Lynn Harris is a writer and producer who has spent her career at the intersection of comedy and culture change.

In this conversation, we talk about what humor can do that argument often cannot: make people listen, expose contradiction, create distance, and help us see the stories a culture has agreed to treat as normal.

Lynn also challenges one of our favorite transformation narratives: the idea that every hard thing has to become meaningful.

Sometimes something terrible happens and it is simply terrible.

But humor can still give us another way to relate to it.

We talk about comedy and trauma, the Holocaust, pop culture, representation, power, who gets the microphone, why specificity makes stories more relatable, and why great comedy is less about magic than practice.

And Lynn gives us one of the most useful metaphors yet for Narrative Intelligence: sometimes the stars do not change.

We just find new lines between them. More about Lynn here: https://goldcomedy.com/

Nichelle Carr is a storyteller, technologist, activist, and attorney whose work sits at the intersection of media, law, culture, technology, and social change.

In this conversation, we talk about who gets to tell the stories that become history, why telling your own story can be an act of self-determination, and how cultural narratives and systems continually reinforce one another.

Nichelle argues that meaningful change may require examining “the stories we love the most about ourselves” and expanding them enough to hold what they have left out.

We also explore AI and human creativity, the responsibility of institutions that shape public narratives, and what Nichelle’s legal training taught her about storytelling:

Don’t hide the inconvenient facts. Lean into the truth.

Because sometimes the fact that complicates the story is the thing that makes it worth telling.

In this episode, Nichelle Carr shares her journey from international experiences to becoming a storyteller and technologist. She discusses the power of narrative in shaping society, the impact of AI on creativity, and the importance of telling untold stories to foster justice and understanding.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Nichelle Carr and her work

2972:07:06 Storytelling as a tool for changing the world

5333:14:01 Early influences: mythology and childhood reading

9361:00:54 Transformational experience living in Dakar, Senegal

17277:41:15 Journey from law to storytelling and entertainment

22555:28:14 Deciding which stories to tell: marginalized and untold narratives

286111:02:04 The importance of Black stories in American history

416388:49:43 The relationship between stories and systems

456944:23:20 Changing organizational culture through storytelling

543055:30:30 The danger of narratives that perpetuate systemic oppression

613055:31:01 The ancestral wisdom and Black women's role in healing

738888:52:06 AI, creativity, and the importance of safeguards

835833:19:31 The future of AI in creative industries

906944:26:37 Closing thoughts on storytelling and societal change

Then she began questioning the story the system was telling — and her own role inside it.

In this conversation, Cheri talks about the moment that forced her to reconsider more than twenty years of work, why institutions can become attached to narratives that preserve their own power, and what happens when the people living a story are not the people authorized to define it.

We explore saviorism, lived experience, power, fear, compliance, imagination, and why systems can become so invested in the stories they already believe that alternative futures become difficult to imagine.

Cheri also offers a powerful definition of Narrative Intelligence: “careful stewardship” of the stories we tell ourselves, believe, and tell about other people.

And she ends somewhere important:

“I’m filled with hope.”

Because when people begin telling new stories, they find one another. Community forms. And what once seemed impossible can begin to become real.

Check out Imagination Factory's work: https://www.imgnfactory.org/

Then she got close enough to the dream to realize something unsettling:

It looked right. It didn’t feel right.

In this conversation, Teneia and I talk about growing up in Mississippi, divorce, creativity, belonging, moving to Spain, and what happens when the identity you worked so hard to build starts becoming too small for who you are becoming.

We also talk about tarot as a storytelling tool—and have a live moment where we interpret the same card in completely different ways. That opened up a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence:

How much of what we believe comes from what happened—and how much comes from the meaning we learned to assign to it?

This episode is about laying down an old dream without calling it failure, learning to ask better questions, and making room for a life that feels more like home.

Architect Angie Lipski has spent 30 years thinking about how the places we inhabit shape the way we feel, move, connect, remember, and live. In this conversation, we explore the possibility that our environments don’t simply contain our lives—they may continually reinforce certain ways of being.

Angie takes us inside the design of a Montana ranch, back to the sensory landscape of her grandmother’s home, and into the small rituals that make up ordinary life: morning light, coffee, thresholds, gathering places, and the spaces where we retreat.

We also explore a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence: Can a new environment help us begin living toward a new identity before we fully know who we are becoming?

This episode expands the inquiry beyond the stories in our heads to the settings in which those stories are lived.

Connect with Angie: https://thesensorystudiolipski.com/

In Episode 14 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams talks with social entrepreneur and changemaker Whitney Williams about politics, philanthropy, documentary filmmaking, and the power stories have to shape what we notice, fund, believe, and fight for.

