100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project

Paige Williams
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Society & Culture

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project explores how the stories we inherit, tell, and live by shape who we become, and what it takes to change them. Hosted by author, filmmaker, and transformational leadership coach Paige Williams, the series brings together researchers, artists, therapists, leaders, storytellers, healers, technologists, and people whose lives have been shaped by profound change. Each conversation examines story not simply as memory or entertainment, but as a force that shapes identity, belonging, relationships, leadership, culture, and human agency. At the center of the project is one question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? Across 100 conversations, Paige is listening for the human capacities that help us recognize the stories shaping us, discern whether they remain true or useful, and participate more consciously in what comes next. The ideas and insights gathered through the project will inform the foundational book Paige is writing to help define the emerging field of Narrative Intelligence.

  1. 2d ago

    Lynn Harris:Comedy Can Create Cultural Change | 100 Stories ep. 19

    What if not every painful experience needs a lesson? Lynn Harris is a writer and producer who has spent her career at the intersection of comedy and culture change. In this conversation, we talk about what humor can do that argument often cannot: make people listen, expose contradiction, create distance, and help us see the stories a culture has agreed to treat as normal. Lynn also challenges one of our favorite transformation narratives: the idea that every hard thing has to become meaningful. Sometimes something terrible happens and it is simply terrible. But humor can still give us another way to relate to it. We talk about comedy and trauma, the Holocaust, pop culture, representation, power, who gets the microphone, why specificity makes stories more relatable, and why great comedy is less about magic than practice. And Lynn gives us one of the most useful metaphors yet for Narrative Intelligence: sometimes the stars do not change. We just find new lines between them. More about Lynn here: https://goldcomedy.com/

  2. 4d ago

    Nichelle Carr: The Stories We Love Most | 100 Stories ep. 18

    What happens when the story we most want to believe about ourselves is also the story keeping us from seeing the truth? Nichelle Carr is a storyteller, technologist, activist, and attorney whose work sits at the intersection of media, law, culture, technology, and social change. In this conversation, we talk about who gets to tell the stories that become history, why telling your own story can be an act of self-determination, and how cultural narratives and systems continually reinforce one another. Nichelle argues that meaningful change may require examining “the stories we love the most about ourselves” and expanding them enough to hold what they have left out. We also explore AI and human creativity, the responsibility of institutions that shape public narratives, and what Nichelle’s legal training taught her about storytelling: Don’t hide the inconvenient facts. Lean into the truth. Because sometimes the fact that complicates the story is the thing that makes it worth telling. In this episode, Nichelle Carr shares her journey from international experiences to becoming a storyteller and technologist. She discusses the power of narrative in shaping society, the impact of AI on creativity, and the importance of telling untold stories to foster justice and understanding. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Nichelle Carr and her work 2972:07:06 Storytelling as a tool for changing the world 5333:14:01 Early influences: mythology and childhood reading 9361:00:54 Transformational experience living in Dakar, Senegal 17277:41:15 Journey from law to storytelling and entertainment 22555:28:14 Deciding which stories to tell: marginalized and untold narratives 286111:02:04 The importance of Black stories in American history 416388:49:43 The relationship between stories and systems 456944:23:20 Changing organizational culture through storytelling 543055:30:30 The danger of narratives that perpetuate systemic oppression 613055:31:01 The ancestral wisdom and Black women's role in healing 738888:52:06 AI, creativity, and the importance of safeguards 835833:19:31 The future of AI in creative industries 906944:26:37 Closing thoughts on storytelling and societal change

  3. Sep 8

    Cheri Williams: When the Savior Story Breaks | 100 Stories ep. 17

    Cheri Williams spent much of her career inside child welfare believing she was helping save children. Then she began questioning the story the system was telling — and her own role inside it. In this conversation, Cheri talks about the moment that forced her to reconsider more than twenty years of work, why institutions can become attached to narratives that preserve their own power, and what happens when the people living a story are not the people authorized to define it. We explore saviorism, lived experience, power, fear, compliance, imagination, and why systems can become so invested in the stories they already believe that alternative futures become difficult to imagine. Cheri also offers a powerful definition of Narrative Intelligence: “careful stewardship” of the stories we tell ourselves, believe, and tell about other people. And she ends somewhere important: “I’m filled with hope.” Because when people begin telling new stories, they find one another. Community forms. And what once seemed impossible can begin to become real. Check out Imagination Factory's work: https://www.imgnfactory.org/

  4. Sep 3

    Teneia Sanders: When the Dream No Longer Fits | 100 Stories ep. 16

    Teneia Sanders spent years building the life she thought she wanted: music, touring, travel, stages, and the identity of being an artist. Then she got close enough to the dream to realize something unsettling: It looked right. It didn’t feel right. In this conversation, Teneia and I talk about growing up in Mississippi, divorce, creativity, belonging, moving to Spain, and what happens when the identity you worked so hard to build starts becoming too small for who you are becoming. We also talk about tarot as a storytelling tool—and have a live moment where we interpret the same card in completely different ways. That opened up a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence: How much of what we believe comes from what happened—and how much comes from the meaning we learned to assign to it? This episode is about laying down an old dream without calling it failure, learning to ask better questions, and making room for a life that feels more like home.

