Welcome! This site provides practical guides, facilitation tools and activities, shared lessons, and experiential stories for applying systems storytelling.
Systems Storytelling Hub
Storytelling is an age-old “technology” to foster collective meaning-making and develop collective agency among groups. Traditional as well as modern societies have historically used storytelling to create and reinforce overarching narratives that influence the way groups selectively process information and choose courses of action.
Western storytelling, which tends to feature linear storylines and heroic actors - has become the dominant way of crafting stories in most industries and sectors, including the social sector. These stories usually position individuals and organizations as powerful agents who address social challenges through single solutions. Often, these stories reinforce existing power narratives about how social change should happen and who social change agents should be, ultimately limiting the set of options available for systems change.
Since the launch of the Systems Storytelling Initiative in 2021, we have been on a journey with many of you to re-discover the art of storytelling and how it can transform our systems towards greater equity and justice.
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.
Systems Stories
The stories we tell shape what we can imagine and how we see possibility.
Hero stories and systems stories both have their place, but they reveal different truths and invite different kinds of action.
The Core Shift
Systems are made of people. Not organisational charts or flowcharts—relationships. A hero story arrives, finished. We receive it, admire it, move on. A systems story is made together—and the making is part of the point.
To understand a system, you have to invite it into the room. Bring together people who don't normally sit together, each holding a different perspective and experience, and create conditions for stories to surface. Then listen across them.
The question shifts from "What did this one person do?" to "What are we seeing together that none of us could see alone?"
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.