Organisational Narrative Intelligence™
The capacity to recognise, decode, and work with the Narrative Architecture™ shaping organisational behaviour, culture, and performance.
Every organisation runs on leader narratives. Most have no intelligence to work with them.
The Invisible Operating System
The internal narratives leaders operate from form the underlying structure that determines how strategy, values, and metrics are actually built.
They shape the emotional climate, the way decisions are made, and what becomes normal inside the system.
When those narratives run in Not Enough Syndrome™, ‘we are behind,’ ‘we are not enough,’ ‘we must prove ourselves,’ the organisation mirrors them.
Urgency replaces clarity. Pressure replaces flow. Reactivity replaces response.
What leaders feel becomes how they communicate. How they communicate becomes culture. The culture becomes their performance.
This is narrative architecture, the invisible structure of stories the organisation is operating inside.
What is Narrative Architecture™
Narrative Architecture is the structural design of the narrative an organisation is operating from. It is the invisible framework that shapes what feels possible, what feels risky, what gets rewarded, what gets avoided, and how people experience themselves, their worth, and their capacity at work.
It forms through the narratives leaders act from, often without realising it.
When narrative architecture is coherent, culture has capacity. When it is strained, culture contracts, even when the business looks successful from the outside.
When the architecture runs on Not Enough Syndrome™, leadership operates under pressure. Numbers carry more weight, margins feel tighter, and that pressure moves downwards through urgency, tone, and demand.
Teams adapt by stretching capacity, double-checking themselves, questioning their competence, and holding back what they really think.
Work continues, but it is cautious.
Energy goes into managing pressure rather than moving the organisation forward.
Over time, momentum slows.
What is Narrative Intelligence™
Organisations invest heavily in what can be measured. Strategy, targets, KPIs, systems, performance frameworks.
All of that sits downstream of something less visible.
Before strategy is executed, before decisions are made, before systems are adopted or resisted, there is a narrative shaping how people interpret what is happening.
In most organisations, that narrative is some version of Not Enough Syndrome.
- Not enough time to think – meetings stacked back to back, decisions made on the move, no space to step back before acting.
- Not enough margin for error – mistakes feel costly, everything needs to be right first time, rework carries unspoken risk.
- Not enough space to slow down without falling behind – pausing feels risky, rest is deferred, catching up becomes the norm.
Leaders with narrative intelligence can see it in themselves first, then in the system. They notice it in urgency, in over-checking, in how pressure moves through teams.
Because it is visible, it becomes workable.
Narrative intelligence is the capacity to notice the narrative shaping behaviour and anchor leadership back into their brilliance before that narrative cascades.
Narrative intelligence is a leader first approach to evolving organisations.
