The stories behind the organization: how cultural narratives shape resilience

By David Honour

Every organization tells stories about itself:

“We always find a way.”

“When things go wrong, our people step up.”

“We look after our own.”

“We move fast and break through barriers.”

“Nothing happens here without proper approval.”

These phrases sound like cultural shorthand, but they reveal something deeper. Organizations develop recurring narratives about who they are, what they value, and how people are expected to behave when circumstances become difficult. Over time, these stories become so deeply embedded that employees cease to recognise them as stories at all. They simply become “how we do things here.”

The underlying observation is not new. Edgar Schein described culture as operating at several levels, with visible artefacts and espoused values sitting above shared assumptions that are so taken for granted that they are rarely articulated.

Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking showed how the interpretive frames and narratives people use influence what they notice and how they reinterpret a situation that no longer fits.

What follows is an attempt to make this thinking usable by resilience professionals. It matters because an organization’s dominant narratives can influence how it anticipates disruption, makes decisions under pressure, responds to crises, and learns afterwards.

Such narratives can be examined through the lens of common societal archetypes.

The concept of archetypes is most strongly associated with Carl Jung, who proposed that universal patterns within the collective unconscious find expression through recurring symbolic images across mythology, religion, dreams, and human culture. Archetypal images are recognisable patterns through which people interpret behaviour, identity, and the world around them.

Jung did not produce a single definitive catalogue of archetypes. He regarded their potential number as effectively unlimited because he linked archetypes to recurring situations in human experience. Others built on his work to create lists of commonly observed archetypes. The best-known is the twelve-archetype scheme developed by Carol Pearson. In Awakening the Heroes Within (1991), these are the Innocent, Orphan, Warrior, Caregiver, Seeker, Lover, Destroyer, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Sage, and Fool. Several labels were later changed for the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator, where the Innocent becomes the Idealist, the Orphan the Realist, the Destroyer the Revolutionary, and the Fool the Jester.

The scheme was adapted for branding in The Hero and the Outlaw (Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson, 2001), where Warrior was recast as Hero and Destroyer as Outlaw. The book helped popularise those labels within the twelve-archetype branding framework.

That variation is partly the point. The precise labels matter less than the narratives they help reveal. The labels are not a fixed taxonomy to be applied diagnostically; they are interpretive devices that can resonate with people and help uncover the narratives that an organization holds.

From there, you can explore how those narratives influence behaviour – positively and negatively – and how the pressure and uncertainty of a crisis change that behaviour. Understanding and, to some extent, predicting that behaviour provides useful planning and management information.

A fire and rescue service may strongly identify with the Hero. A healthcare provider may draw heavily upon the Caregiver. A technology start-up might embody the Rebel and the Magician. A regulator may identify with the Ruler. A university may see itself primarily through the Sage.

Such identities are rarely formally articulated. They emerge through the stories employees tell, the people who receive recognition, the behaviour leaders reward, and the language used to describe success.

The impacts of narratives

Dominant narratives can create genuine capability. A Hero culture may encourage people to take responsibility and act decisively when others hesitate. A Caregiver culture can strengthen social cohesion and mutual support. A Rebel culture may encourage challenge, improvisation, and speed. A Ruler culture can support disciplined governance and clearly understood authority.

The difficulty is that the same characteristic can produce a corresponding weakness:

The Hero’s willingness to save the day can create an organization dependent on heroics and reluctant to invest in the prevention that would make them unnecessary.
The Ruler’s ability to create order can become an inability to act when the procedure does not fit the situation.
The Rebel’s willingness to challenge rules can become contempt for the governance and institutional memory that make recovery possible.
The Caregiver’s instinct to protect everyone can make necessary prioritisation emotionally impossible at the moment it is most needed.

This is not a mysterious property of archetypes. It can happen when an organization receives repeated positive feedback for one class of behaviour: it invests in that behaviour, recruits for it, promotes for it, and stops developing alternatives. The narrative both reflects and reinforces that pattern.

