What kinds of projects can use NarraFirma and PNI?

Updated

NarraFirma and Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) fit projects where a group needs to make collective sense of a complex situation by sharing and interpreting personal experience stories. The site's own project examples span community market planning, work-life balance, culture merging after an acquisition, and theft prevention — so the method is not limited to one sector. If your situation involves values, beliefs, feelings, or perspectives that a survey or dashboard would flatten, PNI is designed for it.

What PNI is, in one paragraph

PNI is a form of Participatory Action Research in which groups of people share and work with their stories of personal experiences to understand each other and to make collective sense of complex issues and situations. It focuses on the profound consideration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through the recounting and interpretation of lived experience. NarraFirma is the web application built to support carrying out PNI projects from start to finish.

Project types shown on the site

The homepage lists four illustrative projects. Each one shows a different reason a group turns to stories.

Project Situation What stories were used for
Community market planning A community market's board wanted to keep the market going strong Listening to customers
Work-life balance Managers discovered their people were overworked Revealing that everybody thought everybody else should do more
Merging cultures A big company acquired a small company Understanding how two cultures could work together
Theft prevention A police force held long-standing assumptions about theft Overturning assumptions about when, where, and why people steal

The pattern across all four: the group held an assumption or a stuck situation, and ordinary stories surfaced something the group could act on.

When this approach is a good fit

Use these as decision conditions rather than a checklist to score.

  • The problem is about meaning, not just measurement. Work-life balance and culture merging are cases where the numbers existed but the interpretation was wrong.
  • You need the group's own members to reach the insight. PNI is participatory: ordinary people share ordinary stories, and the discovery is theirs to use.
  • You want to challenge an existing assumption. The theft prevention example is the clearest case — the point was to overturn long-standing beliefs.
  • You can commit to a full project cycle. The site describes NarraFirma as supporting projects "from start to finish," and offers online, project-based PNI Practicum courses for practice.

When to look elsewhere

If you only need a quick poll, a single interview, or a metric reported upward, the participatory interpretation step is overhead you may not want. PNI's value comes from the group working with the stories together, not from story collection alone.

How NarraFirma supports the work

The site describes the application in two roles:

  • A checklist — practical guidance as you work: questions to answer, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, activities that help you make decisions, and just-in-time advice.
  • A journal — it helps you keep a record as the project proceeds.

Cynthia Kurtz wrote the book on PNI (Working with Stories), and she and Paul Fernhout wrote NarraFirma. The site states that Cynthia offers support, training, and consulting, and links to PNI Practicum courses described as "Online, project-based PNI practice."

A practical way to decide

  1. Write down the assumption or stuck situation your group holds.
  2. Ask whether hearing members' own experience stories could change how the group understands it.
  3. If yes, and the group can participate in interpreting those stories, PNI is a candidate method and NarraFirma is the tool built for it.
  4. If you want to build skill first, the PNI Practicum is the site's own entry point.

For the underlying method, see the book Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization and its siblings in the Working with Stories series.