Dr. Madelyn Blair has been named the recipient of The Stone Register's Lifetime Achievement for Storytelling for Organizations distinction, recognizing her pioneering influence in leadership communication and narrative strategy on a global scale.
JEFFERSON, MD, June 12, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The Stone Register, New York's preeminent boutique marketing firm, proudly recognizes Dr. Madelyn Blair with its Lifetime Achievement for Storytelling for Organizations designation. This distinction highlights a career that has deeply influenced how story is used in leadership, strategy, and institutional development—and how it continues to shape the way professionals engage, communicate, and lead in complex environments.
Dr. Blair's contributions span decades and disciplines. She played a central role in the emergence of story work as a serious organizational method. She was a founding member of Goldenfleece, helping to establish how story, the elemental method of communication and knowledge transfer, could be harnessed by the business community and catalyze a global movement and give storytelling a formal place in business and policy circles. Her early research, coupled with her leadership across major institutions like the World Bank, demonstrated the power of narrative to surface hidden dynamics and drive real outcomes.
Throughout her work, Dr. Blair has brought structure, precision, and clarity to complex business issues rather than with vague enthusiasm. Whether addressing systemic bias, cultural barriers, leadership transitions, as applied in business activities such as organizational mergers or reorganizations, she has consistently introduced story as a disciplined approach to understanding human behavior in context. Her work on resilience helped reframe the concept as a decision point—one that can be prepared for and embraced rather than avoided because special powers are demanded as in an endurance race.
"Madelyn Blair has been speaking and writing about resilience since before it was all the rage," explains S.W. Miliano, Managing Director and Co-Founder of The Stone Register and esteemed member of Forbes Business Council. "It is a foundational building block of her vast body of work. Now that resilience has become a household word in business, it's clear once again that she was ahead of the curve. Quite honestly, this is true of everything she does."
Mr. Miliano knows from firsthand experience that Dr. Blair's storytelling, on-air presence, and ability to connect on a deeper level are unmatched. Having appeared on her podcast himself, he recalls the clarity, preparedness, and thoughtfulness she brought to each conversation—well beyond what most hosts deliver. "Her command of every medium she touches is second to none, which is exactly why this new distinction follows her earlier recognition as a Renaissance Leader," says Miliano. "Make no mistake, we're a strategic marketing and digital media firm—not an awards organization so for us to formally recognize someone twice, well, you can imagine how truly exceptional that person must be."
Dr. Blair's ongoing media work, especially through her TV series Unlocked, reflects the same commitment to depth and authenticity. As a host, she draws from her experience as a researcher, facilitator, and coach to guide each conversation with clarity and intent. The result is a program that resonates with professionals who value stories over lists and substance over spectacle.
"I'm deeply honored to receive the Lifetime Achievement for Storytelling for Organizations," shares Madelyn Blair. "This recognition affirms the path I've walked and the power of story to create clarity, connection, commitment, and real change. Storytelling has been central to everything I do—from research to coaching to media—and I'm grateful to see its value acknowledged in this way."
To mark the occasion, The Stone Register is publishing a long-form interview with Dr. Blair—a wide ranging, reflective conversation that explores her methods, her values, and the evolving role of story in modern leadership. It's a candid and deeply informative look into the mind of someone whose work continues to influence how professionals think, connect, and grow.
You were using storytelling in your work long before it was widely recognized as a method. What led you to that approach, and how did it shape your early work?
When I asked the economist what her boss had said she answered, "He said I was very pleasant to have on the team." That seemed quite benign until I asked the next question. When I asked the economist to tell me about that moment when her boss said she was pleasant, she said that it was part of her annual performance evaluation. She and her boss were discussing a major economic study that she had completed and presented to the client. That client found it illuminating and valuable as they evaluated their next business decisions.
At that point I realized the story was not about being pleasant on the team. The story was about the fact that her manager did not perceive her in relation to her work performance. What he saw was her appearance separated from the valuable, challenging, and professionally done economic analysis. That gave a different meaning to the boss's statement. But I could see this only after I had asked about the context of the initial statement. This story became a part of the research findings of my work on the culture of the organization.
