Escaping the shadow

He turned right and then quickly left, darting between parked cars. His breath got heavier, like a deer chased by a wolf. He ducked behind bales of hay, slid under the looming spikes of a combine harvester, only to realise — with a laugh — that the danger was in his imagination.

Until the torchlight came.
“Oi you! All I want is your payment for that Negroni you didn’t pay for.”

A sigh of relief. Then a flick of a cigarette, floating slowly toward a vat of petrol.

This little fragment came out of a five-minute writing exercise. It’s melodramatic, messy, even ridiculous. But when I re-read it, I noticed something: how often organisations live inside shadows of their own making.

We imagine dangers bigger than they are. We miss the ordinary things — like unpaid debts — that matter more. We laugh at ourselves, but still keep running.

The exercise reminded me that stories, even improvised ones, can be mirrors. They help us see the fears, blind spots and absurdities in how we work.

How organisations can use this

1. Make space for storytelling

• Give teams a prompt (“the shadow I’m escaping at work is…”) and five minutes to write. Share fragments, not finished pieces.
• Example: @theyoungfoundation’s community studies use short stories to surface lived experience alongside statistics.

2. Surface the imagined dangers

• Ask: what are we afraid of that might be exaggerated? What are we ignoring because we’re too focused on the spikes, not the torch?
• Example: @nesta_uk’s Strategy in Uncertain Times report urges organisations to test whether their perceived risks are real or imagined.

3. Spot the ordinary truths

• Look for the “unpaid Negronis” in your system — the everyday issues that matter more than the big imagined crises.
• Example: Waltham Forest’s Mini Holland succeeded by focusing on simple, visible benefits (safe cycle lanes, local shops thriving), not abstract debates.

4. Treat resistance as data

• A cigarette flicked into petrol may feel like sabotage, but sometimes it signals systemic fragility. Listen to what sparks resistance.
• Example: in Amsterdam’s Doughnut Economy work, resistors helped planners see risks of gentrification, shaping fairer design.

5. Use metaphor to reflect

• Reframe challenges through story: is this a wolf, a torch, or just an unpaid drink? Metaphors disarm defensiveness and invite imagination.
• Example: Canada’s Policy Horizons uses storytelling and metaphors to reimagine policy futures beyond technical analysis.

Inspiration from elsewhere

• Local government: Camden Council used narrative methods in its climate assembly, letting residents frame futures in their own words.
• Think tanks: @IPPR’s Everyday Economy research used storytelling to show how people experience insecurity, not just in numbers but in narratives.
• Startups: Fairbnb reframed the Airbnb story, turning what looked like shadow (gentrification, exclusion) into shared community benefit.
• B Corps: Patagonia uses staff and customer stories as part of its activism, making metaphor and narrative central to corporate strategy.
• Civil service: Finland’s Demos Helsinki supports ministries to experiment with “futures stories,” bringing abstract policy into lived imagination.

A call to action

Next time your organisation feels trapped in the shadows — by uncertainty, by fear, by imagined risks — pause.

Run a five-minute story exercise. See what shadows people conjure. Notice the wolves, the torches, the unpaid drinks. Then ask:

• Which fears are imagined, and which are real?
• What everyday truths are we overlooking?
• How can we use story to anticipate, adapt, and reimagine?

Because escaping the shadow isn’t just about running faster. It’s about laughing at our own melodramas, spotting the ordinary truths, and daring to flick a new light onto the system we share.

✨ I’m left wondering: what would it look like if every board meeting began not with bullet points, but with five minutes of collective storytelling? What shadows might we escape together?