When people in organisations communicate, they often do it through stories.¹ Stories reinforce and give life to an organisation's identity and values and they are often invoked to justify decision-making. As a result, stories can both guide and constrain how an organisation sets its strategy and how organisational members work to deliver on it.

When you are working towards embedding sustainability into your organisation's strategy, you will need to pay attention to the stories and metaphors that guide the decisions that are considered to be legitimate within day-to-day organisational life. As you try to help your organisation to embed sustainability in its business practices, you may be able to leverage and redeploy existing stories. You may also find that you bump up against established stories that undermine your efforts. In these cases, you may need to reshape established stories or share new ones that better align with the organisation's shift towards sustainability.

This collection of stories is what we refer to as your organisation's narrative infrastructure. In this guide, we help you to reflect on how to shift your organisation's narrative infrastructure. When exploring this topic, you may find it helpful to read our guide on Storytelling for Sustainability that explores how to construct a compelling story.²

Key Terms

NARRATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE is the collection of ideas, stories, and metaphors that shapes what is considered to be important in an organisation. The people working in your organisation draw on its narrative infrastructure to make judgments about routine decisions quickly and efficiently. While narrative infrastructure speeds up routine decision-making, it also constrains the range of organisational responses.

An organisation's narrative infrastructure is made up of a handful of dominant organisational narratives. These can be thought of as the 'big stories' that express the identity, purpose, and/or strategy of the organisation.

SUPPORTING STORIES provide specific examples of events and experiences that give meaning to one or more organisational narratives. These are the 'little stories', examples, and metaphors that are invoked in the moment to justify or explain.

Successful supporting stories are often a combination of personal reflections and key supporting data. They can enable the telling of a significant sequence of events or signal which values are important to the organisation.

In this guide, we help you understand and shape your organisation's narrative infrastructure in four key steps: