Narrative Intelligence
Narrative is not content. It is context.
Narrative intelligenceTM is the ability to recognize, interpret, and responsibly engage the stories that shape how individuals and societies make meaning.
It is not about persuasion or messaging. It is about discernment—understanding the emotional, cultural, and ethical structures beneath stories, and how they influence belief, behavior, and belonging.
In an era of accelerated media and artificial intelligence, narratives travel faster than meaning. Narrative intelligence is the capacity to slow down, listen, and understand what stories are doing — not just what they are saying.
This framework informs my work across film, advisory practice, and public engagement.
Orientation
Narrative intelligence did not begin for me as a theory. It began as a way of surviving between worlds.
Growing up across cultures, languages, and histories shaped by conflict, I learned early that facts alone rarely move people. Stories do. They shape belonging, fear, loyalty, and identity. Long before I became a filmmaker, I was already paying attention to how narratives functioned beneath the surface of everyday life.
Later, working alongside soldiers, refugees, educators, and communities navigating loss, I saw how the same events could carry radically different meanings depending on the story framing them. Liberation for some, betrayal for others. Hope, or humiliation. Narrative was never neutral. It was power.
This is where narrative intelligence begins—not with content, but with context.
Through documentary work across conflict zones, classrooms, institutions, and intimate human spaces, I began to see patterns. Narratives have structure. They carry emotional momentum. They shape how people interpret themselves, each other, and the world. When mishandled, they flatten complexity and deepen division. When handled with care, they create space for dignity, curiosity, and connection.
Narrative intelligence is the capacity to recognize those underlying structures and ask different questions than traditional storytelling or communications strategy.
Not simply: What is the story?
But: Why this story now?
Who does it serve?
What does it invite people to feel, believe, or become?
In an era of accelerated media, algorithmic amplification, and artificial intelligence, narrative has become infrastructure. Stories travel faster than meaning. Emotion often outruns reflection. The challenge is no longer access to narrative—it is discernment.
Narrative intelligence is that discernment.
It is the ability to read a room, a culture, a moment—and understand which stories heal, which harm, and which distract. It requires listening before shaping, and responsibility after impact. The goal is not persuasion, but resonance. Not certainty, but understanding.
At its core, narrative intelligence is about relationship: between storyteller and audience, past and present, self and other. It is the practice of holding complexity without collapsing it—and inviting others to do the same.