The Storytelling Certification: Final artwork

I’m launching the Social Leadership Storytelling Certification later this week, and have just finalised the artwork, so sharing it today. I’ve been working with Phillip on this piece, building out the landscape we first visited for ‘The Landscape of Trust’. The artwork for that showed a wide open plain, with a small group of people looking out over it: the idea was that the landscape is one that we explore alone, but that the trust we find is what bonds us together. In this image, we are around the fire, the most traditional location for storytelling.

I’ve also included the oak leaves in this, forming a wreath along the bottom: they represent the wider Forest of Social Leaders, and the notion that, to grow, to learn, we will have to shed some of the ‘leaves that we know’, and develop some new ones!

In the background, you can see the mountains: these represent the wilderness. Whilst today, we tend to find comfort in ‘escaping to the wilderness‘, in taking time out of the city, as recently as Victorian times, ‘wilderness’ was seen as threatening, a dark and unknown space. It represents those stories we do not know, the spaces that we need to explore.

The Landscape of Stories represents a new evolution in my own work, carrying forward to approach i have been using around ‘trust’, representing the learning as a landscape that we each explore, but bringing together work around ‘types of power’, ‘subversion and dissent’, and ‘tribes and trust’. I look forward to sharing it, and, once it’s fully prototyped, i will revisit it, possibly with a ‘Sketchbook’, or ‘100 day journey’.