Story, Narrative and Systems Learning & Practice Series
An inspirational learning & practice series on story, narrative and systems to explore how you understand your contribution and learn from your ambitious systems change work.
intermediate
Story, Narrative and Systems Learning & Practice Series
Autumn 2025
Why we're gathering
In a world saturated with competing narratives – many designed to polarise, overwhelm and inhibit agency – this series invites you to explore the potential of story to contribute to systems change and just and regenerative futures.
While systems change often focuses on structures and behaviours, beneath these lie narratives and myths – collections of stories about who we are, what’s happened, what is possible, and what matters in the present and the future. Increasingly, changemakers are turning to story not just as a communication method, but also as a means of imagining beyond, sensemaking, understanding change, cultural intervention, and uncovering the beliefs that weave the fabrics of our realities.
In Story, Narrative and Systems, we intend to uncover our relationship with stories as living artefacts that are influenced by narratives, which shift and shape as they move between us, and hold re-worlding potential.
To dive deeper, we invite you to join us for this learning and practice series through five online 2-hour sessions (September - December 2025) with experienced contributors from across the field to explore how they work with story and narrative for systems change - and how you can too.
The sessions
Each session features experienced practitioners who are deeply grappling with these questions and showcases where they are in their exploration; as well as connecting, reflecting and sharing practices with peers who are working through the complexity of this work. We take an approach in our series striking a balance between sharing multiple methods and ideas collectively with discussion and supporting us to explore these for practice.
The series explores four inquiries followed by a sensemaking and weaving session to close. The last sensemaking session is open to anybody that has participated in at least one of the four sessions.
1. Stories as change
How do stories shape the worlds we live into?
Stories shape the fabric of our current and future realities. This session explores humans' innate storytelling capacity and how, through our stories, we can connect with our imagination to seed future paradigms and open up possibilities in the present.
Date: Wed 17 September 2025
Time: 10:00 ET / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 19:30 IST
Check your time zone
Contributors
2. Uncovering stories to understand systems
How can stories help us develop situational awareness and take wise action?
While stories are all around us, building the capacity to discover and work with systems stories is a practice we can cultivate. In this session, we will explore methods for uncovering stories and so we can observe and learn about what is happening in our systems. Here, we begin to lay the foundations for how we can facilitate collective sense-making, helping make visible both current and emerging futures.
Date: Wed 8 October 2025
Time: 10:00 ET / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 19:30 IST
Check your time zone
Contributors
3. Storytelling in practice
How might we attend to the shared process of co-creating stories as living artefacts?
This session covers the power of storytelling by exploring the process of how stories are created, shared and evolved through those who are present. The practice of telling and listening to a story is an art, and yet not everyone has access or the ability to do so. Stories are not merely a transmission of information; stories are co-created through the ways they are shared, with the storyteller and the receiver's lived experiences and worldviews shaping the story as it emerges, involving their individual capacities to sense, perceive and imagine. This session helps us learn how we can share stories, spot patterns in an ethical way that is informed by consent and considers the potential harmful impact. Here, we will pay attention to the power of the storyteller and receiver, including who gets to hold those roles and systems of accountability.
Date: Wed 22 October 2025
Time: 10:00 ET / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 19:30 IST
Check your time zone
Contributors
4. Shaping narratives
How can narratives interrupt, shift, and shape cultural transformation?
We can think of narratives as the deeper stories that we hold, framed by our cultural beliefs and forming the architecture of how our storytelling minds create meaning in and from the world. Narratives hold immense potential for systemic transformation. In this session, we will learn about the narrative-based systems change and how to weave cultural stories that enable us to move towards alternative futures.
Date: Wed 19 November 2025
Time: 10:00 ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET / 20:30 IST
Check your time zone
Contributors
5. So what: sensemaking and weaving
What stories do we now want to harvest, bundle and seed? How might we make sense and take forward our learnings into action from this series?
Join us for a reflective closing session to surface key insights, sense shifts, and map how storytelling practices can support living into preferred futures.
