See
Recognition
Awareness
Recognize the narrative shaping perception. Awareness can create space between the narrative and the person experiencing it.
What narrative is shaping how I see this?
Narrative Intelligence + Human Judgment in Rapid Change
Make better decisions when there is no stable playbook.
Organizations are operating in environments where technology, strategy, roles, and assumptions are changing faster than people can process them. Paige helps leaders and teams make sense of complexity, challenge outdated assumptions, and decide what comes next.
For executive teams, organizations navigating change, leadership groups, and consequential decisions.
When the facts aren’t the whole problem
Sometimes the organization has changed, but the story has not.
01
The strategy changed, but people are still operating from the old assumptions.
02
The leadership team agrees on the facts but disagrees about what they mean.
03
An old success story is limiting the next stage of growth.
04
A restructuring has happened on paper, but not yet in how people think or act.
05
People understand what needs to change, but the same behaviors keep repeating.
06
Different parts of the organization are operating from fundamentally different versions of reality.
07
A leader is making a consequential decision from a story no one has examined.
Organizations often respond to these problems with more information, more communication, or another strategic plan. Sometimes the missing capacity is the ability to examine the narrative through which all of that information is being interpreted.
Flagship organizational entry offer
Executive Decision Session
Bring the consequential decision your leadership team cannot quite see clearly.
This is a focused working session that applies strategic thinking and Narrative Intelligence to one real decision, tension, or problem. It is not a workshop for learning a framework. The work begins with the decision itself.
- Identify hidden assumptions
- Separate fact from interpretation
- Surface competing narratives
- See where the team is framing the problem differently
- Expand the available options
- Identify the decision or next experiment
Real problem in · sharper judgment and a clearer next move out
Bring us the decisionEvery decision contains a story.
A strategic plan contains assumptions about the future. A culture contains stories about who belongs, what gets rewarded, and how things are done.
A leadership team carries narratives about risk, growth, failure, identity, competition, and what is possible. A merger creates competing stories about what has been lost and what comes next.
A founder transition can force an organization to reconsider the story it has been telling about itself for years.
Narrative Intelligence gives leaders a way to work with those interpretations consciously rather than being unconsciously governed by them.
The Narrative Intelligence framework
Five capacities for leading in a world of competing stories.
Sort
Discernment
Accuracy
Separate what is actually true from assumption, interpretation, inheritance, or projection.
What is actually true, and what am I interpreting?
Expand
Flexibility
Openness
Become open to other plausible meanings, perspectives, or possibilities.
What else could this mean?
Choose
Agency
Choice
Identify where meaningful choice exists and decide how you want to respond.
Given what I know, what do I choose?
Live
Enactment
Living the choice
Translate the choice into how you actually act, relate, decide, lead, or operate.
What would that choice look like in how we actually lead or act?
Narrative Intelligence is not a five-step process. These are interdependent capacities leaders can draw on repeatedly across strategy, decisions, relationships, culture, and change.
Narrative Intelligence becomes especially useful at inflection points.
Strategy and consequential decisions
When leaders need to surface the assumptions and narratives influencing what they believe should happen next.
Organizational change
When the formal organization has changed but people are still operating from an earlier story.
Leadership transitions
When a new leader, founder transition, succession, or changing executive team requires the organization to reconsider who it is becoming.
Executive-team alignment
When leaders share information but differ significantly in their interpretation of what is happening.
Culture
When inherited narratives about success, leadership, identity, failure, or belonging continue shaping behavior.
Growth and reinvention
When the story responsible for an organization’s previous success becomes a constraint on what comes next.
Conflict
When competing interpretations have hardened into competing realities.
Additional engagements
When the work calls for a different scope.
02
Narrative Intelligence Workshop
For leadership groups and teams that need a shared framework for thinking, adapting, deciding, and acting under complexity.
Participants learn the five capacities and apply them to their organization: recognizing narratives, separating facts from assumptions, examining inherited stories, expanding perspectives, identifying choice, and translating insight into action.
