Story Thinking

Neuroscience tells us we are wired for story: it is the sensemaking pattern the brain uses to make meaning out of change. Most leaders only use that pattern for how they talk. This book shows how to use it for how organizations work: how they change, learn, and lead.

For more than a century, "process" has been our mental model of work. Process thinking is fine for routine, but it breaks down whenever something unexpected happens. Story Thinking replaces it with a model that covers the whole cycle: a six-phase story of Automation, Disruption, Investigation, Ideation, Expectation, and Affirmation. We start in routine, run into something out of the ordinary, look deeper, come up with ideas, act on a plan, confirm results, and settle into a new routine. Some trips around the cycle take a moment, some take a project, and some take a lifetime.

Dr. John Lewis is an educational psychologist, knowledge management practitioner, and author of The Explanation Age. Here he offers a solutions-based guide for leaders getting ready for AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is not another warning about robots taking jobs. It shows how to build organizations that can keep learning while the technology keeps changing.

Inside, you will discover:
- A cyclic, descriptive model of change to use instead of memorized, step-by-step prescriptions
- Why routine (transactional) work and transformational change are two halves of the same story
- How one story cycle connects risk, idea, change, quality, and operations management
- Learning objectives and key performance indicators mapped to each phase of the story
- Stage-by-stage evaluation of new ideas, from first concept to full production
- Feedback loops that go beyond maintaining the current system to redesigning and reframing it
- Practical applications for leaders, change agents, knowledge managers, and learning professionals

The Story Thinking cycle builds on the author's ADIIEA organizational learning model, published in 2014. In 2025 he compared it with fifty widely used change models in "Story Thinking Compared with 50 Change Models" (Journal of Innovation Management).

Process was the mental model of the industrial age. Story is the mental model of what comes next.