Not all narratives are noble

Published archetype lists are flattering, and it is worth remembering that many organizational narratives are not. Some of the most consequential are closer to:

“We have always got away with it.”
“We are too important to be allowed to fail.”
“Nobody ever tells us anything.”
“That is not our department’s problem.”

These narratives can shape behaviour under pressure in the same way as the noble ones, and they may be considerably more dangerous. They are also far less likely to be volunteered when you go looking for them.

An example of narratives in action

Consider an organization that prides itself on repeatedly recovering from incidents through extraordinary individual effort. It values its crisis team, runs regular exercises, and has developed real muscle memory. Planning, however, is a weakness. Plans are seen as a paper exercise and are often ignored completely in the heat of a crisis.

Its internal story is: “Whatever happens, our people always come through.” That maps neatly to the Hero.

Hero sounds resilient. However, exploring the implications produces some useful questions:

Why does extraordinary effort repeatedly become necessary?
Why is planning seen as unimportant and denigrated?
Are underlying vulnerabilities being addressed or simply absorbed?
Is recovery dependent on a handful of experienced individuals, and what happens when they leave?
Are employees paying for organizational weaknesses through stress, exhaustion, and burnout?

The Hero narrative can disguise fragility because successful rescue becomes evidence that the system works. Sometimes, the fact that people repeatedly save the organization is evidence that the organizational culture needs repair.

It is worth being honest about what the narrative explains and what it does not. Repeated heroics may equally reflect under-investment, thin resourcing, or a deliberate acceptance of risk. The value of the narrative lens is not that it replaces those explanations. It is that it explains why they go unchallenged: the story makes the pattern feel like a strength rather than a symptom.

You do not have one narrative

Treating an organization as a single narrator is convenient and usually wrong. Larger organizations often operate as federations. The executive, front-line operations, IT, and the resilience function frequently hold different stories about what the organization is and how it behaves when things go wrong. A Ruler board can sit above Hero operations. A Sage technical function can sit alongside a Rebel commercial one.

This matters because crises are rarely contained within a single narrative. They travel across interfaces and it is at those interfaces that assumptions collide: about who has the authority to act, how much deviation is acceptable, and whether it is safer to escalate or simply get on with it.

The same applies beyond your own organizational boundary. Operational resilience requires organizations to understand their dependencies on third parties; and those third parties have dominant narratives of their own. If your arrangements quietly assume that a supplier will improvise around a problem, but that supplier’s story is “nothing happens here without proper approval,” the arrangement may fail in a way that a contract review alone may not reveal.

Mapping narratives across functions and key suppliers is more useful than settling on a single label for the organization as a whole.

Of course, assessing a supplier’s cultural narratives is necessarily interpretive and may be constrained by access. It should complement, rather than replace, formal third-party due diligence, contractual review, dependency mapping, assurance, and testing.

How narratives shape what you notice

Dominant narratives can influence perception, shaping what feels important, threatening, or legitimate. They can also affect the ability to change when adaptation becomes necessary.

A Hero organization may focus intensely on response capability while giving less status to the prevention work that would reduce the need for it.
A highly controlled Ruler organization may see deviation from procedure as dangerous while underestimating the danger of excessive rigidity.
A Rebel organization may notice bureaucracy everywhere but fail to recognise the value of institutional memory.
A Caregiver organization may pay close attention to immediate human impacts but struggle with decisions requiring resources to be withdrawn from one group to protect something more critical.

Risk assessments, business impact analyses, and scenario exercises appear technically neutral, but the people conducting them bring organizational narratives with them. Those narratives can influence assumptions about what is important, what can fail, what must be protected, and what constitutes an acceptable response.

Narratives can therefore create collective blind spots. Understanding your organization’s narratives helps you determine where those blind spots are likely to be.

