Cheri Williams spent much of her career inside child welfare believing she was helping save children.

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/

Teneia Sanders spent years building the life she thought she wanted: music, touring, travel, stages, and the identity of being an artist.

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.

What if changing your story sometimes means changing the room?

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/

Who decides which stories rise, which problems get attention, and which versions of reality become the ones everyone else has to live inside?

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.

What happens to your story once you give it to AI?

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.

What if some of the things you think are simply part of who you are were actually built through years of exposure, access, relationships, and opportunity?

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/

What happens when the identity that once made you successful becomes a box you can no longer live inside?

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

Michael Osborne: The Story Is Never Finished | 100 Stories Ep. 10

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.