chapter Six
Application
Three positions: telling, replotting, reading
In plain terms
The practical chapter, and the organising logic of this site. The same constitutive claim looks different from three positions: constructing a narrative, helping someone else see and replot theirs, and interpreting a narrative you are being told. Each carries different obligations.
Why it matters
It answers the question the argument has been building towards: what changes on Monday morning? The chapter's provocation is that organisations invest heavily in analytical work — modelling, portfolio analysis, organisational design — and then treat the narrative work as something a clear afternoon and a competent slide designer can handle. The deeper point is not that narrative deserves parity. It is that a strategy nobody can inhabit does not yet exist.
How the book develops it
Telling. Before any formal communication, map what is already circulating. Diagnose whether the change is incremental or transformational, using identity rather than scale as the test. Name the meaning void rather than papering over it — counterintuitive, because leaders are conditioned to project confidence, but it shortens the void and gives people a beginning. Pre-script the emotional sequence honestly. Give people characters to occupy, not just information to absorb. Use aphorisms as infrastructure, because they are the smallest unit of narrative that can travel without its author.
Replotting. A leader who is stuck is usually stuck inside a story. The coach's first task is to make that story visible as a story: where it begins, what the starting point makes cause and what it makes consequence, who occupies which roles, which genre or strong plot is running. Then the distinctive move — replotting rather than revising content. Changing the facts inside a tragedy leaves a tragedy. The Socratic elenchus surfaces social scripts without the direct challenge that hardens them, and prospective emplotment gives the client a future to narrate rather than a past to defend.
Reading. The position most neglected by leadership writing, and the one nearly everyone occupies. Recognise the strong plot in operation and ask whether the situation was shaped to fit it. Identify what is left unstated and whether it would still persuade if stated. Take gossip seriously — not as fact but as evidence of where the official account has failed to supply an interpretive vocabulary. Treat resistance as possible narrative critique rather than inertia. And ask the hardest question: what enquiry has this story made feel vulgar, disloyal or unsophisticated to raise?
For a board, this is a governance capability rather than a communications one. A board that cannot name the question its own dominant narrative prevents has been captured by the story it exists to scrutinise — and it should also ask what part it has been cast in: witness, sponsor, endorser, or genuine scrutineer.
Ethics runs through all three. If narrative merely conveyed meaning, misuse would be spin. Because narrative is constitutive, a false story does not just misdescribe reality; it builds one people then make careers and sacrifices inside. The test is not whether the story worked. It is whether it told people honestly what was being asked of them, gave them a genuine role, and left room for uncertainty and dissent.
Related concepts
Terms you will meet in this chapter, kept in the author's vocabulary:
One short example
A question to sit with
Which of the three positions are you actually in right now — and would the people around you agree with your answer?
Where to go next
This lens is developed in Chapter Six: Application.
Related tools: All four tools
Related cases: Mapping the narrative landscape · Pre-scripting the emotional sequence
Status: paraphrased from the manuscript · author review required · no manuscript text reproduced