Narrative Profile
Three markers before your profile: what this tool looks at, what tension means, and what this profile can and cannot say.
What this tool looks at
An organization tells itself a story about who it is, how it works, where it is going. That story lives in official discourse and stated values, and just as much in informal conversations, in what goes without saying and in what is left unsaid. The diagnostic explores it through five dimensions.
The official narrative
The version the organization gives of itself. Whether it is clear and shared, or plural and shifting with the moment and the audience.
The gap between narrative and experience
The distance between what the organization says about itself and what people live day to day.
What limits the field of possibilities
The inherited narratives that narrow, often unnoticed, what seems possible.
What goes unsaid
The subjects everyone perceives and no one names in collective spaces.
What is trying to emerge
The emerging narratives, the voices carried by certain people or teams, that signal something else.
What tension means
On each dimension, your answers produce a tension score from 0 to 3. A score near 0 means the dimension is settled, it raises no particular difficulty. A score near 3 means it is under tension, it is a site of work.
Tension marks a place where the organization's narrative is active, a site of work more than a flaw. A tension once named is already a tension you can work on. Combining the tensions across the five dimensions, your profile moves close to one of twelve narrative configurations, each named after a figure. A configuration names a situation so it can be looked at and worked on, without locking you into a category.
What this profile offers, and its limits
This profile is a reading, a working hypothesis, a mirror. It is not a verdict, and it does not claim to state a final truth about your organization.
One point matters more than the others. At the scale of one person, this profile is a perception. Your perception is real and useful, and it remains the view from one place in the organization. An organization's narrative is read in the convergence of a group, and in the way that convergence is distributed across positions. To establish a real diagnosis, it has to be done at the scale of a collective, with respondents from different levels, functions and tenures, then reading both what unites and what diverges. That is the scale at which the profile becomes a diagnosis.