When I work with a client, my organizational development work includes serious research into the organization—its culture, policies, environment, and market. Even when I am working with a single individual, I research the environment in which they live and work. Interviews were always important. What I discovered was that to understand people's responses, you had to discover the context of their answers. To get the context, you had to ask for the story around the answer. For example, you might ask the person, "Tell me about a time when... Describe who was there with you, what time of day it was, and how did you know you had gotten what you needed."
Almost 30 years ago, I was introduced to appreciative inquiry when it was just being introduced to the organizational development community. When I read about it, I knew I had found confirmation of my own instincts that you needed context. One of the strategies for doing an appreciative inquiry was to say, "Tell me about a time when..." When you ask for the context, you are essentially asking for a story, because you can't tell a story without context. What you're doing is taking the fact or the response to your question and putting flesh around it. This allows you to understand that when one person says "A," it means something different from when another person says "A," because the context is so different. That's when I realized how powerful stories are.
The lesson is, you must know the context: If I told you the answer was 3, would you know what the three meant? If instead I said, "Wow that's ball 3, he has only one more to go" you would know that I was talking about a baseball game.
You played a foundational role in establishing Goldenfleece, a group that helped bring organizational storytelling to a global audience. How did that mission come to life, and what do you think made it so impactful in shaping the field of story work?
The Golden Fleece group began when about 8 or 10 people in Washington, DC decided to join forces. Each of us understood that storytelling was important in organizational settings. It wasn't just for entertaining people from the stage. In the beginning, the group organized an event where we used a storytelling process (called Living Stories) to tell our own stories and get to know each other. It was remarkable, because as people told personal stories, each person became clearer. It was like seeing them first in a picture and then seeing them in a video. You could find ways and places where you could connect with them. Even from just that initial session of a few hours, we gelled into a group that wanted to work together.
Having seen that storytelling was helpful, we decided to meet again and try to determine what we might do together. I designed and facilitated this second session using techniques I had learned from appreciative inquiry. During that session, we decided what we wanted to become and what we wanted to accomplish. As a final step, we wrote our own future story, saying that we were going to be like the vessel, the Argonaut from the famous Greek legend, moving around the world sharing what we knew, picking up new people or dropping them off believing that the understanding of how to use storytelling would grow and multiply. Remarkably, within about 10 years, we began to see exactly what we had envisioned in major publications like the Harvard Business Review and The New York Times who were talking about the power of storytelling in organizations – the 'goldenfleece' we hoped would be shared. Thus, the name we adopted was Goldenfleece.
We met each month to share and test our ideas of how to bring storytelling into the corporate arena. Each year, I headed up the committee that organized an international conference on the use of storytelling in organizations. We did this for 10 years in Washington, DC. It allowed us to share our knowledge and wisdom and to learn from others. I made some of the best friends of my life through this conference.
Our impact was profound because we aimed not just for success, but to ignite opportunities and possibilities for storytelling worldwide. We were invited to speak at conferences and meetings. For example, I was invited to speak in Denmark, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as across the US. Among our core group, about eight people authored major publications on storytelling, such as Steve Denning's work on leadership and storytelling and Paul Costello's on story and politics.
Can you describe the evolution of your storytelling work from research to facilitating large-scale events like Goldenfleece Day and the Smithsonian sessions?
As I listened to Patty Digh's story, I was struck by how she had overcome so much in her life. As I listened to Alicia's story, I was in awe of the places she had lived and how they had contributed to her. Had I met either of these women or any of the other members of Goldenfleece in a seminar or a working group, I doubt I would have come to understand them so well as from those stories they told from their own lives. Slowly, it dawned on me that storytelling allowed understanding but also connection. What I saw was a group of professionals, drawn together to discover how to use storytelling, become like a family. Each person belonged. Each person was free to be who they were. Each person began to appreciate more and more the wonderful variety of humankind that made the times we were together more than business. We healed each other. We appreciated each other. We felt more and more ourselves. As a result, the creativity exploded. Ideas became a flood. We had worked our magic on each other without realizing it.
I used the Golden Fleece group to practice and experiment with new ideas, as did all the other members. We agreed that anyone could come, but they had to participate and provide positive feedback to help builders grow their ideas.
