Spendlove and Lamb

14/10/2026

No Story, No Change

The nurse sighed, went back to the cart to check her computer, and turned to the woman in the bed next to mine. "I don't think I can do this," she said. "Would you be all right if I went and got a colleague to take a look at your veins?" The woman said that was fine, and soon more nurses came in, studied her arms and talked through the different ways they might get a needle in to take bloods....

The nurse sighed, went back to the cart to check her computer, and turned to the woman in the bed next to mine. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said. “Would you be all ri…

23/09/2026

Storytelling for Change: Why Every Cause Needs a Villain

Scapegoating in its original form is a purging: an offloading of the community’s sins onto something else, which is expelled along with the guilt. The practice of transferring sins is universal to human experience. Hence the word ‘scapegoat’ hasn’t fallen out of use in 600 years. The question is why? Why do we need someone or something to project our failures or guilt onto? Luckily for me and you, dear reader, there are researchers and scientists who have been asking the same question. What they have found indicates something uncomfortable about which problems we choose to fight, and the ones we think can’t be won. Before I get into the research, let’s look at two major issues affecting humanity right now....

Scapegoating in its original form is a purging: an offloading of the community’s sins onto something else, which is expelled along with the guilt. The practice of transferring sins is universal to …

17/09/2026

Gathering insights from stories can feel impossible. I break down a simple process for unlocking qualitative insights - https://mailchi.mp/1af56346f359/surge-of-storytelling-17280599

15/09/2026

Unlocking Qualitative Insights from Employee Stories

What do we do with stories once we have them? We turn them into qualitative data, which feels tricky. How do you add up stories? Quantitative is the first preference for a reason. Numbers feel trustworthy because the method is visible to everyone. Two plus two is four; anyone can check the work. Stories have no single formula, so they feel loose and impressionistic. It is easy to dismiss them as unquantifiable anecdotes....

What do we do with stories once we have them? We turn them into qualitative data, which feels tricky. How do you add up stories? Quantitative is the first preference for a reason. Numbers feel trus…

09/09/2026

Transforming Experiences into Qualitative Insights

At the end of a narrative co-design workshop I ran at the Educate Plus Building Futures conference this year, my last slide was a Miro board filled with Post-it notes with words. Every one of them had come from the delegates themselves, gathered across the whole conference through a storytelling challenge app. I explained that the storytelling challenge they had been working on throughout the conference was the source of these words....

At the end of a narrative co-design workshop I ran at the Educate Plus Building Futures conference this year, my last slide was a Miro board filled with Post-it notes with words. Every one of them …

01/09/2026

Transforming Work Setbacks into Storytelling Insights

Robert Burns' line, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," encapsulates storytelling's core elements: reversal and reveal. Aristotle’s concepts of peripeteia and anagnorisis aid in processing life’s challenges. Storytelling offers emotional regulation and insight, proving essential for both personal and workplace encounters with adversity....

Robert Burns’ line, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” encapsulates storytelling’s core elements: reversal and reveal. Aristotle’s concepts of peripeteia a…

24/08/2026

How to Discover Your Inner Narrator for Business Success

You are the narrator; this is your strategy. I work with clients to help them discover their narrative for business or personal purposes. This means they must become the narrator. It starts with a conversation that explores your story, and I start asking questions...

You are the narrator; this is your strategy. I work with clients to help them discover their narrative for business or personal purposes. This means they must become the narrator. It starts with a …

22/08/2026

Could not resist this trend. Storytelling is classic and trends come and go!

19/08/2026

updated the Story Happy Hour carousel - “five” is now “six” across all slides. everything else (photos, layout, structure) is untouched.

updated caption:

Six years ago Yamini Naidu and I started The Story Happy Hour during lockdown. One question, one Zoom, happy stories only. Six years later it’s still going, and I wouldn’t trade a single one of those hours.

18/08/2026

14 years ago I started a storytelling business that changed my life. But when I look back I realise it stated much earlier. With my grandfather sitting on a bridge in Cleveland Ohio.