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Introduces LEGO’s Bionicle toy: it was aimed at boys aged 7‐12 and was developed as part of a new ongoing epic story, with the emphasis on this “movie” aspect rather than on the constructional aspects of the toy: constructional toys are a shrinking market because boys no longer want to take the time to complete them. Relates the Bionicle concept to LEGO’s previous successful toys Slizer and RoboRiders, and to its existing success in buying into stories like Star Wars. Describes how LEGO worked closely with Advance to develop the story and to market the concept in advance of the product; this was very successful. Moves on to the next step, which was to market the “movie” by a wide range of media, such as posters and cinema advertisements, plus media that could carry the parts of the story itself – a website, a CD‐ROM and comics; this carefully designed mosaic of media was accompanied by compelling graphics, phasing the story to maintain involvement, and getting the children to pass on the story parts to each other (i.e. peer‐to‐peer marketing). Concludes with how the campaign has benefited the overall perception of LEGO and led to a wider product range.

The paper seeks to identify why we need to get past the bits and bullets – e‐mails, text messaging and PowerPoint presentations – and tell the full story. Story is the most powerful way to change a culture. By identifying with beliefs and behaviors, stories are shown as the lynchpin for social, economic, organizational, and individual change.

This paper shows how cultural change is driven by stories and provides a process through which leaders can work to drive change within their own organizations using the Story Tools: WinBook, StoryMatrix and Story Coach, eScenes and Scenarios. Together the tools provide the framework for leaders to be more effective and consistent leaders.

Stories are the most successful way to change a culture. By “adding back” context, stories carry success and failure messages, they allow us to reflect and learn by drawing us in, and finally stories influence us to create the right kinds of behavior.

This paper offers practical tools for leaders to capture and tell stories that enhance their leadership skills, as well as offering insights into changing a company's culture.

The originality of this approach to story lies in the story tools – StoryMatrix, Story Coach, WinBook, eScenes and Scenarios developed by the author and his company WisdomTools. The authors's book, What's Your Story? Using Stories to Ignite Performance and Be More Successful, provides the reader with more in‐depth background on the original Story Tools.

Bernard Malamud said “…a short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime. The drama is tense, happens fast, and is more often than not outlandish. In a few pages the story portrays the complexity of a life while producing the surprise and effect of knowledge…” According to Helen Haines, “The short story may be, perhaps, best defined as the equivalent in fiction to the lyric in poetry and the one‐act play in drama: the intensified, concentrated expression of an idea or theme…It demands greater, but less sustained, mastery of style than does the novel…The brevity of the short story, while it limits, also makes for freedom…” The freedoms it allows include posing problems without solutions, ignoring logical development to a conclusion, and referring to vague ideas which are never detailed. These allowable omissions of the short story lead to its great power for the reader. For a short story is only completed through the interaction of its reader. “The readers are forced into active collaboration: they flesh out the story through memory, sympathy, and insight, and they feel its truth as immediately as a toothache.”

Purpose – This chapter explores the complexity and tensions inherent in the question of how story becomes research with particular attention to the use of narrative research in studying teacher education.

Approach – To do this, we begin each section with a narrative fragment from earlier published research in which we collaborated (Hamilton, 1995). Then, we use narrative research analysis tools to explore the meaning of each fragment, lay that understanding alongside research accounts and wonderings about research in and by teacher educators, and consider the fragment in terms of specific understandings of narrative inquiry as research methodology for studying teacher education.

Findings – This chapter examines when story moves to research while probing the tensions between knowledge and living as teachers, teacher educators, and teacher educator researchers. Using the first fragment, we explore fulfilling roles as a teacher educator by using a narrative analysis tool that teases apart the author's role of narrator, actor, and character. In the second fragment, we consider the contexts that influence a teacher educator researcher by examining the fragment to determine the levels of narrative. In the third fragment, we utilize the tools of plotlines and tensions to unpack the competing plotlines of epistemology (modernist vs. narrative) ending with an examination of the importance of ontology in narrative work. In our fourth fragment, we unpack nine approaches to narrative by examining the essential role of story for each element of the research process.

Research implications – As teacher educator researchers, we always stand in the midst – in the midst of the story where we may be simultaneously narrator, character, and actor, in the midst of living the research we are most interested in studying. Within a single moment, we can act as teacher, teacher educator, and teacher educator researcher when our research focuses on our own practice. Our experience as we live it represents the tension between arrival and arriving.

Value – The value of this chapter is the way in which it demonstrates narrative analysis and distinguishes among various approaches to narrative research.

There has been growing interest in narrative ethics over the last three decades. However, narratology, or the study of narratives, has a much longer history dating back to Plato and Aristotle.³ Structural linguistics, and its formal study of grammar and structure of language, was a major contributor to the development of the classification and interpretation of narratives.⁴ This structuralist period was followed by an increased interest in the relationships between narratives and social and historical dynamics and ideologies. Key social theorists, such as Derrida, Bakhtin and Ricoeur, have urged us to consider the relationship of the text to the way we understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. In summary, the study of narratives long preceded its association with ethics, and it was only recently that the interest in narratives has been adopted by the health-care disciplines, notably medicine and nursing.