Running such a conference was a real experience. We had little budget, so creativity was essential in finding locations in Washington, DC, where competition for venues is high. Yet we always secured space.
The Smithsonian event was launched by Steve Denning, who worked with the Smithsonian to support our conferences there. The Goldenfleece group gathered various story practitioners. I usually served as the master of ceremonies (MC), welcoming people and ensuring the conference flowed smoothly. Across the two events, we had between 100 and 150 people each year. It wasn't massive, but it was significant. I took on tasks I had never done before, because I felt so supported by the group. I have always been organized, but I had never done the work of an MC. This was a stretch, and perhaps it was part of why so many years later, I host a TV show and podcast.
As a pioneer in using storytelling to explore issues like gender, race, and culture, how do you see the impact of your early work reflected in the way organizations approach these topics today?
When I was at the World Bank, I was a Division Chief, one of only six women in serious management positions. When I left the Bank, knowing what it was like to be a woman in that culture, I proposed that the Bank look at the issues of women. My newly formed company designed and conducted a study using a team of staff—all women—to do interviews. We had a script to ensure consistency and taught them how to probe for story contexts. I did the final analysis of the findings. One senior manager praised the results as the best sociological report he had ever read. I credit that to the strong data coming from the stories told to the interviewers and the ability to use snippets from the stories to illustrate and show evidence for the conclusions.
This work was recognized across the globe, leading to similar projects at the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and others.
As a result of this work, a major international organization asked me in a second study to explore discrimination in terms of race, culture, and religion. The complexity of this study would have been insurmountable had we not used storytelling. Through the stories, we heard of example after example of people who were not native English speakers having greater difficulty in conveying the complexity of their work.
This surprising finding revealed the importance of language. It wasn't accents or inability to speak English, but rather writing style. Non-native speakers sometimes lacked the sophisticated writing in English that native speakers were able to achieve even if their technical results were no stronger or more important. This underscored the importance of storytelling to bridge understanding gaps.
How have you seen the impact of storytelling change over the years—from your early days in research to your current work as a speaker, author, and TV host?
When a new project landed on my desk, I was excited. The client was merging three units into one. That was important, but the real challenge was that they had to show results in a year to prove the merger was the right managerial decision. Looking at the three units, combining them seemed natural as the units performed activities that already led from one to another. They gave me six hours to work with the combined staff of the three units. Six hours.
I had designed a process for creating not yesterday's or today's stories but the story for the future. The process was designed on the premise that the new story was already within the staff. They just needed to surface the pieces necessary to put it all together. The story could not come from just thinking about it. It really needed to be ignited, just as a fire needs kindling to start. All in six hours.
We began with bringing the staff together, allowing each unit to talk about their important projects and how they had accomplished them. It took the entire morning, and as each presented, I could see lightbulbs coming on in the listeners minds.
When it was all finished, I showed them a clip from the movie Apollo 13 where the engineers pile all the materials that were available to the astronauts and begin to construct from them something that would allow a "square peg to fit into a round hole." I asked them to imagine the amazing amount of information that had been put out in the morning about what each unit had done. All they had to do was use that to build their story of the future. In small (mixed) teams, they jumped into the fray and began to work.
My hope was that the future story, built from what they had heard from their past, would have something recognizable that they could see themselves in. And once in the story, the story became their story.
By mid afternoon, each team had finished their future story which they shared. Then as a whole group, they picked from the essence of each and built their future story and the action plan to make it happen – all by the end of the six hours.
When I visited the newly joined unit two weeks later, they had already achieved what they thought would take six months to achieve. By year's end, they had produced their goal.
I was excited that my process worked, but why it worked was as I had hoped. People were able to see themselves in the future story for the story to draw them to it. Personal motivation is done by seeing ourselves in the story, not from any external force. The future story they had created became their story.
People use storytelling in business for marketing and selling ideas, products, and services. Others focus on the power of the vision to motivate. For me, the key is that the person has to see themselves in the story. When they do, they are engaged in listening and in taking action later.
As a speaker, I weave stories into my talks to engage audiences. As a TV host, I encourage guests to tell stories. While some are expert storytellers, others aren't. Yet asking probing questions can help elicit rich stories within the constraints of the time, enhancing the audience's connection and understanding.
