Rethinking LeadershipKevin Morrell · companion site

Lens 6 of 6 · Chapter Seven

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.

What the chapter argues

From the abstract to Chapter Seven: Application

This closing chapter offers another way to translate the book’s main ideas into practice by considering three different positions: the storyteller or ‘leader’ who is setting out a narrative; the coach who works alongside a leader helping them to identify the narrative they are stuck inside and find a way to replot it; and the person being told the story, whether employee, board member, investor, or anyone who needs to read an organisational narrative through a critical lens.

Related concepts

Terms you will meet in this chapter, kept in the author's vocabulary:

  • Three positions
  • Cultural audit
  • Sense breaking
  • Naming the void
  • Prospective emplotment
  • Aphorism as infrastructure
  • Story stabilisation
  • Replotting
  • Socratic questioning
  • Strong plots
  • Suppressed questions
  • Resistance as critique
  • Board reading
  • Ethics of narrative

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 Seven: Application.

Related tools: All four tools

Related cases: Mapping the narrative landscape · Pre-scripting the emotional sequence

Status: the abstract above is quoted directly from the manuscript · surrounding text is site-written · author review required