The Campfire Approach: Informal Storytelling as Cultural Glue

“Your most powerful stories aren’t being crafted in your marketing department. They’re being shared over coffee, in corridor conversations, and in team retrospectives.”

The Power of Informal Narratives

Your communications budget may be invested in slick videos and glossy case studies, but your organisation’s most effective storytellers are sitting at lunch tables and in messaging channels, sharing experiences informally. Their unpolished, authentic accounts create more gravitational pull than your meticulously crafted corporate narratives.

This shouldn’t surprise us. For hundreds of thousands of years before PowerPoint, humans gathered around fires to share experiences, transmit knowledge, and strengthen community bonds. The campfire—where stories have been shared for millennia—didn’t have slides, didn’t require approval, and certainly didn’t have an agenda. Yet it created the cultural cohesion that helped humanity survive and thrive.

Today’s most distinctive organisations have rediscovered this ancient truth: around campfires, not boardroom tables, is where cultures are truly formed and stories naturally emerge. They understand that informal narrative exchange creates deeper connections than formal communications ever could, and they’ve built modern equivalents of the campfire into their organisational design.

Forget the expensive storytelling consultants and elaborate brand narrative frameworks. The most impactful approach to organisational storytelling might be the simplest: create the conditions for natural human connection, and the stories that matter will emerge on their own.

The Formality Trap

When organisations formalise storytelling, something essential gets lost in translation. The authenticity that makes stories compelling becomes polished away. The rough edges that create human connection get smoothed into corporate blandness. The spontaneity that sparks emotional response gets scripted into predictability.

Research in cognitive neuroscience helps explain why. When we encounter obviously crafted marketing narratives, our brains activate different regions than when we hear authentic personal accounts. The former triggers our analytical, skeptical faculties, while the latter activates regions associated with empathy and emotional connection. Perfect is the enemy of persuasive. The moment a story becomes too polished, it loses the rough edges that make it human and believable.

Remote teams face particular challenges in creating authentic narrative cultures. Without physical proximity, casual exchanges must be deliberately fostered. Buffer, the social media management platform, has tackled this challenge by creating regular virtual spaces for team members to share personal and professional stories, building connection in a distributed environment. By emphasising transparency and creating predictable moments for informal exchange, they’ve maintained cultural cohesion despite physical distance.

The formality trap manifests in many ways:

• The official company blog that sounds nothing like how people actually speak
• The customer case studies stripped of all struggle and complexity
• The internal communications that present a sanitised version of reality
• The leadership narratives that never acknowledge vulnerability or uncertainty

Each of these represents a missed opportunity to harness the magnetic power of authentic human storytelling.

The Campfire Principle

Anthropologists have long studied how gathering around fires fundamentally shaped human cognitive and social development. Recent research suggests that firelit gatherings extended the day, creating space for different types of conversation—reflective, imaginative, and story-focused—that drove cultural development. These firelit circles weren’t just practical; they created the conditions for distinctly human forms of connection through narrative.

The implications for modern organisations are profound. The physical and psychological architecture of the campfire—circular, equal, face-to-face, focused yet relaxed—creates conditions for narrative emergence that formal meetings almost never achieve. When people sit in circles rather than rows, stories emerge naturally. The geometry of gathering shapes the narrative that follows.

The UK retail company Timpson exemplifies this approach through what might be called “shop floor stories.” Under the leadership of James Timpson, the company practices what they call “upside-down management,” where authority is delegated to frontline colleagues to best serve customers. The organisation famously employs ex-offenders and has built a distinctive culture through the sharing of authentic experiences rather than through top-down messaging. These shop floor stories become the cultural fabric that communicates “how we do things here” more effectively than any policy manual could.

The neurological impact of direct, face-to-face storytelling environments explains their distinctive power. When we hear stories in intimate settings, our brains release oxytocin, the bonding hormone that creates feelings of trust and connection. The campfire creates biological conditions for deepened relationship through narrative exchange.

Three Campfire Creation Principles

Creating modern campfires—whether physical or virtual—doesn’t require elaborate systems or significant resources. Three simple principles can transform your organisation’s storytelling culture:

1. Circles, Not Rows

The physical arrangement of people fundamentally impacts the stories that emerge. Research on circular seating arrangements shows they increase participation equity, psychological safety, and sense of belonging. When everyone can see everyone else’s face, power dynamics shift, participation broadens, and narratives diversify.

Practical application:

• Rearrange meeting spaces from rectangular to circular when possible
• In virtual meetings, use gallery view and encourage cameras on
• Consider standing circles for brief daily exchanges
• Eliminate physical barriers between participants (like tables)
• Ensure leaders are part of the circle, not separate from it

2. Questions, Not Presentations

Authentic stories rarely emerge from presentations. They emerge from powerful questions that invite reflection and personal experience. The difference between “What did we achieve?” and “What happened along the way?” can transform a status update into a rich narrative exchange.

Powerful story-eliciting questions include:

• “What surprised you in this process?”
• “When did you feel most aligned with our purpose?”
• “What’s a moment you’ll remember from this project?”
• “Where did you struggle, and what helped you through?”
• “How did this experience change your perspective?”

These questions unlock the human story beneath the metrics and milestones, revealing the narrative gold that builds connection and learning.

3. Ritual, Not Agenda

Predictable spaces create the psychological safety required for vulnerable storytelling. Rituals—recurring practices with symbolic significance—provide the container for authentic expression. Unlike rigid agendas that specify outcomes, rituals create space for emergent content within familiar formats.