You were arguably the first to introduce the concept of resilience into the business world, long before it became the buzzword it is today. Do you see today's wave of resilience training as an extension of the work you pioneered, or has the term evolved into something else entirely?
It was 6:30 in the morning, and I was walking from the security shack to where I was to give my class starting at 7. I had to walk about 200 yards and so was not in a rush although I didn't have time to spare. From one step to the next, I found myself face down on the sidewalk. The tip of my foot had hit a small edge between the sidewalk sections, my balance was lost, and I landed on my chin.
After recognizing where I was, I knew I had to get up and get to the class. I had students from around the world expecting to tune in to my class at 7. I picked myself up, reassembled my things, and continued on to the class.
During the class, I wondered why I had trouble remembering a word that I knew I knew. Only after the class in the afternoon when I went to see my doctor about something else entirely did I learn that I had given myself a concussion. My doctor sent me home with strict instructions to rest in bed for a long as it took for my brain to clear. No TV, no radio, no conversation or reading! All I could do was sleep, eat, attend natural functions, and think.
It took four days for my brain to clear, and when it did, I had learned an important lesson. Victor Frankl said that "Between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space lies our power to choose. And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom." My lesson was that when you are hit with the unexpected, you have the choice to move on, and that meant that resilience actually lives in that space. With this clear understanding, I began my serious work on resilience.
I won't claim to be the first to bring resilience into the business world, as I have not read every book on business. What I can say is that I redefined resilience so that it became more relevant to business actions. My definition begins with identifying that the moment of resilience—the locus of it—is from the moment you are hit with the disruption or change or whatever is unexpected, and when you decide to move on. So, it is, in fact, a moment of decision. That's where resilience lies. With that, you go on from there to actually do what you think is appropriate.
Most people think of resilience as bouncing back. We say, if you bounce back, then you're resilient. But what takes you from the moment of disruption to that moment when you have moved past the disruption? For example, if the market changes and is no longer supportive of your advertising scheme, then a business decides to change something. But again, you begin with the decision. Then businesses identify the options and know what to do. But it all begins with deciding that you will take some action to move on.
That clarity has allowed individuals, teams, and organizations to be clear about what they need to do to prepare for that moment. So in that preparation, they become ready to be resilient when it is called upon.
Stephen Kowalski says that creativity is a potential; he says we all have it, but we don't recognize it until it is called forth. Resilience is similar; we may or may not know we are resilient, but when we are called upon, then we can decide to take action to move on and thus prove to ourselves that we are either resilient or not.
So, while I don't think I was the first person to talk resilience, I think I have opened the topic so that businesses are able to act upon it, and it brings great value to them. Your comment about it being in recent months—there is no question that we are in a state of flux. The market is in a state of flux, the world is in a state of flux, and it has been for many years. Technology has constantly disrupted how we do things, how we sell things, how we make things, and how we even think about things. Recent policy changes simply add to that almost frenetic pace that's been established through technological advancements. So resilience has been needed for a long time.
We are a resilient species. It's our ability to find ourselves in uncomfortable situations, assess the possibilities, and decide to move forward. Although I believe you decide that you're going to move forward and then you look at the possibilities in order to determine how.
Many people see your books, your show, and your body of work without realizing how central storytelling has been from the very beginning. Has storytelling been one of the keys for you personally in unlocking your own potential?
When I coach clients, one of the early steps is to have them begin to write stories from their lives – from childhood or from yesterday. They often resist only because they can't think of any stories. It doesn't take long for them to find many stories. My objective is to get them to see themselves in the mirror of their own stories. I do this because the more you review these stories, the more clearly you see what you truly value. I tell them, don't worry, like the field, just open a place for them and they will come.
You learn why not wasting food is important to you. You learn the purpose of hard work and the reason you engage in hard work over long periods. You learn to save money for a rainy day. You learn to be true to yourself. Or one of any number of things we learn through our lives from those who raised us or influenced us.
There are tests to find out what your values are, but your stories teach you in your own words what's important to you. For myself, I have journals full of my own stories. In preparation for answering these questions, I read through pages of them. Stories act as mirrors that allow us to see ourselves at different times, in different lights, and in different settings with enormous efficiency.
