Story Intelligence: A Bespoke Session for Leadership Teams Who Want to See Themselves Clearly
The most watched characters on television right now are not the heroes.
They are the villains. Walter White. Roy Cohn. Tom Ripley. The calculating intelligence of The Staircase‘s Michael Peterson. The cold precision of the protagonist in The Killer. The terrifying self-belief of Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy.
We are fascinated by them — not because we want to be them, but because they understand something that most leaders spend their entire careers never quite learning:
The person who controls the narrative controls the room.
Every week on this site, Peter de Kuster analyses a great film or series through the lens of story intelligence — the ability to read the narrative patterns that are shaping a situation, a person, or an organisation before those patterns become problems.
The Staircase is not simply a crime story. It is a masterclass in how human beings construct stories that justify decisions they have already made — and how entire teams can be drawn into a collective fiction without anyone noticing.
Man on Fire is not simply an action film. It is a study of what happens to a leader who has lost the story that gave his life direction — and what it costs everyone around him.
Imperfect Women is not simply a psychological drama. It is an exploration of the hidden narratives that women in leadership tell themselves to stay safe, stay small, and stay out of the conflict that their actual gifts would take them into.
Now Peter brings this kind of story intelligence directly to your leadership team.
What is a Story Intelligence Session?
A Story Intelligence Session is a 90-minute facilitated conversation — conducted live at your location or online — in which Peter uses one great film or series as the analytical lens for a real leadership challenge your team is currently facing.
Not a lecture. Not a workshop with coloured sticky notes and breakout rooms. A sophisticated, guided conversation in which the story of a fictional character becomes the clearest mirror your team will ever look into.
Peter selects the film with you in advance. He prepares a bespoke analytical briefing — sent to all participants before the session — so that everyone arrives with the same conceptual foundation. He then facilitates a conversation that is rarely comfortable, always illuminating, and consistently described by participants as unlike anything they have experienced in a professional development context.
Recent themes have included:
What The Staircase teaches us about the stories we construct to justify decisions we have already made — for a leadership team navigating an organisational crisis in which the official version and the real version had quietly diverged.
What Man on Fire teaches us about the leader who has lost their why — for an executive team where burnout and disengagement had begun to show up in ways that no performance review had named.
What Imperfect Women teaches us about the narratives women tell themselves to remain below the threshold of conflict — for an organisation genuinely committed to women’s leadership but uncertain why its programmes were not producing the change it intended.
What Ben-Hur teaches us about loyalty, betrayal, and the stories that outlast careers — for a team navigating a merger in which the old culture and the new one were telling incompatible stories about what the organisation was for.
What you receive:
A 90-minute Story Intelligence session, live at your location or conducted online.
A written analytical briefing sent to all participants in advance — the film’s story structure, the key archetypes in play, and the three questions the film is implicitly asking your team.
Peter’s post-session written analysis: the three narrative patterns he observed in your team’s conversation, and what they suggest about the story your organisation is currently telling itself.
Optional: a follow-up Story Coaching session for the individual leader who wants to go significantly deeper into what the session revealed.
Investment: € 3.500 per session. Travel costs for live on-site sessions are additional and agreed in advance. Available globally online, and on-site in Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Florence, and London.
To discuss your team’s specific challenge and how Peter would approach it: peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
The leaders who understand story understand power. The ones who don’t spend their careers wondering why the room never quite follows.
The Film: Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Four witnesses. One event. Four completely different stories — each one entirely true, from where its teller was standing.
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is the foundational film about something that every leadership team encounters every single week and almost never has language for: the fact that the story told about a situation depends entirely on who is telling it, what they need it to mean, and what they cannot afford to see.
A samurai is found dead in a forest. A bandit, the samurai’s wife, a woodcutter, and — through a medium — the samurai himself each give accounts of what happened. The accounts are irreconcilable. No one is lying, exactly. But no one is telling the whole truth. Each narrator constructs the version of events in which they appear most favourably — or most coherently — to themselves.
This is not a story about dishonesty. It is a story about narrative self-interest — the way every human being, and every organisation, shapes the story of what happened to protect the story of who they are.
Leadership teams do this constantly. The story told in the board meeting and the story told in the corridor after the board meeting are rarely the same. The story the organisation tells about its last failed project and the story its former employees tell are irreconcilable in exactly the Rashomon way — not because anyone is lying, but because everyone is telling the version that preserves their sense of themselves as competent, well-intentioned, and essentially right.
A Story Intelligence Breakfast does not ask a leadership team to be more honest. It does something more interesting and more difficult: it asks them to notice which story they are telling, and why, and what it is costing them to tell it. Kurosawa’s film gives the group a safe distance — it is about a dead samurai in medieval Japan — while the conversation it opens is entirely about the room they are sitting in.
The woodcutter, at the end of the film, makes a small act of decency that partially restores his integrity. He had withheld something. He confesses it, quietly, without fanfare. The monk says that this act has restored his faith in human beings. A leadership team that can do the equivalent — that can identify the story they have been withholding and bring it into the room — has done something genuinely rare. That is what the Story Intelligence Breakfast is for.