The work, in practice

What changes when you can see what’s actually shaping the problem?

The work looks different in every room. A leader making a consequential decision. A researcher defining something new. An executive leaving one chapter and building another. An organization trying to understand an innovation ecosystem. A creative finally making the work they have carried for years.

Narrative Intelligence in practice

The common thread is learning to see what is shaping the problem before deciding what to do about it.

Featured work

Three contexts. One underlying practice.

Narrative Intelligence + Leadership

Cascadia Management Group

From pushing harder to leading with clarity

Applied Research + Innovation Strategy

Imagination Factory

Making innovation visible enough to study

Human Judgment + Rapid Change

Microsoft

When the plan changes before the work is finished

Case study 01

Colleen Rudio | Cascadia Management Group

Leadership + Narrative Intelligence

From pushing harder to leading with clarity

The situation

Colleen had built a successful career around a story that had served her well: work hard, persevere, stay determined, anticipate the problems, and push through the barrier.

But the same qualities that helped her succeed could become hypervigilance and control when the stakes were high.

What became visible

The question was not whether hard work was good or bad. It was whether pushing harder had become the automatic story underneath her leadership.

Through Paige’s work, Colleen began slowing down enough to examine what she was assuming, what was actually at stake, and what other people in the room might be experiencing.

What changed

She began moving from anticipation and control toward curiosity, presence, and clarity.

That internal shift began showing up inside Cascadia. Colleen and her team developed a five-year growth plan with greater calmness and clarity and made decisions to release services, programs, and products that had once mattered but were no longer serving the organization’s current purpose.

“That calmness started to show up at work. My team is absolutely seeing that difference inside of our organization.”

— Colleen Rudio, Cascadia Management Group

Narrative Intelligence in practice

SEE

Recognize the story that harder work and greater control will get me through.

SORT

Distinguish what once served the organization from what serves it now.

EXPAND

Make room for curiosity and other perspectives.

CHOOSE

Release work that no longer serves the purpose.

LIVE

Lead differently enough that the team experiences the difference.

“It’s totally transformed the way that I enter into the space, and then it’s helped me navigate the space.”

Case study 02

Imagination Factory

Applied Research + Innovation Strategy

Making innovation visible enough to study

The situation

Imagination Factory is working to strengthen innovation across the child-welfare ecosystem.

The challenge was larger than identifying innovative programs. The work required understanding the conditions, infrastructure, mindsets, relationships, and stakeholder roles that allow innovation to emerge and sustain itself across an ecosystem.

Paige and her research partner were engaged to lead research framing, literature review, expert interviews, survey and interview design, analytical framing, synthesis, findings, and strategic recommendations.

What became visible

Early testing revealed something important: even sophisticated people doing innovative work did not necessarily identify with the language researchers were using to describe innovation.

Some of the questions were effectively two steps ahead of the people they were designed to reach. The problem changed.

This was no longer simply about measuring an innovation ecosystem. It was also about developing language people inside that ecosystem could recognize themselves in.

The work

Paige helped translate broader innovation research into language, questions, categories, and tools appropriate to the realities of the child-welfare field.

“This report is translating it to our sector.”

— Matt Anderson, CEO, Imagination Factory

What changed

The research instrument began becoming more than a way to collect data. It could also become a tool for building shared language and helping people understand how innovation actually happens in their field.

“Nobody’s done this yet.”

— Matt Anderson, CEO, Imagination Factory

Narrative Intelligence in practice

Before you can accurately understand a system, you have to understand the stories, definitions, assumptions, and mental models through which the people inside it are interpreting that system.

Individual work

When a different story creates a different move.

These private engagements are anonymized. The identifying details are withheld; the decisions and actions are not.

Case study 04

University Innovation Leader

Private Strategic Advisory

From frustration to convening the conversation

The situation

A leader working in university innovation saw a recurring problem: institutions that could benefit from collaborating were operating as separate camps.

It would have been easy to keep asking why the system worked that way.

What became visible

The question shifted from:

Why don’t these organizations work together?

to:

What happens if I create the conversation?

What changed

She convened leaders from separate university technology-transfer organizations to begin exploring greater collaboration.

The conversation expanded into larger possibilities around strengthening the state’s innovation ecosystem and increasing the ability to move university research into communities and businesses.

She used her voice. She convened the people. She put the larger idea on the table.

SEE

Notice the story that “this is simply how the institutions operate.”

EXPAND

Ask what collaboration could make possible.

CHOOSE

Stop waiting for someone else to create the conversation.

LIVE

Convene it.

Case study 05

Senior Corporate Executive

Private Strategic Advisory

From corporate success to building what comes next

The situation

After a long and successful corporate career, a senior executive reached an inflection point.

The existing professional identity no longer fully fit, but leaving it meant confronting questions about security, worth, expertise, identity, and what she wanted to build next.

What became visible

The work was not simply about whether she should stay or leave.

It was about separating the facts of the decision from the stories attached to it: what success meant outside the corporate role, which parts of her expertise were actually hers, and whether the existing career path was the only legitimate one.

What changed

She moved from corporate leadership into building her own consulting practice.

Paige worked with her to think through the identity transition, articulate the value of her experience, and begin turning that experience into an independent body of work.

She did not simply imagine another professional life. She began building it.

Case study 06

Creative Professional

Creative Leadership + Strategic Advisory

From carrying the idea to making the work

The situation

A creative professional had wanted to develop a one-woman show for years.

The issue was not lack of talent or ideas. It was crossing the threshold from wanting to make the work to claiming the authority to actually make it.

The work

Paige worked with her around voice, courage, identity, story, creative permission, and action.

What changed

The project moved from something imagined into something being written, developed, and prepared for performance.

She made the thing.

From the field

Microsoft

Human Judgment + Rapid Change

When the plan changes before the work is finished

Not every engagement produces a clean before-and-after result. Some surface questions that materially shape Paige’s research and strategic thinking.

The situation

In Paige’s work with Microsoft, a central tension surfaced around working in an environment of rapid technological and strategic change.

People could begin executing against a plan only to have the plan change before the work was finished.

Leaders also wanted to understand what other organizations were doing as companies tried to adapt to AI and rapidly changing technology.

What became visible

The underlying question was not simply how to manage change better. It was how people make good decisions when technology, strategy, roles, and assumptions are changing faster than they can process them.

More access to information does not necessarily create better decisions. It can create more inputs, more possibilities, more competing interpretations, and more decisions. That makes the problem partly a human judgment problem.

Where this led

The experience helped sharpen Paige’s current inquiry into the relationship between:

Narrative Intelligence
Human Judgment
Decision-making
Innovation
Rapid technological change

When the environment keeps changing, the ability to examine the story you are making sense of it through becomes strategic infrastructure.

Private Strategic Advisory

For work that keeps evolving.

A six-month private thinking partnership for founders, researchers, executives, creators, and leaders navigating complex, original, or high-stakes work as the decisions, conditions, and questions continue to change.

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