A self-hostable platform for narrative inquiry work

TL;DR

Real change in organisations starts with listening to multiple voices, not just the sponsor’s story. Participatory Narrative Inquiry made it possible to arrive at a client engagement with richer context, something integral to running a Culture Sprint. I am sharing a simple, open source, self-hostable platform for small engagements you can use in your work as a consultant, facilitator, or internal change agent.

The Journey

The work of hosting participatory spaces was about listening to the different voices in the room. But the contract and mandate always came through a sponsor or leader who would tell their story and reason for the intervention. As many of us practitioners know, their accounts were rarely the full picture. We would find out slowly, or sometimes rather abruptly, that there were many more layers in that onion.

In one client engagement, it took no more than a couple of voices in the opening circle to realise the job was, in fact, to sell the leader’s story to the team. It was not necessarily the leader’s deception, but rather a lack of listening and contracting on our part.

The structure of many consulting engagements rarely allowed for a return visit. Our participatory intervention ended up performative and shallow. Even when everyone seemed satisfied, it felt more like a twisted version of a motivational keynote than a meaningful conversation. Being a facilitator and host like that was not enough for real change to happen.

The work with change and culture started with a search for multiple conversations that could generate possibilities. Hosting space expanded to negotiating a mandate and process that could support the creation of spaces, experiments, and commitments to open new possibilities.

For a change project with one client, we created a group with different stakeholders who joined us consultants in conducting interviews, experiencing the client’s journey, and taking this back to the organisation by hosting the conversation themselves.

When I came across Participatory Narrative Inquiry almost a decade ago, I started experimenting with collecting narratives before engaging with the client. Some clients would approach me for an intervention and I’d suggest collecting experiences beforehand.

It was not easy. Adding PNI to the process was already a negotiation for listening to multiple voices, and it was often met with resistance. To be honest, clients who said yes were almost always the ones who already knew my work and trusted me at some level.

One global organisation used PNI to listen to their members before regional gatherings took place. What used to be a team building event became a space for conversations on topics that were always present but never discussed.

Then came the pandemic and the remote and hybrid work that followed. People in organisations who already had little time to stop and reflect ended up with even less. Online hosting showed surprisingly good results, but it was not the same as having people in the room for conversations like that.

That’s when Culture Sprint was born. It brought together the power of collecting diverse accounts beforehand using PNI and the condensed in-person conversations to explore them in the here-and-now.

With one multinational client, we used Culture Sprint to understand how people worked and what invitations, including the unspoken ones, were present. We used PNI and spent a week at the client’s headquarters.

The Platform

I started partnering with others and running PNI projects using Narrafirma, which remains the best open source software for learning the process, alongside the books and some guided practice. I also explored SenseMaker and Sprockler, both with strong features and good presentation.

Over time, some tools had more features than I needed for smaller engagements. Sometimes it was easier to collect through a different method and import. Other times I wanted to try something new and found it hard to navigate existing platforms. So I started building my own, a simple collection tool inspired by PNI but not claiming to replicate it completely. I shared with colleagues running Culture Sprints and some of you may have explored the Culture Sprint Platform last year.

Several people wanted to use the platform outside the Culture Sprint context. That conversation pushed me to separate them and open it up to the field. After extensive testing and security reviews, here it is.

You can now self-host your own platform on your server. It was built for simple engagements, so it does not have many of the features other tools offers, but it is a solid structure for the work. If you are on the technical side and want to use and improve it, you are most welcome. I would also be grateful if anyone wants to write better documentation on how to self-host.

What would you add or change to make it work for your practice?