- Typical format
- Half day or full day
- Best for
- Shared language · Applied practice · Decisions · Behavior · Change
03
Leadership Retreat or Offsite
For executive retreats, board meetings, leadership offsites, and strategic planning gatherings.
Rather than adding another presentation to the agenda, Paige facilitates a deeper examination of the narratives shaping the organization’s most important questions.
- Typical format
- Half day, full day, or integrated retreat experience
- Best for
- Executive retreats · Boards · Offsites · Strategic planning
04
Keynote Speaker on Leadership and Creative Change
Narrative Intelligence: The Stories We Lead From
A keynote and interactive experience exploring how narratives influence perception, decision-making, identity, leadership, culture, and change.
The experience can include interactive application of the framework so audiences leave with a way to examine the stories shaping how they see and act.
- Typical format
- 45–75 minutes
- Best for
- Conferences · Leadership gatherings · Company events · Retreats
05
Six-Week Organizational Lab
For teams that want to build shared capacity for human judgment and decision-making during rapid change.
A research-informed learning environment where leaders apply emerging Narrative Intelligence tools to live organizational questions and test them through practice.
- Typical format
- Six-week facilitated cohort
- Best for
- Leadership teams · Cross-functional groups · Emerging strategy · Rapid change
06
Ongoing Strategic Advisory
For executives and leadership teams who need continuing thought partnership as conditions evolve.
Private advisory around consequential decisions, innovation, resistance, role change, and the assumptions shaping what the organization believes is possible.
- Typical format
- Ongoing engagement
- Best for
- Executive leaders · Founders · Innovation teams · Strategic initiatives
07
Listening + Research Engagement
For organizations that need to understand the human system before deciding what to change.
Focused qualitative listening, narrative analysis, and synthesis that surfaces recurring interpretations, friction, and leverage points across an organization or field.
- Typical format
- Scoped research engagement
- Best for
- Organizational listening · Narrative analysis · Strategy · Field-building
What changes
The goal is not simply a better story.
The goal is better perception, better choices, and better action.
- Greater clarity about the narratives influencing a decision
- Better separation between evidence and interpretation
- Greater ability to hold competing perspectives without premature certainty
- Clearer understanding of where meaningful choice exists
- Shared language for discussing assumptions and organizational stories
- Greater alignment around what happens next
- Specific decisions or behavioral commitments
- A more adaptive relationship to change and uncertainty
About Paige Williams
Paige Williams is developing and researching a Narrative Intelligence framework for understanding how the stories people and organizations live by shape perception, decisions, behavior, and change.
She is an applied researcher, strategist, entrepreneur, filmmaker, bestselling author, and former technology founder whose work focuses on human judgment, leadership, innovation, narrative, and change.
Her clients and audiences have included leaders and organizations such as Microsoft, Nasdaq, ALPS, and the Montana Chamber of Commerce.
She is the bestselling author of The Twelve Creative Keys and creator and host of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project.
Selected clients
Trusted by leaders at organizations across industries.
- Panera Bread
- Microsoft
- Dell
- Hilton
- Southwest
- Blackfoot Communications
- University of Montana
The work behind the work
Narrative Intelligence is being developed through research, practice, and conversation.
Paige is currently leading 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, a public research and interview initiative exploring one central question:
How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?
The project brings together perspectives from researchers, executives, artists, educators, therapists, social scientists, storytellers, and other practitioners working with human behavior, identity, leadership, and change.
The work is informing Paige’s forthcoming foundational book on Narrative Intelligence and the continuing development of the framework.
Start a conversation
Bring us the decision.
Start with the consequential decision, tension, or problem your leadership team needs to see more clearly.
No generic sales presentation. Bring the real situation your organization is facing.
Discuss an Executive Decision Session
Begin with a focused conversation to understand the decision and scope the right session.
Next step
Book a conversation
Start with a short call. Bring the decision, question, or challenge you are working on and we will determine the right starting point together.