Recognising patterns

When something significant happens, how does your organisation make sense of it?

Narrative connections are visible in how understanding moves - or fails to move - across the organisation. These prompts help you see where meaning flows, where it pools, and where it gets lost entirely.

Listen for

• When a significant decision is made, do people across the organisation understand the reasoning - or just the outcome? "We're restructuring" without the why creates anxiety. The why creates understanding.
• When something goes wrong, does the story travel accurately - or does it distort as it moves through the system, becoming rumour, blame, or mythology?
• Do people reference what's happening beyond their immediate team with understanding - or with indifference?
• When successes are shared, do the stories carry an understanding of why something worked - or just that it worked?

Watch for

• When one team makes a decision that affects another, was the affected team already aware of the context - or blindsided?
• Do lessons from one team's experience reach others who could benefit - or does each part of the organisation learn the same things independently, again and again?
• Are there people who act as informal narrative bridges - carrying context between parts of the organisation that wouldn't otherwise connect? What happens when those people move or leave?
• When the official message and the corridor conversation tell different stories, which one do people act on?

Measure

• What's the gap between what leadership believes has been communicated and what people report having understood? That gap is a direct measure of narrative connection.
• How many layers does information pass through before reaching the people who need it - and what's lost at each layer?
• Do people regularly discover information they should have had earlier? That's the system telling you the connections aren't there.

Notice

• Where are the narrative dead zones - the places where stories stop travelling? Between levels? Between departments? Between the centre and the edges? Those boundaries tell you where connection is weakest.
• Does the organisation have a healthy relationship with its own history - learning from it without being trapped by it? Or is the past either forgotten or weaponised?
• Is the organisation drowning in information but starving for meaning? More newsletters, more updates, more dashboards - but less shared understanding of what any of it means?

The test of narrative connection isn't whether the organisation communicates. Most communicate constantly. It's whether meaning arrives - not just messages.