Orientation

Start where you stand

Leadership is constituted differently depending on your relationship to it. Rather than asking what you want to know, this site asks where you are standing.

I am trying to lead or communicate change

You are constructing a story that has to carry other people. Start by finding out what is already circulating, then work out whether this change is asking people to do something different or to be something different.

I am helping someone else think through change

You are working alongside the story rather than inside it. The distinctive move is replotting rather than revising content — and preserving the other person's authorship while you do it.

I am being told a story and need to assess it

The position most leadership writing neglects, and the one nearly everyone occupies. Strong plots, unstated premises, absent actors, and the question the story is designed to prevent.

I am studying leadership and narrative

Six lenses, a chapter guide, the cases the book works through, and a chapter on method that argues thematic coding studies the wrong object.

I am teaching or facilitating these ideas

Seminar questions, session shapes and discussion guides, plus the tools as classroom instruments. Being built out; what exists is clearly marked as draft.

If more than one fits

Most people occupy several positions at once — telling one story while being told another, coaching a colleague through a change you are also living inside. Pick the one that matches the situation in front of you today. The pathways cross-link, and the same tool is often useful from more than one position.

If none of them fits

You may be somewhere the book treats as prior to all three: a situation where the shared space in which any of this could happen does not yet exist, or has broken down. That is the subject of the Figure-Ground lens, and it is where the book is at its least reassuring and most useful.