Whitney grew up in a family where making a difference was expected. Her father, former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, taught her that "there's a genius on every block," a belief that still anchors how she thinks about leadership and community. She went on to the Clinton White House, founded the social impact agency WilliamsWorks, co-founded the Eastern Congo Initiative with Ben Affleck, and ran for governor of Montana in 2020.

She brings out a hand-painted silk banner from Butte's Women's Protective Union, founded in 1893, and tells the story of learning what it actually was. She explains why the stories that break through in philanthropy are the ones that make an enormous issue human, describes the moment at the Wilma Theater when she knew a film had done its job, and shares what a man at a town hall in Broadus asked her during the governor's race, along with her answer.

The conversation then moves into narrative power: money, media, repetition, and who holds the ability to make a political story feel like reality. Whitney's response is to keep talking with our neighbors and to support the artists and storytellers who can break through when nothing else can.

Her definition of narrative intelligence adds something new to the inquiry. Becoming more narratively intelligent may be a collective act as much as an individual one, built through listening, learning, and making meaning together in community.

She closes with a question a woman asked her in a community center outside Goma, and the answer that has stayed with her ever since.

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project asks: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

In Episode 13 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams talks with technology executive, author, entrepreneur, and Equis AI CEO Sandy Carter about AI, privacy, leadership, organizational culture, and the stories shaping whether we trust or resist new technology.

Drawing on her leadership experience at IBM and Amazon, Sandy shares how organizational narratives can become something people actually use to make decisions. She tells the story of being asked at Amazon to present one of her failures instead of her successes, and how that experience changed the way she thought about vulnerability, learning, and leadership.

The conversation also explores the dominant stories surrounding AI today, including fears about job loss, the perception that AI is only for technical people, and growing concerns about what happens to the personal information we share with AI systems.

Sandy also offers an important insight for understanding technology adoption: people’s perceptions can change once they actually experience what a technology can do. That raises a larger Narrative Intelligence question: Can experience change the story through which we understand a new technology?

Paige and Sandy explore the responsibility of technology creators, the difference between AI-generated answers and human lived experience, and why judgment, context, values, and consequence still matter.

For Sandy, Narrative Intelligence at the organizational level is about the story a company lives every day, one that helps people make decisions aligned with shared values and principles.

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project asks:

How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with board director, advisor, writer, and former C-suite executive Ara Tucker about reinvention, identity, and what Ara calls The Architecture of Advantage™.

Ara traces her own path from visual arts to law, higher education, Morgan Stanley, Audible, and C-suite leadership before eventually stepping away from the next expected role to build something of her own. Along the way, she began to recognize something she had previously taken for granted: many of the abilities that felt natural to her had an architecture beneath them.

Early exposure became fluency. Fluency created ease. Ease could be interpreted as talent. And talent created new opportunities.

Ara explains how conversations with her parents helped her recognize advantages she had inherited without consciously knowing it, and how her wife’s observation that she was, in some ways, a “Nepo baby” changed the way she understood her relationship to the art world.

Paige and Ara also explore the stories that run quietly in the background of our lives, why some identities are reinforced by a whole “chorus” around us, and what happens once we begin to see the forces shaping what feels possible.

Ara offers an important complication to the idea that we can simply write any story we choose: we may all have imagination, but our stories do not have equal permanence, impact, legibility, or volume. Sometimes a story also needs someone willing to amplify it. As Ara says, “Every storyteller needs a megaphone, and they are usually not their own megaphone.”

The conversation also explores midlife reinvention, the fear of leaving the “golden handcuffs,” identity and belonging, coming out, Ara’s decision to stop chemically processing her hair, and why sometimes doing the thing is how we become ready for it.

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project explores one central question:

How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

Mor eon Ara here: https://storieswork.studio/

Casey Erin Clark—performer, author, podcast host, and co-founder of Vital Voice Training—joins Paige Williams to explore voice, identity, and the stories that shape who we believe we are allowed to become.

Casey shares her journey from small-town “girl with the voice” to pursuing Broadway, building a business, and creating her one-woman show about difficult women. Together, Paige and Casey examine the good-girl narrative, beauty and casting archetypes, the shadow of the unlived life, and the institutional stories embedded in theater and evangelical Christianity.

They also explore what happens when someone discovers a voice they didn’t know they possessed—and why stepping outside an inherited identity often requires what Casey calls a “flaming inner middle finger.”

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project explores one central question: How malleable are the stories we live by—and what does it take to change one?

Discover your Narrative Quotient at storykeys.co.

Vital Voice Training: https://www.vitalvoicetraining.com/casey-bio

What if the story you tell about yourself is only one version of the truth?

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with award-winning podcast producer Michael Osborne about storytelling, listening, meaning-making, and why we may not always be the best arbiters of our own lives.

Michael has spent years listening to and shaping other people’s stories. That experience has taught him that our interpretations are always partial—and that other people can sometimes see things in us that we cannot see from inside our own perspective. As he puts it, “I’m just not the best arbiter of my own story.”

