100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project

Writer, director, producer, and creative strategist Ryan Cunningham joins 100 Stories for a conversation about ADHD, identity, comedy, representation, creativity, and the stories we construct around our lives.

Ryan’s ADHD diagnosis changed the way she understood her past.

The events themselves stayed exactly where they were. What changed was the meaning she gave them.

Things she had interpreted as personal shortcomings suddenly had context. And with that context came a different relationship with herself: more kindness, more understanding, and less fighting against how her mind actually works.

We talk about meditation, directing, comedy, representation, and the moment Ryan stopped waiting for permission to lead creatively.

Then Ryan offers several ideas that push my thinking about Narrative Intelligence.

What happened and the story we construct about what happened are different things.

A useful story has to be strong enough to hold complexity.

And sometimes intelligence may require recognizing that something does not need to become a story at all.

What in your past might mean something different if you had more context now?

More about Ryan Cunningham: https://www.instagram.com/ryanecunningham

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Former spy, author, and speaker Meegan Kriley-Mackay joins 100 Stories to explore human intelligence, Narrative Intelligence, artificial intelligence, soft interrogation, and what she calls the “human program.”

Meegan’s premise is that every person enters life inside a program they did not choose—family, culture, experiences, beliefs, expectations, and ways of interpreting the world.

Her model of human intelligence begins when we become aware of that program, question it, imagine beyond it, make choices, and learn to connect differently.

That creates a fascinating problem for this project.

Those ideas closely resemble the five capacities I’m exploring in Narrative Intelligence: Recognition, Discernment, Flexibility, Agency, and Enactment.

So Meegan and I spend part of this conversation asking whether Narrative Intelligence is its own capacity, a dimension of human intelligence, or whether we are approaching similar territory with different language.

We also talk about her path into intelligence work, interrogation training, active listening, open-ended questions, and what AI makes newly urgent about understanding human judgment and human capacity.

I leave this conversation with more questions than answers—which is exactly what this project is for.

What part of the program you inherited have you never stopped to question?

More about Meegan Kriley-Mackay: https://www.softinterrogator.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Strategist and qualitative researcher Farrah Bostic joins 100 Stories for a conversation about listening, human judgment, data, artificial intelligence, persuasion, and everything that can disappear when we reduce human experience to a transcript.

Farrah listens to people for a living.

For more than two decades, she has worked inside qualitative research, sitting with people in their homes and communities and helping organizations understand not simply what people say, but what those experiences might actually mean.

One of the clearest examples comes from a research project where the transcript suggested people were uncertain about an idea.

The room told another story.

People were smiling, laughing, touching the materials, and interacting with each other. Farrah told the client that reading the transcript alone would lead them toward the wrong conclusion.

That opens a much larger question:

How much of meaning exists outside language?

We talk about body language, emotion, environment, culture, power, status, and the interpretation the researcher brings into every listening experience.

Farrah also challenges the idea that data is neutral.

Every questionnaire begins with a question. Every question reflects some assumption about what matters. And every research project begins with at least a tentative story about what the researcher expects to find.

Narrative enters before the first answer is ever collected.

Then we turn to AI.

Farrah uses AI tools in her research and finds them useful for searching and summarizing large volumes of material. But she argues that they tend to privilege consensus over outliers and can miss the emotional, embodied, historical, and relational context that gives an experience its deeper meaning.

That matters because the unusual answer may be the beginning of something new.

We also explore cultural stories about generations, why narratives can survive evidence that contradicts them, and what separates data-driven decision-making from human judgment.

Near the end, Farrah offers a simple warning about stories:

We can get stuck in them.

A story can have been true and still not be the only story available to us now.

The question I’m leaving with:

What disappears when we confuse the words someone said with the meaning of their experience?

More about Farrah Bostic: https://thedifferenceengine.co/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Writer and entrepreneur Rachel Catherine Allen joins 100 Stories for a conversation about inherited narratives, family estrangement, religious identity, writing, personal agency, forgiveness, and how language shapes the stories we live by.

Rachel is the author of 23 books and founder of Bolt from the Blue Copywriting. She grew up in a deeply conservative religious family with a clear story about who she was supposed to become. Writing became one of the first places she could question that story and imagine another life.

She started journaling when she was nine. Years later, going no contact with her family forced her to rebuild her understanding of herself from the ground up.

Rachel describes a period when she had lost confidence in her own perception of reality and decided to begin with one thing she could trust: knowing when something hurt. From there came other questions. What feels safe? What makes me happy? Who do I want to become?

We talk about how inherited stories become identity, why seeing other people live differently can expand what feels possible, how words create worlds, and what it means to understand someone else’s narrative without giving that narrative authority over your life.

Rachel also talks about becoming many different versions of herself over time and why identity does not have to be a fixed destination.

The question I’m leaving with:

What story were you handed, and what are you doing with it now?

More about Rachel Catherine Allen: https://www.boltfromthebluecopywriting.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Stanford professor Dr. Jo Boaler joins 100 Stories for a conversation about growth mindset, identity, public narrative, mathematical ability, struggle, and the stories we develop about intelligence.

Jo has spent years studying what happens when people internalize ideas like “I’m bad at math,” “I’m gifted,” or “I’m smart.”

Then she found herself inside a public story she did not create.

After her work in math education became nationally controversial, Jo received thousands of abusive messages and death threats and watched a version of herself circulate through media and social media that she did not recognize as her own.

