How to Use Storytelling as a Collaborative Tool for Holding Complexity

Making space for all the voices in the room

Jun 01, 2025

The Mess and the Magic of Co-Creation

In many participatory projects, there comes a point where the room fills with a mix of ideas, expectations, and differing perspectives. You’ve brought the right people together and created a clear intention, but now the conversation feels a bit messy, and the next steps aren’t immediately clear.

This isn’t a setback. It’s a natural part of meaningful collaboration. One of the most effective tools for navigating this moment, without resorting to rigid control or letting things unravel, is storytelling.

In my work as a strategic designer, I’ve seen how shared stories can help groups stay with the tension, rather than rush to resolve it. They offer a way to shape what’s emerging, even when it’s still uncertain. Whether you're co-designing a community initiative, rethinking an organisation, or having a multi-generational dialogue, storytelling helps make space for complexity and ensures every voice has room to be heard.

What Is Storytelling in Collaborative Contexts?

Most of us are familiar with storytelling as a personal or artistic act. But in collaborative settings, where people bring different values, vocabularies, and worldviews — storytelling becomes a tool of sense-making.

Here, storytelling isn’t about crafting the perfect narrative.
It’s about weaving together fragments of lived experience, data, intuition, and vision. It’s about listening deeply, surfacing meaning, and creating a shared language for things that feel hard to name.

Collaborative storytelling asks:

What do we see?
What do we feel?
What do we long for?
And how can we make sense of it together?

Stories as Boundary Objects: Connecting Different Worlds

In the world of design research, we often work across boundaries — disciplinary, cultural, institutional, generational. People don’t always agree. But what they often can do is gather around a story.

This is where the concept of a boundary object becomes useful. Coined by sociologist Susan Leigh Star, a boundary object is something that different people can use, interpret, and build upon without needing to fully agree on what it means. It’s flexible, yet structured. Shared, yet personal.

In this sense, stories can act as boundary objects. They allow us to enter a common space without forcing consensus.

For example, in a youth-led sustainability project I worked on, we asked teenagers and city planners to write stories from the perspective of the same tree in their neighbourhood imagining its past, present, and future. The planners spoke of policy. The teens spoke of heartbreak. Together, they created a new narrative that influenced the city’s green space strategy.

They didn’t need to agree on everything.
They just needed a place to meet. And story was that place.

Making Space for All the Voices in the Room

This work is more than a facilitation technique — it’s a commitment. When we say we want all voices in the room, we must also be ready to face contradiction, silence, grief, and joy.

Here’s what helps:

Invite fragments, not finalities.

People may not have polished stories. That’s okay. Ask for moments, metaphors, or memories. Let it be incomplete. Let it be human.

Recognise power dynamics.

Whose stories get told? Whose get listened to? You may need to actively make space for those usually left out or overspoken.

Honour emotion and ambiguity.

Not all knowledge is rational. Emotional truths matter. Uncertainty is allowed.

Create rituals of listening.

Design moments where listening is as valued as speaking. Story circles, deep listening rounds, and mirrored reflections can transform the room.

Story-Based Tools and Prompts to Try

You don’t need to be a designer to use storytelling as a boundary object. Here are five practical ways you can bring this into your next conversation, workshop, or team session:

1. The Two Truths Exercise

Ask participants to write two short “truths”:

One that feels personally true (subjective, emotional, lived)
One that feels systemically true (structural, data-driven, external)

Use these to explore where stories align or diverge and what this teaches you about the system you're trying to shift.

2. Future Storytelling: "It's 2035 and..."

Invite people to imagine the future as if it has already happened.
“It’s 2035. Our project has transformed lives. Tell the story of what changed.”

This unlocks visionary thinking and reveals hidden hopes and values.

3. Roleplay Narratives

Create personas based on real or imagined system actors e.g., a migrant mother, a frontline nurse, a tree in a city park, a burnt-out teacher.

Ask participants to tell a story from that character’s point of view. This can shift perspectives and build empathy across lines of difference.

4. Story Circles

In small groups, each person shares a story in response to a prompt (e.g., “A moment I felt invisible” or “A time I changed my mind”).

No discussion. Just listening. After everyone shares, open space for reflection. It creates collective understanding without debate.

5. The Narrative Map

On a large sheet or whiteboard, map out the emerging themes from shared stories — values, tensions, metaphors, goals.

Use this as a living guide to inform decisions, designs, or strategy.

Story as a Vessel for Shared Meaning

Storytelling isn’t a shortcut to clarity, it’s a container for complexity. It helps us sit with what we don’t yet understand, while staying connected to each other. In a time of polarisation, burnout, and urgency, the ability to co-create meaning is a radical act of care.

As designers, facilitators, educators, and leaders, our job isn’t to simplify the world. It’s to help people make meaning together, across difference and discomfort.

So next time you're in a room full of voices — some loud, some hesitant, some unfamiliar, ask:

What story wants to be told here?
And how can I help hold it, not solve it?

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone working in community building, team leadership, or systems change. You can also reply or comment with your own experiences using story in complex spaces — I’d love to hear them.

With curiosity and care,
Elena
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