Their conversation explores the stories we tell about ourselves, the role of ego and self-deception, why dialogue can help us test our interpretations, and how creativity gives us new ways to understand experience. Michael also shares the unexpected conversation that led him from a PhD program in climate science at Stanford into podcasting—and how that moment changed the trajectory of his life.

One of Michael’s central ideas becomes a powerful contribution to the inquiry: our stories are never fixed. New experiences, new information, other people, and new interpretations can continually change what a life means.

Michael offers this working definition of Narrative Intelligence:

“A journey to understand the stories that help us make sense of both ourselves and the world while recognizing that those stories are always subject to new events, new information, and most importantly, new interpretation.”

The conversation also explores why the best stories can feel both unpredictable and inevitable, why listening may be more important than talking, and Michael’s newly coined idea of “metaphorical possibility”—the capacity of a story to hold multiple ways for people to recognize themselves inside it.

What’s your NQ? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with Courtney Townley about transformation, self-leadership, behavior change, identity, and what she has learned from coaching thousands of women.

Courtney’s own transformation began after becoming a mother. Although people around her praised how quickly she had lost the baby weight, she was struggling internally—with identity, relationships, and what health actually meant. At the same time, she was watching clients transform physically and then gradually return to their old behaviors.

It forced her to confront a larger question:

What if knowing the right thing to do—or even achieving the desired outcome—isn’t enough to create lasting change?

In this conversation, Paige and Courtney explore:

• Why recognizing a story does not automatically change behavior
• Courtney’s “shit moment”—when we can no longer avoid what we see
• The difference between awareness and radical ownership
• Why meaningful transformation requires practice
• How new behavior can create evidence for a new story
• Why people repeatedly fall back into old patterns
• The difference between discipline and devotion
• Courtney’s idea of “consistent self-honoring”
• Why realignment may matter more than perfect consistency
• How to know when you need to recommit—and when you have simply outgrown the goal
• Self-trust, boundaries, capacity, and the power of the pause
• What caring for aging parents can teach us about changing ourselves instead of trying to control others

One of the central ideas emerging from this conversation for Narrative Intelligence is that transformation may not move neatly from new story → new behavior.

Sometimes it may work in the other direction too:

We act differently. We create new evidence. And eventually, we become capable of believing a different story about ourselves.

Courtney defines Narrative Intelligence as recognizing your own authorship: becoming conscious of the story you are living and deciding whether it is actually yours to keep writing.

Courtney Townley: https://graceandgrit.com/

What’s your NQ? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

Subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project and follow along as Paige Williams learns from 100 people about one central question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?

Julie traces her own journey from a deeply shy child in the Pacific Northwest to acting, voice work, and eventually helping others expand beyond the communication habits they have inherited. She challenges the idea that each of us has one singular “authentic voice.” Instead, she sees authenticity as access to greater range, choice, expression, and more of who we already are.

Julie also shares the story of leaving her life in New York after reaching a breaking point. For years she interpreted that moment as failure. Over time, the story changed. What once looked like collapse began to look like recognition that the life she had built no longer fit who she was.

The conversation explores the stories workplaces tell about confidence, charisma, introversion, and leadership; why silence is not necessarily a problem to be fixed; the difference between protective communication habits and limitation; and what happens when we begin using our voices without waiting to become perfect.

One of Julie’s most important contributions to Narrative Intelligence comes in her definition: stories are the connective tissue between events. Narrative Intelligence, she suggests, is becoming aware of the meaning we have placed between those events and recognizing that the connective tissue may be more flexible than we think.

And Julie is still inside one of her own unfolding stories. She is writing about her mother, their relationship, loss, and the things she has not yet said publicly. We do not yet know how telling that story will change her. That unfinishedness is part of the inquiry too.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment and join the inquiry at StoryKeys.co.

Learn more about Julie's work and company here: https://www.vitalvoicetraining.com/

Thaler Pekar has spent more than three decades helping leaders and organizations uncover the stories shaping their cultures, decisions, and relationships. In this conversation, she and Paige explore why Narrative Intelligence is not simply the ability to tell a compelling story. It is also the capacity to ask for stories, listen for what is missing, remain open to contradiction, and recognize the larger narrative landscape surrounding us.

Through stories of civic action, a near-drowning, organizational myths, and gathering 178 oral histories for Atlantic Philanthropies, Thaler reveals how people make meaning after an experience and how being heard can transform both individuals and institutions.

They also explore why leaders must understand the stories already circulating before introducing a new strategy, the ethics of holding another person’s story, and Thaler’s powerful definition of story as “input and output, process and product.”

This episode asks us to become more curious, courageous listeners and to make room for the messy, unfinished, and wonderfully squiggly nature of human meaning.

