If you rearrange the letters of the word creation you get reaction. Same letters. Different perspective. Changes everything.
We think about that a lot around here. Because most organizations aren't broken. They're just reacting. Reacting to markets, to competitors, to last quarter's numbers, to the loudest voice in the room. And reaction has a way of looking like strategy when you dress it up in a slide deck and give it a timeline.
But it isn't strategy. It's Bizarro Superman. It's a world that looks like the one you wanted, only everything is off in almost every way.
We do something different. We design narratives. Not the kind you put on a billboard or tuck into an annual report. The kind that redesign the reality they operate in. The kind where the problem doesn't get solved — it ceases to be — because the story that created it gets rewritten at the root.
Narrative design isn't in the dictionary. At least not the Merriam-Webster. It's in our glossary and it's on Wikipedia, mostly as a video game design role. We borrowed it, because the idea of architecting the story people live inside — rather than controlling what happens in that story — felt like the truest description of everything we do.
There's a saying we have: data without a story is simply a set of numbers. Information without knowing how it best fits into pressing human needs is just another idea competing with so many others. The information age is ending. What's next isn't more data. It's the capacity to synthesize — to see the pattern between the numbers, the people, the fear, and the ambition, and to make something that moves.
That's what we mean by narrative design. It's design thinking that learned how to tell a story. It's storytelling that learned how to build a system. It's the marriage of the two, and when it works — and it works — the result is momentum.
There are few things we like better than momentum. Except maybe the smell of beeswax candles and the taste of toaster waffles.
We don't solve problems. We uncover the stories that created them — then use narrative to redesign the reality until the problem ceases to be.
Most companies inherit their narrative the way most people inherit their accent — without choosing it. It was shaped by founders, market conditions, early hires, a crisis or two, and a handful of decisions that calcified into “the way we do things.” None of that was designed. It just happened.
We believe the most powerful intervention in any organization is to surface the story it's already telling — the one running underneath the mission statement and the brand guidelines and the all-hands emails — and then ask a dangerous question: is this the story we want?
If the answer is no, you don't need a rebrand. You need a re-story.
Here's a thing we learned from improv, from Waffle Houses, from waiting tables, from standing on stages in front of people who didn't sign up for a design thinking lecture: the moment you stop performing at someone and start creating with them, everything shifts.
Design and storytelling are both fundamentally service-oriented. They are both, at their core, an exchange with a human being. People marry a person and divorce a role. So we don't play the role of consultants. We enter the exchange. We sit in the room as co-creators. We invite your story into our story and see what emerges in the overlap.
The overlap, incidentally, is a sacred geometry form called the vesica piscis. Two circles converging, creating something new in the space between. It's also our logo. We don't do accidental things.
We know. It sounds soft. It sounds like something you'd hear at a retreat with too many candles and not enough chairs. But here's the thing about vulnerability in the context of what we do: it's the only place where assumptions die.
And assumptions are the real enemy of change. Not budgets. Not timelines. Not “alignment.” Assumptions are the invisible architecture of every stuck organization, every stalled strategy, every culture that says it values innovation while rewarding compliance.
Brené Brown called vulnerability the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. She's right. We've just built the tools to get you there without needing a Ted Talk and a therapy session first. Though those don't hurt.
Design thinking builds the bridge. Storytelling walks across it and has the audacity to build a life on the other side.
storylab started in the place all good stories start: at the intersection of two worlds that shouldn't have been in the same room.
Our founder grew up at the crossroads of Cherokee oral tradition and American television. Of sacred fire and Hollywood sets. Of elders who understood that a story told well could heal a community, and producers who understood that a story told well could move a market.
He spent years in entertainment — writing screenplays, directing films, winning festivals, working sets where “hollywooding it” meant fixing something on the fly because time translates to dollars very quickly. Then he crossed into business, into design, into the world of strategy and culture and innovation.
What he found there was a lot of very smart people solving the wrong problems. Not because they lacked intelligence. Because they lacked story. They had data and dashboards and deliverables, but no narrative architecture to hold it all together. No way to make the numbers mean something to the humans who had to live inside them every day.
So he built storylab. A place where the ancient and the innovative sit in the same room. Where sacred geometry informs brand architecture. Where the oldest storytelling framework on earth — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — gets applied to the newest challenges in business.
Seven years later, the organizations we work with span the UN to Fortune 500s, from Saudi Arabia to Colorado Springs, from classrooms at Parsons to boardrooms that used to think “culture” was something you put in a frame on the wall.
They don't think that anymore.
If you've read this far, you're either one of us or you're about to be. There is no in-between. Welcome to the middle of the venn diagram, or as we call it, vesica piscis.
We'd love to hear where you are, where you're headed, and what's in the way. We promise to listen longer than you'd expect.
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