Date: Wed 3 December 2025
Time: 10:00 ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET / 20:30 IST
Check your time zone
How we're gathering
This series is a ‘choose your own path’ learning experience which means you can join the whole journey or choose to participate in the sessions that feel most relevant and alive to you.
We will convene five times for two hours. Each session will include:
- Framing and an introduction to the session topic
- Inspiration, dialogue and applied learning opportunities with experienced guest contributors
- Space to reflect with peers on how the topic relates to your different contexts and experiences
- An invitation to develop your next micro or macro experiment or practical application of this topic in your context
The closing sensemaking and weaving session is free and open to anybody that has participated in at least one of the first four sessions. Participants will receive an invitation to this session nearer the time.
Who is gathering
The series is intended for a range of experience including practitioners who are starting out in story and narrative or systems change to those who have led story and narrative efforts in large-scale change initiatives. We believe each session would be beneficial to those who have:
- Knowledge, understanding and practice in story and narrative
- Interest in systems change and working in systems
- Some experience applying story/narrative to sector / thematic challenges / large-scale change
- A project or initiative(s) where they can bring insights and ideas into practice
We are intentionally keeping the 'prior experience and knowledge' broad as we would like to encourage those from different and diverse ways of knowing and working to join us for an expansive and fruitful conversation.
Contributors
In each session, the hosting team will be joined by experienced guest contributors who will bring in personal anecdotes, stories, and ‘how to’ practical routes for engaging with the topic being explored.
Hosting team
Advisor
Course Fees
The fee for this series is offered on a sliding scale. Please select the option that is most appropriate for you, depending on what you can afford. Course fees are per one individual, not one team or organisation.
For the full series
- Regenerative: £550 GBP
- Supporter: £425 GBP
- Supported: £275 GBP
For individual sessions
- Regenerative: £150 GBP
- Supporter: £125 GBP
- Supported: £75 GBP
Which option is right for you?
Regenerative: We encourage philanthropy, corporations, and the public sector to join our series on the regenerative rate. Your registration will support others to participate. This rate reflects the true cost of the series.
Supporter: We encourage those working in the small to mid-size for-profit organisations, charity sector and community organisations (typically a participant joining to financial sponsorship from an employer) to join our series at this rate. This rate reflects most of the cost of the series.
Supported: The supported rate enables those who are independent or freelance, or who have limited funds to invest in their learning and development. Each cohort has a limited number of places for those coming in on the supported rate. When possible, we encourage those with some flexibility to join us on a supporter rate.
VAT does not apply.
No refunds are available for the series, however you can transfer your ticket to another individual to join. Email the School team at [email protected] if you have any questions about this.
Enrol
To take part, you can join the whole journey (at a discounted price) or sign up to individual sessions and choose to participate only in the areas that feel most relevant and alive to you.
If you sign up for the full series before the second session on Wed 8 October 2025 (with a 20% discount code: use FS_20 at checkout), we will share all session recordings and recommended resources with you, shortly after you enrol.
Team and group enrolment is available. Please reach out to the School at [email protected] for group pricing as well as the option to add on team coaching to help the team ground learnings into projects or initiatives.
Equity & Diversity
We seek to create safe and brave spaces for participants from different backgrounds and lived experience to engage in learning together. We acknowledge the power and responsibility we hold in our role as a convenor and learning provider, placing multiple ways of knowing and awareness of difference as fundamental design principles in our programmes.
Read more about our commitment and journey around equity and difference.
Accessibility
If you will need additional or specific support for your wellbeing or access needs, then please let us know as soon as possible, so we can factor this into our session design. You can let us know in the enrolment form or email us at [email protected] - we are happy to arrange a call to discuss how we can support your learning. The course producer will also be on hand throughout the course if you have any questions or concerns to raise.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about the learning & practice series please contact the School team at [email protected].
If you would like to discuss additional coaching or a Learning & Practice Partnership to support your learning, get in touch with Sean at [email protected].