About
This is, of course, not just a story about storytelling, it is a story that starts with the frustration of the lack of inability to cultivate real change on issues relating to social end environmental concerns. There was always a deep sense that we were missing something, something underneath. Which is why everything felt like one step forward and two steps back.
While Master Storytelling was developed as a tool, theory and set of resources for a specific task, its tools, insights and resources can be used by anyone in a variety of contexts. It is offered here for anyone who has felt that the problem runs deeper than the level they have been working at.
Motivation driven from outside does not by itself make a value one’s own. The framework is what came from taking that seriously.
In climate communication, where the tools of marketing were used to ask people to act beyond themselves.
Climate communication has made several turns. First it assumed people lacked information, so it supplied facts. When facts did not move people, it assumed they lacked feeling, so it supplied emotion. When that fell short, it assumed they lacked the right values, and set out to engage them. Each turn was an advance. But each kept the same model: the audience is missing something, and communication’s job is to deliver it.
That model comes from marketing, where it works well. It is less clear that it can carry a value people are asked to hold for its own sake. Asking people to care for something beyond themselves, using tools designed to appeal to what they get out of it, risks teaching the opposite of what the message says.
Noticing that was the first thread. It is also the kind of seeing the framework tries to teach: not a better answer to the question we were asking, but a look at the question itself.
One thread loosened the next, from the tools of communication down to motivation, purpose, knowledge and value.
If the way we communicate carries its own message about what matters, which values and motivations is it building? That question produced a three-part model of value, motivation and purpose, the VMP triad. Its first finding was that the three cannot be pulled apart. Every motivation has a value texture: how we are moved tends to warm some values and cool others. And no motivation exists without a purpose, an end it is ordered towards, however near or faint. The three are always present together. What changes is how each is oriented, how strong it is, and whether they point the same way.
That raised the question of what a fuller account of motivation would look like, which became Integral Motivation Theory. That raised a harder question: what would a purpose look like if it were held for its own sake? Answering it needed a way of knowing that does not reduce everything to what can be measured, which the framework calls integrative epistemology. Asking what all of this rested on led down to value itself, and to a philosophical foundation called Axiological Primitivism.
Only then did the larger pattern come into view. The stories a culture tells carry an implicit grammar of value, motivation and purpose, and that grammar shapes what a society does. The framework calls these metanarratives. They are not the explicit stories a culture tells about itself, but the code those stories run on.
Getting here took close to a decade of research, writing and revision, drawing on motivation science, philosophy and the wisdom traditions, and tested in training and consultancy along the way.
The same pattern appears wherever a measure displaces the value it was meant to serve.
Once you see it in climate communication, it is hard to unsee elsewhere. A nurse who came into the work to care, managed by targets that leave little room for care. A teacher who loves the subject, teaching to the test. A charity whose mission is slowly reshaped by what funders count. In each case, something people hold for its own sake gets organised around something external, and the external measure gradually takes its place.
That is why the framework is offered to everyone, not only to campaigners. The pattern is not confined to one sector, and neither are the tools for seeing it.
It does not explain every failure, and it should not be used as if it did. Some workplaces and schools hold measures and intrinsic commitment together well, and they are as instructive as the places where the two have come apart. A lens that finds the same problem everywhere is telling you about the lens, not the world.
This work is demanding. It asks you to look at the code you are inside, not only the code others are running.
It is easy to diagnose a campaign, an organisation or a culture from outside. It is harder to notice the same pattern in your own work: in the targets you set, the appeals you reach for, the reasons you give yourself. The framework asks for both, and the second is where most of its value lies.
These blind spots are not a personal failing. They are what it means to live inside a culture’s stories. But they do not become visible on their own, and seeing them usually means unlearning something that has served us well. That takes time, attention and some discomfort.
The framework is built to be revised. That is part of what it is, not a sign that it is unfinished.
A framework about how people come to hold values cannot ask to be held on authority. It is offered as a set of tools to test in your own experience, and its claims are held with the confidence they have earned. Its account of value is a working hypothesis: stronger than a guess, weaker than an established result.
It has already changed under pressure. Earlier versions treated values as a layer of their own; the framework now treats them as what we notice as mattering. Earlier versions implied that if the practice worked, its foundations must be true; it now holds that working and being true are different tests. Earlier versions offered some diagnoses as neutral; it now accepts that every diagnosis carries a judgement about who bears the cost of change.
It also says where it could be wrong. If communication built on outside pressure turned out, reliably, to carry intrinsic values as well as communication that speaks to them directly, the thread this framework started from would break, and much of what followed would need rebuilding. That is the test it has set itself.
Founder
Master Storytelling was created by Kieran O’Brien, who has worked for more than twenty years in the charity and social change sector as a practitioner, consultant and trainer. He is its founder and director, and lives in Wales.
Where to start
