Tool two
Narrative Landscape Mapper
Before you communicate anything, find out what is already being said. Add each story circulating around your change, and the map will show you what you are actually working with.
In any organisation living with uncertainty, stories have been circulating well before the formal programme begins. Some are broadly accurate, some are darker than reality, and some have already hardened into established truth through repetition in informal networks.
This tool adapts the cultural audit approach the book describes: mapping the narrative landscape as it is, rather than as the official account assumes it to be. Add as many stories as you need. Two is usually too few.
Reading your map
- Where one story's background is another story's central problem, you have found the real disagreement.
- Two dominant stories usually means one of them is dominant somewhere you are not standing.
- A blank under who is excluded is more often an unasked question than an absence.
- The premises hardest to see are the ones you share with the teller.
Then what
Ask which of these stories people will use to interpret whatever you say next; which could coordinate action and which would foreclose dialogue; and what narrative work remains before a new story could stabilise. The Tell the story pathway takes it from there.
Status: drafted from the manuscript · author review required