We talk about what happens to your sense of identity when other people gain the power to define you publicly, how Jo protected her own understanding of who she was, and what she learned about struggle, creativity, courage, and the space between what happens to us and the meaning we make from it.

This conversation also changed the Narrative Intelligence Project.

I asked Jo whether Narrative Intelligence should be reduced to a single score. Her answer helped me see how easily a number can become another fixed story about a person.

So in this episode, I made a decision: the overall Narrative Quotient score is going away.

The question I’m leaving with:

When someone else tells a powerful story about who you are, how do you decide what belongs to you?

More about Jo Boaler: https://www.youcubed.org/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Actor, writer, leadership consultant, and author Pam Sherman joins 100 Stories for a conversation about identity, leadership, authenticity, personal narrative, and what she calls the “believability gap” — the distance between who we think we are, how we believe we’re showing up, and how other people actually experience us.

Pam spent years moving between law, acting, writing, and leadership work. Her own story raises a question that sits at the center of Narrative Intelligence: what happens when the identity you have been living no longer fits?

We talk about the stories we inherit about success, work, and who we are supposed to become; what it takes to behave differently when an old story is still present; and why insight alone rarely creates change.

Pam also challenges one of our culture’s favorite ideas: authenticity.

Knowing yourself matters. So does listening, empathy, relationship, and paying attention to the impact you have on other people.

That tension led us into a bigger question for the Narrative Intelligence Project: Is emotional intelligence part of the foundation for Narrative Intelligence? And what happens when someone understands their story but still struggles to act differently?

The question I’m leaving with:

How different is the person you believe yourself to be from the person other people actually experience?

More about Pam Sherman: https://www.thepamsherman.com/my-story

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Movie marketing executive Jeremy Sauter joins 100 Stories for a conversation about storytelling, framing, attention, audience psychology, and how narratives shape what people believe.

Jeremy has spent decades marketing movies and thinking about the gap between the story a filmmaker intends, the story an audience experiences, and the story marketing creates to connect the two.

We talk about why framing matters, what audience reactions can teach us, and the responsibility that comes with deciding which parts of a story get amplified or left behind.

Jeremy also shares how he began protecting his own attention from the constant stream of messages competing to define what matters. He wants to move through life more like a museum: at his own pace, choosing what deserves his attention.

And we explore a question at the heart of Narrative Intelligence: human beings naturally create coherence from incomplete information. What happens when the story we construct begins to feel like the whole truth?

The question I’m leaving with:

Who framed the story you are currently treating as reality?

More about Jeremy Sauter: https://www.jeremysauter.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Dr. David Drake joins 100 Stories for a conversation about narrative coaching, story change, human agency, identity, and what actually allows people to live differently.

David has spent more than 30 years developing narrative coaching and working with the stories people carry into their lives, relationships, and work.

We talk about a problem that keeps surfacing throughout the Narrative Intelligence Project: a person can understand where a story came from and still remain deeply shaped by it.

David challenges the idea that insight automatically creates transformation. He describes stories as living processes whose meaning changes as we change, and he explores what happens when we gain more freedom in our relationship to a story even while parts of it remain present.

We also discuss context, self-regulation, choice, release, enactment, and the gap between recognizing a narrative and actually behaving differently.

This conversation helped sharpen one of the central questions in my work:

What allows a person to move from understanding a story to living with greater agency in relation to it?

The question I’m leaving with:

What story do you understand clearly and still find yourself living?

More about David Drake: https://www.themomentinstitute.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Filmmaker Julián Nunez joins 100 Stories for a conversation about storytelling, representation, history, culture, creative responsibility, and who gets to decide which version of a story becomes the one people remember.

Julián grew up in New Mexico and builds films from history, imagination, culture, and lived experience.

While researching a film about Paulita Maxwell, he discovered that the version of her story he was constructing did not fully align with the family’s version.

He chose to bring the family into the process, listen to what they knew, and revise the script.

We talk about what happens when writers, directors, actors, families, and audiences all interpret the same material differently, and how power enters the process of deciding which version gets amplified.

We also explore a central Narrative Intelligence question:

What responsibility do we have when we tell a story that belongs partly to someone else?

The question I’m leaving with:

When several people hold different versions of the same story, whose version gets to become the one everyone remembers?

More about Julián Nunez: https://www.juliannunezfilms.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/

Dr. Mónica Lebrón joins 100 Stories for a conversation about workaholism, identity, achievement, ambition, leadership, sabbatical, and what happens when a career becomes part of who you believe you are.

Mónica spent 27 years working in college athletics. She loved the work, climbed through high-performance environments, made herself available to everyone, and wore her work ethic as a badge of honor.

Then she was forced off the hamster wheel.

With time away came a realization:

“Work didn’t love me back.”

Mónica began looking differently at the sacrifices she had made, the role achievement played in her identity, and the way titles, brands, salary, and success can slowly become measures of who we think we are.

We talk about what she has learned during more than two years of sabbatical, why her ambition has not disappeared, and how she is trying to build a relationship with work that leaves room for herself.

Then we reach a harder question.

Mónica understands the old pattern. She can see what happened and describe what she wants to do differently. She also knows that a traditional high-performance environment could activate many of the same habits again.

She says she will not know whether she has truly changed until she is back inside that environment.

That tension gets very close to something I am trying to understand through Narrative Intelligence: what allows insight to become action?

Mónica’s own definition of Narrative Intelligence is “owning your own script.”

The question I’m leaving with:

What story have you already understood that you are still learning how to live differently?

More about Dr. Mónica Lebrón: https://www.drmonicalebron.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/