I really love this question because the answer is yes. Storytelling is a key that I have used to personally unlock who I am and understand who I am. It's in that understanding that we begin to see what our potential is. That sounds backwards, but it's not. You can't unlock something unless you have a clue that it is there. In my case, I use stories from my younger self to understand what I value, and then I use that in making decisions because I never want to make a decision that is counter to my values as that only leads to discomfort, disappointment, and a lack of a sense of agency.
To reach your potential, you need to know what you have at hand and that you have agency to use them. So using stories to understand how you were formed and what became a part of you is crucial to knowing what you bring to the table that you can draw upon when you're hit with the unexpected.
For example, I often tell a story called cracked eggs which is all about growing up on a farm. One of my responsibilities was to gather eggs, and at the end of the week, on Saturday mornings, my mother would ask me to take these cracked eggs and bake a cake from them. Enormous lessons came from that. At the time, I couldn't articulate that. Today I see clearly that those cracked eggs with no economic value were good food that you didn't want to waste, food that could produce something delicious and wholesome.
I compared that to my time at the World Bank when I began heading up the division of customer services. Knowing that inside a cracked egg was gold—what we call a yolk but is really the gold of the egg—I used that metaphor in my mind. I looked at the people on my team and knew that within them there had to be gold. My job was to help them find it themselves and then employ it. I won't tell the story here, but you can find it on my website where I tell it in full and glorious detail.
In addition to using it as a division chief, I also know that I drew two values from that story or from that activity in my youth. One was that even things that have no economic value can have intrinsic value. To me, that translated to every person having something of value to bring and being worthy, therefore, of respect. The second lesson or value was that food is valuable. It is valuable because it's essential to our lives, and to this day, I find it very hard to waste food.
So did it help me unlock my potential? Yes, because once I understood that every person has something of value to give and my job was to draw that out, I began exploring possibilities of how to do that. In that process, I discovered it happens to be one of my strengths. Some people might call it a natural talent; others might call it empathy. I just call it a wonderful gift.
If you could choose three works from your career—across any medium—that stand out as the most significant to you, which would they be, and why?
In the course of my career, I have done well over 700 projects, and I suspect it's probably more than that. But that's just when I began counting. As I look across them, I like your question because it's forcing me to think about where I gained particular value, both in terms of offering value to my clients or to other people, but also giving me enormous insights, developing skills, and offering real satisfaction.
The first was my work in institutional analysis as part of my consulting practice. Clients would come to me with particularly difficult problems where they didn't even know how to define the problem, let alone understand it and take action. The more I did this work, the better I became at interpreting amorphous, nebulous problems and gaining sufficient clarity. I could then ask questions of many people and bring those insights from across sometimes thousands of people into a coherent understanding of what the problem really was and what the potential solutions were. I knew I did this, but it was my sister who identified it for me. She said, "Madelyn, you are a researcher," because I was curious, which I am, and I appreciate her naming it.
The second project is the work I did at Columbia University where I taught in a Master's program. I taught the capstone course—the course at the end when students bring all their learning together and work with a real client to solve the client's problem. My job was to help them discover within themselves what they knew and what their real strengths were so that they could then help the client. I would obviously teach them in areas where there were gaps in the team, but what I found my real strength was, and what was totally appreciated by the students, was that I was able to help them identify their own strengths, capacities, and potential. It was a very satisfying role. Today, I bring that same capacity into my coaching work, called transition coaching, because I like to work with people when they're thinking about making changes.
The third, without a doubt, is hosting my television show, "Unlocked." Creating a coherent script for a show that allows people to talk about what they do and draw out insights valuable to the audience is a complex task. With all my research and coaching experience, because I know how to ask questions and see potential, I've been able to put on a weekly show. I'm now in my seventh year — three years on radio, now in my fourth year on TV. The show grows steadily, and my audience profile remains consistent, which indicates a lot of loyal viewers.
As I look at this list, I am struck that I would never have anticipated any of these to be so challenging and satisfying at the same time.
Through your work on "Unlocked," the TV show, you've drawn out powerful stories from a wide range of guests. After hearing so many, what do you believe stories ultimately offer us?