Learn more about Thaler Pekar and her work:
https://thalerpekar.com/

Discover your story archetypes, hidden patterns, and Narrative Quotient at StoryKeys:
https://storykeys.co/

Quentin shares how dance helped him move across dangerous neighborhood boundaries, created unexpected connection between people divided by history and conflict, and gave emotion a form when words were not enough.

At the center of the conversation is the story of a student who had been labeled difficult and disengaged. Through a writing and movement exercise, the student revealed circumstances his teacher had never understood. When he reached the word compassion, he stopped. He knew the word, but he could not find a gesture for it. That moment changed the teacher’s story about who the student was.

Paige and Quentin also explore the history and commercialization of hip hop, why movement must be understood within its cultural context, and how the stories attached to bodies shape recognition, opportunity, and power.

Quentin’s contribution to Narrative Intelligence is clear: stories do not live only in language. They also live in movement, memory, culture, and lived experience. Movement can create new evidence, change how a person is seen, and make another story possible.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

Joseph was born Blackfeet and adopted as a child into a white Irish Catholic family during an era of Indigenous child removal and assimilation. He grew up loved, but disconnected from the language, family, culture, and community he came from. Years later, through education, relationships, and the making of his documentary Return to the Blanket, he began filling in those missing pieces.

Joseph also shares the moment that ended nearly eighteen years of alcoholism, the sense of purpose that followed, and why he now sees his life not as a story he would erase, but as one he has learned to integrate.

His contribution to Narrative Intelligence is powerful: reclaiming a story does not require rejecting everything that came before it. It can mean holding complexity, making room for multiple identities, and practicing cultural humility by recognizing how much we still have to learn.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can follow Joseph at https://www.instagram.com/joseph.grady.792

Ann reflects on the evolution of her career, from building an early digital publication out of a tiny Lower East Side apartment, to becoming editor in chief of Seventeen, writing The Big Life, and eventually acquiring The Li.st.

Together, Paige and Ann explore why success is not a solo sport, how community expands the futures we can imagine, and why listening to other people’s stories can challenge and revise our own. Ann also shares how her understanding of imposter syndrome changed after listening to people whose experiences of professional spaces differed from hers.

Her contribution to Narrative Intelligence is especially clear: it is not only about the stories we tell, but also the stories we listen to, follow, and believe.

Learn more about Ann at theli.st and 10minutestotogetherness.com.

Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co, and subscribe to 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project wherever you listen to podcasts.

In Episode 3 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with Matt Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Imagination Factory, about the stories that shape our work, our identities, and our willingness to change.

Matt traces the beginning of his journey to one question from a young person aging out of foster care: “Do you even know my story?” That moment led to the documentary From Place to Place, transformed his understanding of expertise and systems change, and eventually forced him to confront what he calls values fatigue: the exhaustion created by the distance between what we believe and what our work requires of us.

Together, Paige and Matt explore what it takes to leave an identity that no longer fits, enter the uncertain space between stories, and build a life that more fully reflects who we are. They also discuss curiosity, humility, courage, the power of a compelling question, and Matt’s belief that our lives can change one sentence at a time.

At the center of the conversation is a defining Narrative Intelligence question:

Can we recognize when the future is knocking, and will we answer the door?

Sleep educator and patient advocate Lindsay Scola lived with symptoms of narcolepsy for 19 years before receiving a diagnosis. During that time, she hid naps in public bathrooms, pushed herself to keep pace with high-performing colleagues, and believed needing sleep meant she was less capable.

In this conversation, Lindsay and I explore the cultural stories that teach us to treat sleep as lazy, inconvenient, or something we can postpone until the work is finished.

We talk about:

• The shame Lindsay carried before her narcolepsy diagnosis
• Why receiving the right language changed how she understood herself
• Common warning signs of sleep apnea and other sleep disorders
• The relationship between sleep, creativity, memory, health, and agency
• Why midlife, hormones, and ADHD can change how women experience sleep
• The problem with rigid sleep routines and obsessive sleep tracking
• Why telling her story became part of Lindsay’s purpose
• What it means to rewrite our relationship with rest

Sleep is not what gets in the way of our lives. It is one of the things making our lives possible.

This conversation is part of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, an exploration of how the stories we inherit and repeat shape our identities, choices, relationships, health, and capacity to change.

Connect with Lindsay: https://www.lindsayscola.com/

Watch the TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ykomUh6-Y

Eyoälha shares how her Jump for Joy project changed the way she experienced other people, how a journey marked by repeated eagle sightings deepened her trust, and how she learned to recognize and change the belief that she was not intelligent. She also explores the power of names, language, nature, creativity, and cultural perspective, including what Indigenous and oral knowledge may reveal about the limits of AI.

Together, Paige and Eyoälha ask: How do stories become identity? What does it actually take to change one? And what might Narrative Intelligence require of us?

100 Stories explores one central question:
How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one?