  5. Aug 31

    Angie Lipski: The Spaces That Shape Us | 100 Stories Ep. 15

    What if changing your story sometimes means changing the room? Architect Angie Lipski has spent 30 years thinking about how the places we inhabit shape the way we feel, move, connect, remember, and live. In this conversation, we explore the possibility that our environments don’t simply contain our lives—they may continually reinforce certain ways of being. Angie takes us inside the design of a Montana ranch, back to the sensory landscape of her grandmother’s home, and into the small rituals that make up ordinary life: morning light, coffee, thresholds, gathering places, and the spaces where we retreat. We also explore a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence: Can a new environment help us begin living toward a new identity before we fully know who we are becoming? This episode expands the inquiry beyond the stories in our heads to the settings in which those stories are lived. Connect with Angie: https://thesensorystudiolipski.com/

  6. Aug 26

    Whitney Williams: Progress Is Possible | 100 Stories Ep. 14

    Who decides which stories rise, which problems get attention, and which versions of reality become the ones everyone else has to live inside? In Episode 14 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams talks with social entrepreneur and changemaker Whitney Williams about politics, philanthropy, documentary filmmaking, and the power stories have to shape what we notice, fund, believe, and fight for. Whitney grew up in a family where making a difference was expected. Her father, former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, taught her that "there's a genius on every block," a belief that still anchors how she thinks about leadership and community. She went on to the Clinton White House, founded the social impact agency WilliamsWorks, co-founded the Eastern Congo Initiative with Ben Affleck, and ran for governor of Montana in 2020. She brings out a hand-painted silk banner from Butte's Women's Protective Union, founded in 1893, and tells the story of learning what it actually was. She explains why the stories that break through in philanthropy are the ones that make an enormous issue human, describes the moment at the Wilma Theater when she knew a film had done its job, and shares what a man at a town hall in Broadus asked her during the governor's race, along with her answer. The conversation then moves into narrative power: money, media, repetition, and who holds the ability to make a political story feel like reality. Whitney's response is to keep talking with our neighbors and to support the artists and storytellers who can break through when nothing else can. Her definition of narrative intelligence adds something new to the inquiry. Becoming more narratively intelligent may be a collective act as much as an individual one, built through listening, learning, and making meaning together in community. She closes with a question a woman asked her in a community center outside Goma, and the answer that has stayed with her ever since. 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project asks: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

  7. Aug 21

    Sandy Carter: Before You Tell AI Your Story | 100 Stories Ep. 13

    What happens to your story once you give it to AI? In Episode 13 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams talks with technology executive, author, entrepreneur, and Equis AI CEO Sandy Carter about AI, privacy, leadership, organizational culture, and the stories shaping whether we trust or resist new technology. Drawing on her leadership experience at IBM and Amazon, Sandy shares how organizational narratives can become something people actually use to make decisions. She tells the story of being asked at Amazon to present one of her failures instead of her successes, and how that experience changed the way she thought about vulnerability, learning, and leadership. The conversation also explores the dominant stories surrounding AI today, including fears about job loss, the perception that AI is only for technical people, and growing concerns about what happens to the personal information we share with AI systems. Sandy also offers an important insight for understanding technology adoption: people’s perceptions can change once they actually experience what a technology can do. That raises a larger Narrative Intelligence question: Can experience change the story through which we understand a new technology? Paige and Sandy explore the responsibility of technology creators, the difference between AI-generated answers and human lived experience, and why judgment, context, values, and consequence still matter. For Sandy, Narrative Intelligence at the organizational level is about the story a company lives every day, one that helps people make decisions aligned with shared values and principles. 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project asks: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co.

  8. Aug 20

    Ara Tucker: The Architecture of Advantage | 100 Stories Ep. 12

    What if some of the things you think are simply part of who you are were actually built through years of exposure, access, relationships, and opportunity? In this episode of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with board director, advisor, writer, and former C-suite executive Ara Tucker about reinvention, identity, and what Ara calls The Architecture of Advantage™. Ara traces her own path from visual arts to law, higher education, Morgan Stanley, Audible, and C-suite leadership before eventually stepping away from the next expected role to build something of her own. Along the way, she began to recognize something she had previously taken for granted: many of the abilities that felt natural to her had an architecture beneath them. Early exposure became fluency. Fluency created ease. Ease could be interpreted as talent. And talent created new opportunities. Ara explains how conversations with her parents helped her recognize advantages she had inherited without consciously knowing it, and how her wife’s observation that she was, in some ways, a “Nepo baby” changed the way she understood her relationship to the art world. Paige and Ara also explore the stories that run quietly in the background of our lives, why some identities are reinforced by a whole “chorus” around us, and what happens once we begin to see the forces shaping what feels possible. Ara offers an important complication to the idea that we can simply write any story we choose: we may all have imagination, but our stories do not have equal permanence, impact, legibility, or volume. Sometimes a story also needs someone willing to amplify it. As Ara says, “Every storyteller needs a megaphone, and they are usually not their own megaphone.” The conversation also explores midlife reinvention, the fear of leaving the “golden handcuffs,” identity and belonging, coming out, Ara’s decision to stop chemically processing her hair, and why sometimes doing the thing is how we become ready for it. 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project explores one central question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? Take the Narrative Quotient assessment at StoryKeys.co. Mor eon Ara here: https://storieswork.studio/

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About

100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project explores how the stories we inherit, tell, and live by shape who we become, and what it takes to change them. Hosted by author, filmmaker, and transformational leadership coach Paige Williams, the series brings together researchers, artists, therapists, leaders, storytellers, healers, technologists, and people whose lives have been shaped by profound change. Each conversation examines story not simply as memory or entertainment, but as a force that shapes identity, belonging, relationships, leadership, culture, and human agency. At the center of the project is one question: How malleable are the stories we live by, and what does it take to change one? Across 100 conversations, Paige is listening for the human capacities that help us recognize the stories shaping us, discern whether they remain true or useful, and participate more consciously in what comes next. The ideas and insights gathered through the project will inform the foundational book Paige is writing to help define the emerging field of Narrative Intelligence.

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