Tools
The Systems Storytelling Tools are living resources, developed through practice and across diverse contexts. They reflect an ongoing learning journey and will continue to evolve as new insights, experiences, and adaptations emerge.
These tools are shared openly to support learning and practice. They are available for free use for non-commercial purposes, with appropriate acknowledgement.
Understanding Systems Stories
These tools are used to help understand what systems stories are and how to tune into them.
-
Different moments in change work call for different kinds of storytelling. Early stages need stories that reveal how things actually work. Mid-process needs stories that surface patterns across experiences. Transitions need stories that preserve wisdom and strengthen relationships. Emerging change needs stories that catch early signals. This tool offers four scenarios matched to these moments.
-
Stories carry more than content. They carry assumptions about how change happens, who holds expertise, whose timeframe matters, and what counts as evidence. This guide offers seven frequencies to tune into—layers of meaning that often go unheard when we listen only for plot.
-
Learn more about what a systems story by completing this activity.
-
A visual depicting the key elements of a systems story.
Navigating Power and Care
These tools address the long-term ethical implications of storytelling, focusing on power dynamics and mitigating risks as stories move through an organization or system.
-
People come to storytelling with different relationships to vulnerability, different histories with the issues being discussed, and different exposure to reflective practice. Assuming uniform readiness creates gatherings where some people dominate and others withdraw. This tool helps you anticipate and design for unevenness.
-
Systems storytelling carries risks. Individual stories can reinforce bootstrap narratives. Trauma can be exploited for impact. One person's experience can be presented as universal. Power structures can disappear from view. This tool names five common pitfalls and offers practices to navigate them.
-
Stories are not static products to be collected and stored. They change as they move—between people, across formats, over time. A "living story" emerges in the exchange between gathering (story circles, interviews, conversations) and creating (artifacts like videos, maps, exhibits, reports). This framework helps you tend the whole journey rather than treating gathering as the end point.
Designing the Container
These tools focus on the preparatory and ongoing relational work necessary for ethical and inclusive story gathering.
-
Trust is often assumed rather than cultivated. Organizations ask for stories before establishing whether people feel safe sharing them. This protocol makes trust-building explicit—naming what needs to be true before stories can be shared, and what ongoing practices maintain trust over time.
-
Invitation lists tend to replicate existing relationships and power structures. The people easiest to reach are often those already closest to institutional spaces. This audit helps you see who's present, who's absent, and what conditions might make different participation possible.
-
Relationships cultivated during gathering can dissolve, leaving communities with potential extraction residue—the feeling of having given something without ongoing reciprocity. This protocol helps you plan for relational continuity from the start.
-
A brief guide on organizing different types of systems storytelling gatherings.
Story Discernment and Language
These tools support practitioners to critically examine language and stories—surfacing underlying assumptions, assessing alignment with purpose, and making narrative and editorial choices more visible and intentional.
-
Language carries assumptions about who acts, who receives, what counts as progress, and how change happens. Words borrowed from military, medical, engineering, extractive, corporate, and academic contexts bring their logics with them—often without our awareness. This tool helps you see what your language assumes.
-
Stories can carry many things—but they can't carry everything, and shouldn't be asked to. A story gathered for internal reflection may not be appropriate for public advocacy. A story that builds understanding may be flattened when used for fundraising. This tool helps you discern whether a story matches what it's being asked to do.
-
Power over stories doesn't end when gathering ends. It continues—often invisibly—through editing, framing, selecting, sequencing, titling, and contextualizing. This audit makes editorial power visible so it can be exercised with intention.
This body of work was authored by Mary Tangelder, who developed the narrative and practice framework and led the synthesis of learning in partnership with CCL.
This material is made available for use under the Creative Commons license.