Storytelling-Based Learning · Amsterdam
Change how your people approach business challenges through the stories of your own experts.
Before your people approach a challenge differently, they have to think differently. Thinking differently doesn’t come from instruction, it comes from experience. A colleague’s story is the only way to give someone an experience they didn’t live.
Case Study
How Mollie helped employees think differently about speaking up through storytelling.
1 → 3
skills built: storytelling,
public speaking & leadership
communication
public speaking & leadership
communication
1 → ∞
one person’s experience
becomes organisation-wide
insight
becomes organisation-wide
insight
5 / 5
programme rating,
Mollie 2025
Mollie 2025
The Challenge
You’ve invested in the right themes.
The thinking hasn’t changed.
Every programme begins with the right ambition. Speak-up culture. Feedback culture. Navigating change. People attend. Principles get taught. Then they go back to their desks and work exactly the same way they did before.
For example
After the training
“It’s too risky. If I say something, it could backfire.”
After hearing a colleague’s story
“The risk of not saying it is higher. I’ve seen what silence costs.”
After the training
“The timing isn’t right. I’ll wait for a better moment.”
After hearing a colleague’s story
“There’s never a right time. There’s only the cost of waiting.”
After the training
“The plan isn’t good enough. That’s why people are resisting.”
After hearing a colleague’s story
“The plan isn’t the problem. How people are thinking about it is.”
That way of thinking comes from having lived through enough specific, difficult moments and having drawn a meaningful insight from them. Current approaches don’t provide that.
Three reasons current approaches fall short and what we do instead
Why it doesn’t work
Instruction gives vocabulary. It doesn’t create insight.
External training teaches the model. People leave knowing the principle but the way they think about it stays exactly where it was.
What we do instead
Colleagues share real stories from inside your organisation. The listener experiences it as something that happened to someone they recognise and draws their own insight from it.
Why it doesn’t work
Information without emotion doesn’t stay.
People forget 70% of new information within 24 hours and 90% within a week.² Without an emotional hook, training evaporates.
What we do instead
Stories activate the emotional brain. Research shows 63% of audiences recall a story; only 5% recall a statistic.³ Emotion is the mechanism, not the flourish.
Why it doesn’t work
Generic content doesn’t create personally meaningful insight.
Generic training asks people to act on someone else’s experience, in someone else’s context. When the story never feels true to your situation, nothing changes.
What we do instead
Every story comes from inside your organisation, from colleagues who faced the same pressures and constraints. The gap between “their world” and “my situation” disappears.
The business cost of the gap
70%¹
of change initiatives fail — the primary cause is employee mindset and resistance, not poor planning
90%²
of training content is forgotten within a week — information without meaning doesn’t stay
15%⁴
of what employees learn in training gets applied back to their actual work
¹McKinsey & Company / Harvard Business Review. Widely cited across change management literature.
²Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. The Forgetting Curve. See also: Learning Guild (2024). learningguild.com
³Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick. Stanford research on narrative versus statistics in recall.
⁴Speach Method (2024), citing Journal of Applied Psychology findings on learning transfer rates.
The Programme
A structured journey from
experience to insight.
Each programme is built around one theme, the topic your organisation needs its people to think differently about.
Topics we work on
Navigating uncertainty
Leadership & influence
Speaking up
Navigating change
Understanding customers
Culture & values in practice
Giving & receiving feedback
Delivering under pressure
01
Define the Theme
We align on a theme that matters most to your organisation right now, and identify the experts whose experience is most worth sharing.
02
Skill Foundations Workshop
A 2–3 hour interactive session covering storytelling fundamentals, narrative structure, public speaking techniques, and how to extract clear insight from real experiences.
03
Applied Learning Assignment
Participants identify a real workplace moment and craft a story around it. Guided materials help them surface the lesson and shape it into something worth sharing.
04
Practice & Peer Feedback
Stories are refined through cohort presentations, peer feedback, and one-to-one coaching. Delivery and message are both sharpened.
05
The Storytelling Night
The capstone event. Selected participants share their stories with colleagues and leaders, creating a live learning experience that stays with everyone in the room.
Learning Impact
One programme.
Three levels of impact.
Narrative Learning Lab creates value at every level of the organisation simultaneously.
For participants
They become the kind of communicator who moves people.
- Reflect on and extract insight from real experiences
- Articulate lessons clearly to any audience
- Build confidence in public speaking and high-stakes communication
- Translate personal moments into leadership that influences others
For the teams
They gain access to experience they never had.
- Emotionally connect with situations and lessons
- Reflect on how insights apply to their own work
- Understand how to become more effective in what they do
For the organisation
Insight that starts with one person travels to everyone.
- Create the conditions for people to think differently, and act from that new understanding, which leads them to work more effectively
- Strengthen communication and leadership capability across teams
- Bring values and culture to life through real stories
- Build empathy and trust across teams
“Instead of leaving knowing more about speaking up, people left thinking about it differently. And that’s what actually changes how they act.”
Narrative Learning Lab · Core Programme Philosophy
Let’s Talk
What do you need your people to think differently about?
Your organisation has knowledge sitting inside its best people that the rest of the team doesn’t have access to. Book a short consultation and we’ll explore how to make it transferable.
Book a Consultation
We’ll be in touch within one business day.