I Help Leaders See the Story Beneath the Problem.
I’m Jon Symes — advisor, speaker, writer, and creator of Narrative Leadership.
For more than two decades, I’ve worked with leaders and organizations navigating growth, change, conflict, culture, performance — and the moments when the old way of operating has stopped working.
My work begins with a simple observation: What looks like a strategy problem is often a story problem.
Beneath the way we lead, decide, collaborate, exercise power, and respond under pressure are stories about what is safe, expected, rewarded, possible, and true.
Make the story visible, and choices that were previously hidden become possible.
Three Decades Inside Leadership, Change, and Human Systems.
My work has taken me across six continents and into rooms with founders, executives, leadership teams, institutions, governments, and global organizations.
Different sectors. Different cultures. Different challenges.
But again and again, I encountered the same paradox: The problem people were trying hardest to solve was often being recreated by assumptions nobody could see.
A founder wanted the team to take more ownership — while remaining the person every important decision had to pass through.
A leadership team wanted greater trust — while behaving as though vulnerability was dangerous.
An organization wanted transformation — while continuing to reward the very behaviors of the culture it said it wanted to leave behind.
I became increasingly interested not just in what organizations were doing, but in the invisible logic underneath it. Eventually, that became the center of my work.
How Narrative Leadership Emerged
Strategy Matters. But Strategy Doesn’t Explain Everything.
I’ve spent years inside organizations working with questions of performance, culture, leadership, power, and change.
At the same time, I’ve spent years exploring the human territory beneath them — psychology, identity, meaning, personal transformation, and the stories we use to make sense of ourselves and the world.
Those two worlds are often treated as separate disciplines. I came to see them as inseparable.
Because organizations are human systems. And human beings do not operate on spreadsheets, org charts, incentives, and strategy alone.
We also act from stories.
Stories about leadership. Success. Control. Conflict. Power. Belonging. What good leadership looks like. Who gets to decide.
What can safely be said. What is possible here.
Narrative Leadership grew from learning to see those stories as operating forces — and helping leaders work with them deliberately rather than being governed by assumptions they can no longer see.
The Person Behind The Work
Equal Parts Pragmatist and Poet.
I care deeply about results. I care just as much about the human beings responsible for producing them. Holding those two things together has shaped much of my life and work.
I’m a father, writer, traveler, seeker, and lifelong student of what makes people and systems come alive.
Much of what I know did not come from boardrooms.
It came from crossing cultures and continents, difficult conversations, personal reinvention, failure, uncertainty, and those moments when the story I was living no longer fit the person I was becoming.
Those experiences taught me that meaningful change rarely begins with having the right answer.
It often begins with becoming willing to question what we had stopped realizing was an assumption.
That is as true for an organization as it is for a human life.
The Kind Of Leadership I Care About
I’m Not Interested in Louder Leadership.
I’m interested in wiser leadership.
Leadership capable of holding complexity without immediately reducing it to certainty.
Leadership willing to question a system even when that system has rewarded us.
Leadership strong enough to have the conversation everyone else is avoiding.
Leadership that understands performance matters — but that performance can’t ultimately be separated from people, culture, meaning, power, and consequence.
And leadership willing to recognize that the story that got us here may not be the story capable of taking us where we need to go.
A Few Things I've Come To Believe
Stories shape behavior.
People rarely act from values printed on a wall. They respond to what the culture repeatedly signals is true, safe, rewarded, and expected.
What once served us can eventually limit us.
The leadership story that helped create success at one stage can become the constraint at the next.
Insight is not change.
A new story matters only when it starts changing decisions, conversations, behavior, structures, and action.
Leadership is consequential work.
The stories leaders reinforce travel far beyond quarterly performance. They shape cultures, careers, families, communities, institutions — and what other people come to believe is possible.
Repeating problems contain information.
When the same issue survives multiple strategies, restructures, meetings, and difficult conversations, something beneath the visible problem is usually holding it in place.
How I Work
Clarity Without Simplification.
I’m not interested in handing leaders another framework to memorize.
My role is to help you see what has been difficult to see. To ask the question underneath the question. To challenge assumptions without unnecessary drama. To name patterns without blame. And then to turn that clarity into movement.
Sometimes that means making a decision. Sometimes it means having the conversation everyone has been avoiding.
Sometimes it means changing how authority is held. Sometimes it means recognizing that a story central to your leadership identity has reached the end of its useful life.
The work can be challenging. It should also create relief.
Because once you can see the story as a story, you have choices you didn’t have while you were living inside it as reality.
Where The Work Lives Today
I work with leaders and organizations at the moments when something important needs to change — but the obvious solutions haven’t been enough.
Founders, CEOs & Senior Leaders
I work with leaders and organizations at the moments when something important needs to change — but the obvious solutions haven’t been enough.
Leadership Teams & Organizations
Workshops and facilitated work that surface the hidden narratives shaping culture, alignment, authority, strategy, and execution — and help teams create a stronger operating narrative for what comes next.
Conferences & Leadership Communities
Keynotes that challenge audiences to see leadership, culture, work, and human behavior differently — and give them language for recognizing the stories they had previously mistaken for reality.
What Story Is Shaping What Happens Next?
If something important keeps repeating — in your leadership, your team, or your organization — the visible problem may only be part of what is holding it in place.
Let’s find the story underneath it.
Copyright 2026. Jon Symes. All Rights Reserved.