Hero’s Journey: Imbuing Projects and Processes with Life

The hero’s journey is a narrative method that makes projects and strategic processes more alive and tangible by superimposing a story on the procedures. Thanks to movies like Star Wars, the archetypal structure of the hero’s journey is widely known and easily accessible to many first-time users. Even though it has many successive stages in its original form, organizations can usually reduce them to the following five stations: (1) The heroes hear the call to adventure; (2) they commence their journey into the unknown where (3) they are met with many challenges, but (4) eventually they prevail and obtain a treasure before (5) they need to find a way to return to their home world. Its similarities with projects and the potential of these stations to provide a blueprint for planning upcoming strategic processes turn the hero’s journey into a narrative method with a wide range of possible applications.