Effective narrative rituals:

• Have clear opening and closing elements
• Occur at regular intervals (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Include symbolic elements (objects, phrases, traditions)
• Allow for emergence within structure
• Evolve organically over time

Toyota’s Quality Circles represent a ritualised approach to worker-led improvement narratives. What began as structured problem-solving evolved into cultural storytelling, where frontline experiences become organisational knowledge through regular exchange. The ritual nature of these gatherings creates psychological safety for authentic sharing.

The Power of Informal Storytelling Across Industries

The campfire approach transcends industry boundaries, organisational size, and cultural contexts. Its principles work as effectively in manufacturing as in creative services, in ten-person teams as in global enterprises.

In software development and open-source communities, the power of informal narrative exchange is particularly evident. Platforms like GitLab have developed approaches to virtual community-building that emphasise storytelling over formal documentation. Their “Contribute” events and “Unfiltered” channels create spaces where developers share challenges and solutions, strengthening distributed community through informal knowledge exchange.

Engineering firms like Arup have developed traditions of knowledge-sharing that balance technical precision with accessible storytelling. By creating regular forums for informal exchange across specialties, they’ve built a distinctive culture of collaborative innovation through narrative.

Retail organisations have discovered the power of daily storytelling rituals. American grocery chain Trader Joe’s has developed a distinctive approach through daily “huddles” where store experiences become shared narratives. These informal gatherings create the cultural foundation that differentiates their shopping experience.

The common elements across these diverse examples include:

• Regular, predictable spaces for informal exchange
• Leadership that models vulnerability and authentic sharing
• Questions that elicit personal experience, not just outcomes
• Equal participation structures that flatten hierarchies
• The capture and circulation of emergent stories
• Connection of personal narratives to organisational purpose

The Leader as Fire Keeper

In traditional cultures, fire keepers played a crucial role—not controlling the stories told around the fire, but creating and maintaining the conditions that allowed those stories to emerge. Today’s leaders face a similar challenge: not dictating organisational narratives, but fostering environments where authentic stories can surface and circulate.

Leaders extinguish storytelling cultures when they:

• Interrupt or shut down emerging narratives
• Respond defensively to stories that reveal problems
• Value polish over authenticity
• Keep themselves separate from narrative circles
• Rush to solutions before stories have fully unfolded
• Fail to model vulnerable sharing themselves

Conversely, leaders kindle storytelling cultures when they:

• Create psychological safety for authentic expression
• Ask questions that elicit personal experience
• Share their own stories with appropriate vulnerability
• Listen deeply without immediately problem-solving
• Highlight and circulate emerging stories
• Connect personal narratives to organisational purpose

James Timpson exemplifies this fire-keeping leadership role through his practice of collecting and sharing frontline employee stories during branch visits. Rather than focusing on inspection, these visits prioritise listening to shop floor experiences, which then become part of the organisation’s cultural fabric.

Low-Cost, High-Impact Implementation

Implementing the campfire approach requires minimal resources but delivers substantial impact. Start with this simple three-step process:

1. Find Your Natural Campfires

Before creating new structures, identify where stories already emerge naturally in your organisation:

• Where do people gather informally?
• When do conversations shift from transactional to narrative?
• Who are the natural storytellers and story collectors?
• What spaces (physical or virtual) foster authentic exchange?
• Which team rituals already generate stories?

These existing campfires provide the foundation for expanding narrative culture.

2. Create a Simple Storytelling Ritual

Design a minimal structure focused on experience sharing:

• Choose a regular cadence (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Create a circular format with equal participation
• Develop 2-3 powerful questions that elicit personal experience
• Establish simple opening and closing elements
• Implement in one team or department as prototype
• Start small—15-30 minutes is often sufficient

For remote teams, consider virtual approaches like Buffer’s regular sessions where team members share work challenges and solutions, creating cultural cohesion despite physical distance.

3. Capture and Connect

Develop light-touch methods for preserving and circulating emergent stories:

• Rotate the role of “story catcher” to document key narratives
• Create simple channels for sharing stories across teams
• Connect emerging stories to organisational purpose and values
• Use narrative patterns to inform decision-making
• Allow for evolution based on what emerges

The key is maintaining informality while creating sufficient structure for stories to spread and connect.

Keeping the Flames Alive

The campfire approach offers a radical alternative to conventional corporate storytelling—one that harnesses humanity’s oldest knowledge-sharing tradition for today’s organisational challenges. By creating spaces for informal narrative exchange, you build cultural cohesion, drive positioning reinforcement, and create gravitational pull more effectively than formal initiatives ever could.

The most valuable stories in your organisation aren’t waiting to be created; they’re waiting to be uncovered. They’re already being shared in corridors and chat channels, over lunch tables and in team retrospectives. Your task isn’t to manufacture narratives but to create the conditions where authentic stories naturally emerge and spread.

The campfire—that ancient technology for human connection—offers a timeless model for modern organisations seeking authenticity, cohesion, and distinction. Around these simple circles, not in slick corporate videos or polished case studies, is where the true story of your organisation continues to be written, day by day, conversation by conversation.

Time to gather your team, rearrange those chairs into a circle, and ask the questions that matter. The stories that emerge might surprise you—and they’ll almost certainly be more powerful than anything your marketing department could have scripted.