The story behind the story
In 2001, working for the British Council in Seoul, Steve Rawlings helped introduce a new approach to English language teaching into South Korean secondary schools. Not a textbook revision. A fundamental shift in method - from grammar and repetition to communication and contextual usage. The Ministry of Education adopted it. Millions of students learned English differently because of it.
That is what good communication can do when it is built right. Change things at scale.
For the next fifteen years, Steve built a senior career in international education - Study Group, INTO University Partnerships, the British Council - working across the UK, Korea, Kuwait and Spain. He was good at it. He was effective. And he was, in the way that senior careers demand, increasingly far from the things that mattered most to him.
In 2018, at the age of 49, Steve was diagnosed with COPD.
It stopped him. Not immediately, and not completely - but in the way that a diagnosis like that tends to; it changed the shape of the questions he was asking. Not just about work, but about what the work was for.
If this is the time I have, what do I want to do with it?
He made a decision. He would stop sacrificing family moments for professional commitments. He would do work that made a difference at every level — not just organisationally, but personally.
He took on two children’s storytelling businesses, left the security of a senior salary, bonuses and pension contributions, and began driving his own work and winning his own contracts. He also began to study storytelling properly — not as a communications technique, but as a human phenomenon. He read the neuroscience. He understood why stories are trusted in a way that facts alone never are. He watched what happened when a story landed right: the room changed. People leaned in. Things shifted.
And he recognised something he had been doing, in one form or another, for his entire career.
Eleven months after the diagnosis, pulmonary specialists at the Royal Brompton Hospital delivered their findings. A new form of spectrometry test had been misread. There was no COPD. There had never been any COPD.
Steve had already left. Already jumped. Already built something new.
The diagnosis that turned out to be wrong had turned out to be exactly right.
Story of Business exists because of that moment. It brings together twenty years of senior experience in international organisations, a deep understanding of how and why stories work, and the practical ability to help leaders, teams and organisations communicate in ways that move people.
Sometimes the thing that forces your hand turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Most of us wait to be forced. We stay with what we know, with how we have always done it. But sometimes you have to create that risk yourself — because the bigger prize is on the other side of it.
You already have stories worth telling. The question is whether they are built in a way that makes people hear them.
That is what Story of Business is here to help you do.