encommon is a narrative strategy consultancy that works alongside leaders and groups to surface and weave diverse perspectives into resonant stories shaping a future of collective flourishing for everyone.
approach
Narrative strategy works at the level of meaning-making—an approach to shifting the beliefs and worldviews that shape how people understand themselves and the world around them. Storytelling brings that strategy to life through the craft of translating complex ideas into nuanced, vivid, multi-perspective, and emotionally resonant accounts that move people.
Stories are therefore one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping enduring change.
When people encounter a story that helps them see, make sense of, and find meaning within the systems they belong to, real shifts begin to take place. Relationships deepen, collective intelligence grows, and new possibilities emerge.
Yet today, most stories told about social change follow an all-too-familiar arc, elevating individuals and single solutions for overcoming problems. If we know that changemaking is nonlinear, requires diverse groups to collaborate over time, and unfolds in ways that resist tidy explanation, then how we tell that story matters more than we often recognize.
Our work flows from a central question:
How can we tell ethical stories that show how change actually happens?
Our engagements, whether they involve story-centered learning and impact, communications, or facilitated sensemaking, are designed to create opportunities for mutual learning—for individual story-holders and across the groups involved. We bring journalistic sensibility and a systems lens, attuned to the emotional resonance of individual experience while listening carefully for the tension and pattern that emerges across perspectives. We also hold a commitment to ethical storytelling, an ongoing practice that centers relationship, transparency, informed consent, and ensuring that people are seen in their dignity and strength.
Those we work with often find that our engagements leave behind more than a deliverable, including shared language for talking about the work, new ways of seeing and making sense of what people are part of, and shifts in thinking that ripple outward long after our work together comes to a close. We aim to leave people with a clearer, more expansive understanding of what they are part of—and the tools to keep sharing their stories as they unfold.
Leadership
Jessica Conrad, Founder & Principal
Jessica Conrad is a narrative strategist, qualitative researcher, and facilitator who helps purpose-driven leaders and groups find and tell the story of complex change—with the warmth of deep relationship and the rigor of a systems lens.
Her path to this practice runs through systems change philanthropy, where for over a decade she has been designing and facilitating story-centered learning and impact processes, leading strategic communications for foundations and multi-stakeholder networks, and developing the storytelling fluency of organizations and teams working on complex social challenges. She is drawn to the places where disciplines cross and meaning emerges: weaving multiple perspectives, listening for patterns, and making sense of complexity alongside the people living it.
Stories of Change: How a Systems Change Approach is Transforming a Region, a publication and growing body of work Jessica leads for Rotary Charities of Traverse City, was named by an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as a shining example of emerging approaches to systems change evaluation. Beyond documenting the work of collaborative initiatives, the storytelling is actively shaping a cultural narrative about what's possible for the region. She presented her methodology at the American Evaluation Association Conference and has shared it through workshops for the School of Systems Change, reaching practitioners across 16 countries.
Jessica holds a master's degree in strategic leadership for sustainability, with a focus on systems and complexity, from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden and a transformative coaching certification from the Certified Coaches Alliance. Earlier in her career, she worked as a journalist and ghostwriter, where she wrote about the sharing economy and contributed to a Wall Street Journal bestselling book.
Every role along Jessica’s path followed the same question: how do people understand what they're part of, and how does that understanding move them? That question now guides her work with foundations, collaborative networks, and social impact organizations working across issues including health equity, climate and energy, food systems, and community development.
Select PARTNERS
Cancer Free Economy Network
CoCreative
Collectrify
DN Batten Foundation
Global Knowledge Initiative
Northern Michigan Community Health Innovation Region
Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness
Rotary Charities of Traverse City
School of Systems Change
CONNECT
Behind the name
en·com·mon
to hold in common, to share.
The name reflects what has always been at the heart of this work—a belief in our shared humanity and the power of what we build, protect, and tend to together. The word commons carries a long history in shared lands, shared resources, and the shared life that communities have always organized around. encommon is an orientation toward that same spirit in collective intelligence, mutual flourishing, and the stories we carry together.
