The map has stopped matching the territory. That is where the work begins.
How do stories work as acts of communication, culture and identity? What are the underlying structures of meaning that shape how we feel, think and act? In this first module, we begin to explore narrative competence as a way to discover and read this layer, and to work with it across diverse contexts.
How do we develop meaningful questions? Those whose answers we do not know yet, and which help us gain new understandings and perspectives. In narrative work, questions are the dooropener to people's experiences. We dive deep into question design and practice storylistening together.
What do stories reveal about the teller and their world, especially when we give room to many different voices? Among plurality and complexity there are emerging patterns and shared values. We learn to recognise and read them, to better understand guiding emotions and develop fields of action.
What are different ways to invite stories in? How do we give voice to different experiences? And what do we do with these shared moments? In this module, we fill our Treasure-Chest with narrative practices, interventions and methods that fit the moment, the person and the context in front of us.
What is waiting for you back in your own work, the project, the challenge, the question you came here to meet differently? Narrative competence only becomes practice once it meets a real context again. In this final module, we carry what we've developed back into your own work, and practice the return.
... you already facilitate, coach or consult, but the exercises you've always used don't get you as far as they used to. You want new ways to get a group talking honestly about what's actually going on, not just what's on the agenda, and you want narrative competence as the practice that lets you read it.
... you lead a team and something is off: people are tense in meetings, the same misunderstanding keeps coming back, someone who used to speak up has gone quiet. You want to understand what's really happening before you decide what to do about it.
... your job depends on proving impact, in government, an NGO or a foundation, and a spreadsheet of numbers never quite shows what actually happened. You want to learn how to collect the stories that explain it better, the kind that can be the difference between your funding getting renewed or not.
... your organisation or team is moving through a transition, and the people inside it are telling quite different stories about what's happening and why. You don't want to force everyone into one official version. You want to understand the different stories well enough that the decisions you make afterward don't lose people.
... you're in the middle of a big change in your own life: a new job, a move, a relationship ending, anything that's made you start telling a different story about who you are. You want to understand that story clearly enough to make your next decision based on who you actually are now, not the old version of yourself.
"Whose story is heard and what becomes possible when we invite the quiet ones in?"
"The most valuable thing I took from the training wasn't a technique. It was a community of people who think the same way — and a language we share."
