Hero No. 0 : Before heroes emerge

I spend my professional life working with stories. As a narrative consultant, I help organisations articulate who they are, what they believe, and why their messages work(or do not). Over time, this work has left me with a persistent discomfort. Almost every storytelling framework I rely on assumes a single main character.

This assumption is deeply embedded in how we understand stories. From Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to Gustav Freytag’s pyramid, dominant narrative structures are built around individual agency, conflict, and resolution. Even when stories claim to be about communities, movements, or cultures, they almost always narrow down to one person at a time. Individual stories are easier to aspire to, easier to remember, and easier to operationalise. They have become accessible enough to shape films, novels, political messaging, and even corporate branding.

But the world we are trying to describe, societies, organisations, and publics, does not actually work that way.

This session begins with a question I keep returning to. What does the story of a community look like? If agency is distributed, what is the unit of action? How do multiple narratives interact, overlap, or contradict one another? And what are we simplifying, or losing, when we keep reverting to individual story structures simply because they are easier to work with?

This question has been explored before, but rarely in ways that are easy to work with in practice. Thinkers such as Benedict Anderson, Georg Lukács, and Gustave Le Bon have all, in different ways, treated collectives as narrative subjects. Yet these ideas remain difficult to translate into usable structures. As a result, we continue to fall back on individual heroes, not because they are always accurate, but because they are workable.

A second question follows naturally. If stories shape behaviour, power, and meaning, why are they so hard to see? When we try to imagine what a story like The Lion King looks like, we recall iconic images such as Simba being lifted into the sky atop Pride Rock. What we visualise is the imagery of the story, not its narrative structure. We do not see the arc, the relationships, or the forces shaping the story over time. We lack a visual language for narrative itself, especially for collective narratives.

In my practice, I have been experimenting with narrative visualisations to make this invisible layer more visible. These are not finished systems or polished frameworks. They are sketches, models, and provocations that attempt to surface relationships, tensions, and narrative gravity inside organisations. I have found that visualising narratives makes it possible to begin working with collective story structures that remain abstract in text alone.

This talk is a sharing of that journey. I will walk through the problems that led me here, the visual experiments I have tried, and the gaps I have not been able to solve alone. The goal is not to present a solution, but to open up narrative visualisation as a design space that invites collaboration across data visualisation, design, development, and systems thinking.

Participants will leave with new ways of thinking about stories beyond protagonists, early patterns for visualising narratives as systems, and an invitation to explore what becomes possible when we start working before heroes emerge. If stories shape our collective reality, then building ways to see them should itself be a collective effort.