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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 Systems Storytelling Hub is offered as a shared resource.
It’s stewarded by people working inside complex systems who care deeply about how ideas are held, shared, and put to use. Stewardship here means tending the work with intention—while leaving room for others to adapt it, question it, and carry it into their own contexts. The hub is meant to grow through use, gaining strength as it travels and takes new shape.
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 storytelling can support systems change.
It’s for funders, conveners, evaluators, 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 is a systems story?
A systems story it reframes how we understand agency.
Instead of asking:
“What did this remarkable person do?”
a systems story asks:
“What conditions made change possible—and who else was involved?”
Systems stories can be just as emotionally compelling, just as rich with character, and just as narratively satisfying as any hero’s journey. Yet they require different craft—different questions, different muscles—but they move us just as deeply.
A hero story follows a single river—tracing its dramatic course from source to sea. A systems story maps the watershed: the tributaries, the groundwater, the rainfall, the land that shapes where water can and cannot flow. Both are true. But if you want to understand why the river is drying up, you need to see the whole basin.
Where a hero story centers an individual protagonist, a systems story might center a relationship, a pattern, or a community coming into awareness of its own interconnection.
Where a hero story ends in victory and closure, a systems story stays with ongoing learning and transformation.
Where a hero story invites admiration, a systems story invites recognition—of one’s own place in larger webs, of what conditions need to change, and of whose knowledge has been missing.
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.
Use
The content on this microsite is shared under a Creative Commons license, making it freely available for use, adaptation, and sharing for non-commercial purposes with appropriate attribution. This means you are welcome to build on and apply these materials in your own context, while crediting the source and not using them for commercial gain.
Acknowledgements
This work was made possible through the care, insight, and commitment of many people who contributed their time, wisdom, and lived experience to exploring and advancing the practice of systems storytelling.
This body of work is also grounded in and inspired by a rich lineage of practice. Systems storytelling draws from longstanding traditions, including Indigenous narrative practices, oral histories, Freirean pedagogy, participatory action research, community-based arts, and feminist and relational methodologies. We honour these foundations and the communities who have carried this knowledge forward across generations.
We are deeply grateful to the members of the Advisory Council—Nat Kendall-Taylor, Joanne Cheung, Natalia Quinones and Nayantara Sen—whose guidance, reflection, and stewardship helped shape these initiatives. We also extend our appreciation to Community of Practice and Learning for Action, whose early thinking and collaboration were instrumental in bringing the vision of the systems storytelling initiatives to life.
We offer sincere thanks to Philippa Kabali-Kagwa and Mary Tangelder, for their leadership, and to the CCL staff—John Kania, Tad Khosa, Lian Zeitz and Jules Myer—as well as contributors who supported this work behind the scenes. Most importantly, we acknowledge the Fellows and participants who generously shared their energy, insights, and practices. Their contributions are at the heart of the learnings, tools, and resources shared throughout this microsite.
Stewardship
This guide is offered as a shared resource.
It’s stewarded by people working inside complex systems who care deeply about how ideas are held, shared, and put to use. Stewardship here means tending the work with intention—while leaving room for others to adapt it, question it, and carry it into their own contexts. The guide is meant to grow through use, gaining strength as it travels and takes new shape.
About Use of Quotes
Quotes throughout this Systems Storytelling microsite are shared with permission and used to illuminate patterns, not to represent individuals or stand in for the whole.
