My name is Professor Bambo Soyinka, and I am Director and Lead Author of the StoryArcs Programme. StoryArcs is the culmination of a four-year Programme of Research into Story Skills working with organisations across the UK, and informed by a lifetime of practice and research into Story as a dynamic process running through our cultures, societies and ecosystems.
Most of us are already living inside stories.
We use Story to sense what’s happening. To find our place in it. To choose what matters. To stay connected when things get complex. To move together when the next step isn’t obvious. This isn’t just “storytelling” as communication or authorship. It’s Story as a kind of everyday intelligence — shaping how groups learn, decide, build, and care for what they’re making.
StoryArcs begins there: with Story as a living skill in life, learning, and work.
StoryArcs is a research and leadership development programme supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We work with a network of researchers, cultural organisations, enterprises, and practitioners across the UK, exploring what helps story stay truthful, useful, and safe in real conditions — especially when there is pressure to simplify, to persuade, or to control.
Opening the Story
StoryArcs seek to widen our understanding of the many applications and uses of Story Skills. This research is important because Story is a valuable national capacity for growth, but it doesn’t always behave as we want it to. It takes time, listening and negotiation to co-develop a shared Story space that we all want to inhabit.
Story can facilitate hope, connection and coherence, but it can also tighten attention, shrink futures and spike fear. When faced with uncertainty, Story can help people move together — or it freeze action and limit the space for creative adaptation. Paying attention to the difference between Story as control and Story as ecological response is part of the work.
Story Skills
When we say “Story Skills,” we mean the underlying capacities that help people and groups:
• notice what’s emerging before it becomes a fixed narrative;
• listen well — especially across difference, power, and experience;
• keep values visible when choices are being made;
• refine what’s being said so it becomes clearer without becoming smaller;
• carry Story into forms others can work with — without flattening what’s alive.
These skills show up everywhere: in leadership, collaboration, education, health, culture, community work, policy, and organisational life. Often, they’re present but unnamed — held by individuals quietly, without a shared language or support.
A Platform For Practice
A key part of StoryArcs is the Deep Story Leadership Platform — a place for early-career professionals to develop Story skills through live projects with partner organisations, supported by a cohort, mentoring, and a wider community of practice.
Some people arrive through fellowships. Many arrive because they’ve been doing this work for years — often under other names. StoryArcs recognises those long, lived practices: making, tending, repairing, translating, building — sometimes with other job titles, sometimes with no title at all. The platform is designed to hold both: those stepping into this practice more formally, and those who have been carrying it for a long time.
Where we are now
We’re in a short winter pause between phases.
Our next cohort of Story Fellows has been selected, and we’ll be introducing them soon — alongside a wider community of Story Practitioners across the UK.
Over the last few months, we’ve been working carefully through the full range of applications and conversations and looking at additional ways to support the work already happening across the UK.
In the new year, we will be contacting previous applicants to discuss a range of runner-up initiatives and awards: from small micro-grants to shared platforms for connection, visibility, mentoring and practice. This next phase is about gathering what’s already here, letting connections form naturally, and making space for shared movement.
If you have any questions for me or are wondering where you application is in the pipeline, then please email me on storyboss@bathspa.ac.uk
Bambo Soyinka December 2025