Using exercises to surface narratives

Scenario exercises are a particularly powerful way to explore narratives because they can be used to deliberately create situations in which the organization’s preferred story is insufficient:

What happens when the Hero lacks the specific information needed to carry out the recovery?
What happens when the Ruler loses access to communications and cannot issue instructions?
What happens when the Caregiver must choose which services receive scarce resources?
What happens when the Magician’s technology is what has failed?

Explored in this way, the exercise tests something deeper than the plan. It tests the organization’s ability to operate outside its preferred story about itself and provides a legitimate, non-accusatory setting in which to start the conversation by exploring the positive things the narrative brings and how its reverse creates difficulty in the challenging environment of a crisis.

Building the counter-narrative into structure

Awareness on its own changes very little. The more important move is to give the missing narrative a permanent institutional home so that it does not depend on somebody remembering to raise it.

In a Hero culture, structured post-incident reviews institutionalise the Sage, mandatory recovery periods after major incidents institutionalise the Caregiver, and succession planning directly challenges dependence on individual heroes.

In a Ruler culture, red teams create legitimate permission to challenge accepted assumptions, and pre-agreed delegated emergency authorities allow people to exercise judgement when normal command structures cannot operate quickly enough.

In an innovation-dominated organization, architecture standards, change control, and long-term dependency mapping give the cautious voice organizational standing without extinguishing the appetite for change.

Two cautions are needed here. First, the counter-narrative has a shadow of its own: too much Sage in a Hero culture produces analysis instead of action, while too much challenge in a Ruler culture corrodes the authority often needed during a crisis. The objective is balance, not replacement. Second, decide in advance how you will know whether it has worked. The evidence lies in changed behaviour during exercises and incidents, not in a more favourable culture survey.

Positioning resilience through the story people already believe

There is a further practical implication worth exploring.

Resilience programmes often struggle because they are communicated in the language of methodology: business impact analyses, recovery objectives, dependencies, controls, and governance. The language may be necessary, but it rarely inspires anybody outside the world of business continuity and resilience.

Understanding the organization’s narrative offers a more powerful way of positioning the work internally:

In a Hero culture, preparedness is not bureaucracy; it is making sure people have what they need when the difficult moment comes.
In a Sage culture, resilience becomes the disciplined pursuit of understanding uncertainty.
In a Caregiver culture, business continuity becomes an obligation to the people who depend on the organization.

There is an obvious tension here. Speaking to the dominant narrative reinforces it, but this uses the existing story to win attention, budget, and engagement because it is what people already respond to.

This is not about manipulating employees through mythology or dressing business continuity plans in heroic imagery. It is about recognising that imagery can influence behaviour and that people engage with meaning as well as process.

Surfacing narratives through stories

None of this requires an archetype questionnaire or an elaborate psychological assessment. Start with stories and keep your eyes and ears open:

Ask employees what the organization is like when it is at its best.
Ask about the incidents people still talk about years afterwards.
Ask who is admired and what they did.
Listen to the metaphors leaders use during disruption.
Look at what behaviour receives public recognition and what receives quiet tolerance.

Most importantly, look at the stories that are difficult to tell or that have been suppressed:

The organization that celebrates heroic recovery but rarely discusses exhaustion and burnout.
The organization obsessed with innovation that closes down uncomfortable questions about consequences.
The highly disciplined organization that treats those who do not conform as difficult troublemakers rather than as an important source of adaptive capacity.

The suppressed narrative may carry information that the dominant culture does not want to hear. That is precisely why it is worth trying to find it.

Resilience is partly the ability to change the story

Organizations need processes, plans, resources, governance, and technical capability. However, at the heart of an organization’s resilience are people. Resilience depends on the ability to adapt and that ultimately depends on human beings deciding what matters and how to behave when the expected world around them changes. In those moments, deeply embedded narratives become powerful. They can give people courage, identity, and purpose. They can also trap organizations inside behaviours that once worked but no longer fit the circumstances. Perhaps one mark of a genuinely resilient organization is its ability to recognise the story it habitually tells about itself and to break out of that story when resilience requires it.