Most organisations treat their narrative as a possession. It gets written by a small group, approved, distributed, and thereafter defended. When it drifts, someone is asked to correct the drift. The unstated belief is that meaning can be controlled if the words are tight enough and the distribution is careful enough.
That was never true, and it is now visibly untrue, because counter-narratives are easy to see. But the interesting part is not that control fails. It is that control was the wrong objective in the first place.
I was Chief Digital Officer at Xynteo, where the work was coalition-building and where I co-authored the method for this. What follows is that method and the argument I have kept from it.
The test
A good organisational narrative is one that does not require policing.
That single line reorganises the work. If the aim is a story people cannot alter, you write defensively and you spend your budget on correction. If the aim is a story people can make their own while still pointing in one direction, you write for adoption and you spend your budget on engagement. Those two programmes look nothing like each other, and most companies are running the first while hoping for the results of the second.
The method held that a narrative worth having has three properties.
It is alive. It does not merely tolerate alteration, it requires it. The strongest ones set a clear direction while leaving room to respond to a changing context. A narrative that can only be recited is already dead; you just have not been told yet.
It is credible, which means backed by action and coherent across audiences. It can be told differently to different people, but there is one narrative per organisation. A company seeking reputational advantage from charity while mistreating its customers does not have a communications problem.
It is relevant — connected to a human problem, not only to a commercial ambition, and prepared to accept open challenge while still giving people a reason to care.
Why co-creation is the mechanism, not the courtesy
If the narrative has to be adoptable, then the people who will carry it have to have shaped it. The most elegant way to engage a stakeholder is to give them a stake in the story.
This is where the method stops being comfortable. Genuine co-creation asks people — including the people who commissioned the work — to re-examine beliefs they hold and be willing to change them. A process where the answer is decided in advance and stakeholders are consulted for validation produces a document everyone has seen and nobody owns. That is worse than not asking, because it manufactures the appearance of agreement and hides the disagreement you needed to find.
The distinction I use constantly since then is between a narrative and a proto-narrative: a set of core statements whose only purpose is to start an iterative process. The proto-narrative is not the answer and is not meant to survive. It exists to be argued with. Bringing something deliberately incomplete to a room gets you a real answer far faster than a blank page, and far more honestly than a finished draft, which people tend to edit rather than challenge.
The vocabulary is the useful part
The method's glossary is the thing I would hand to anyone attempting this, because the words do real work.
A shared narrative is the output: a story stakeholders accept as legitimate. A shared agenda is the outcome, and it is different — a readiness to act, a positive disposition toward a course of action. Naming those separately stops an organisation from congratulating itself on agreement that produces no movement.
Mavens are the core reference group driving co-creation. The ecosystem is the interacting system of stakeholders, events and discourse that a narrative has to live in. There is a named owner, accountable for the narrative, distinct from the partner sponsoring the work.
Most narrative projects fail at exactly the point that glossary covers. Nobody is accountable once the consultants leave, the reference group was never constituted so no faction owns the result, and the difference between "everyone agreed" and "anyone will act" was never measured because it was never named.
What it is worth
The business case is four things: positioning, in the sense of staying relevant enough to keep a licence to operate; a tribe of people who will support the work without being asked each time; efficiency, because a clear narrative steers people and prevents expensive misunderstanding inside the organisation; and risk awareness, because a genuine engagement process surfaces stakeholder perceptions that day-to-day analysis does not.
The last is the one I would sell hardest and the one that gets least attention. An engagement process is an instrument for finding out what people actually believe about you. Most companies pay for that separately, later, and usually after it has become a problem.
Where I would push it further
The method is strong on how to build a shared narrative and lighter on how to know whether you have one.
If a shared agenda is a readiness to act, that is measurable — not by asking people whether they agree, which reliably overstates, but by watching what they do when there is a small cost attached. Who repeats the argument when you are not in the room. Who commits budget, staff or their own reputation. Who brings you a problem that fits the narrative without being prompted.
I would build that measurement in from the start, as the instrument that tells you whether the story has been adopted or merely approved. It is the same argument I make about every other kind of claim: decide what would count as evidence before you begin, or you will end up grading your own work.