Start here

Over two years, we convened storytellers, artists, researchers, and practitioners across six countries and ten disciplines. Together, we experimented—testing approaches grounded in systems thinking, healing, and narrative craft. We failed, learned, refined, and tried again.

The craft of systems storytelling is still taking shape—and always will be. It's a discipline grounded in care, reciprocity, and respect: for the stories, for the storytellers, for the communities holding both.

Our approach is grounded in the belief that deep, lasting change is fundamentally relational—it happens between, by, and for people, not TO them. A practice that serves this kind of change has to stay alive to the people and contexts it meets.

This site holds what we've learned so far. 

Who this is for

This site is for people working in complexity who want to understand how the practice of storytelling can be used to support systems change.

It’s for funders, conveners, leaders, designers, educators, and practitioners who are less interested in polishing messages and more interested in what becomes possible when stories are gathered, held, and connected well.

Systems storytelling treats storytelling as both a process and an outcome: a way to bring people into relationship, surface patterns and power, and make sense of complexity together—and a way to produce narratives that feel shared, credible, and alive to the people inside the system.

What you'll find

17 Lessons What emerged through practice—the patterns we saw again and again, and why they matter.

Tools Practices you can try in your own context: ways to shift questions, surface patterns, and craft stories that hold complexity without losing heart.

Stewardship Meet the fellows carrying this work into their own contexts—across six countries, ten disciplines, and countless experiments. This isn't a plug-and-play method. It's a living practice, held and adapted by the people doing the work.

An invitation

The craft of telling systems stories is still emerging. What we offer here is a set of orientations: grounded in practice, held lightly, and meant to be tested.

Start with a lesson. Try a tool. Notice what changes—in how people listen, in what becomes visible, in what action feels possible.

Start anywhere. See what opens.