I was in a management class with about 20 other people. We were asked to do a series of exercises to learn about good listening. I don't remember exactly that first part of the exercise, but the second part of the exercise was to have one person talk and the others in the small group were to ignore that person.
I tend to engage in any learning activity as I know it is designed to help me learn something. So, I immediately began looking at the floor, yawning, or anything that would tell the other that I was not interested in what they were saying. Then I made a mistake. I looked at the person. What I saw shocked me. A person who was excited to be in the class now looked completely broken, his face crumbling as he tried to continue to talk. I hated what I saw!
It took me no more than a nanosecond to change my strategy. I looked at the person, asking him to tell me if I correctly understood what he was saying and repeating what I thought he had said. His face lit up. I then told the other members of our team to stop the exercise as it was so harmful to the person who was being ignored. They were surprised until I told them why they should stop. Then they agreed, and we moved on to the final segment of the exercise, sharing our experiences with the rest of the class.
I never forgot that experience and the fragility of the human spirit when it is cut off from others. Today I never use exercises that put human beings in such places of distress. I use just the story, and the participants understand perfectly without having to experience it themselves. This is what is known as a resistance story.
Life means growth—growth of understanding, empathy, and relationships. Humans want to belong, to be included, and to be acknowledged.
When I work with clients, whether individually or as part of a group or organization, I often ask about times they felt respected and what it was about that moment that made them feel that way. When I look across the thousands of stories I've heard in response, it invariably points to the fact that the person felt they had been heard. It was not a question of whether their ideas made it to the final decision, but rather that they knew their ideas, thoughts, and considerations had been taken into account. They were heard.
Several things are implied in that statement. One is that they were a part of whatever was being considered—in other words, they were considered useful participants in the project. Their presence was acknowledged. Secondly, their presence was valued; others listened, meaning they had established some connection. Thirdly, even if their ideas weren't directly reflected in the conclusion, they knew their ideas were considered, indicating they had some influence over the outcome.
From thousands of stories, I see that being heard involves being a part of things, relating to others, and having some influence or control. Stories provide this context, which is essential for understanding.
Stories serve understanding, connection, and healing. They offer contextual knowledge, help build relationships and can heal by explaining perspectives and fostering empathy.
You've been a successful, influential force across research, writing, teaching, and broadcasting. What advice would you give to others who want to use story to create insight, connection, and change?
When I was working on my PhD dissertation, I'll never forget the admonition from my advisor that I needed to write the dissertation in my own voice, telling my own story.
Most people think of a dissertation as being something scientific, esoteric, and very removed from day to day. What does story have to do with it? Yet that was what he looked for in what I wrote. He wanted to hear my voice. He wanted to hear my story, because it was only when I had tapped into my own voice, told my own story that I would be able to present to the world what I had found with credibility. He was right.
I struggled with the writing to bring out the context in which I had learned what I learned and what it meant to me. My conclusions were mine, not from some other author. It was a hard story to write mainly because it was not the form I thought I needed to write in. The facts I had carefully gathered had to be presented in context so they became relevant to human beings. In the end, it sailed through its defense.
You see, the idea of a PhD dissertation is to find something new and then share it with the world. That's what academic research is about — finding new things and sharing them with the world. That's how we constantly add to the knowledge base that we have. It's why we can go from Alan Turing's thinking machine to a quantum computer today, because we have added continually more and more knowledge to what we know.
Keeping that in mind, if you want to use story to create insight connection and change, you begin by writing your own stories from your own life. I have a big journal that started out with empty pages and is now filled with stories that I have written from my own life. Some of them are very simple stories — early memories as a 2-year-old in a field of grass or yesterday's memories of how a new idea of cooking a particular vegetable worked out. Some of them are long, describing very significant events in my life such as helping my daughter after her brain surgery.
These are the little pieces that don't just inform you, they form you. So if you want to do this work you have to begin by looking at your own stories. In books you are often told what to do with the admonition that there's no magic to this you just do it. Well, I'm sorry. With story, there is magic, and the magic comes from the fact that you are speaking to yourselves in the language that we were designed to speak. In every place in this world, there are stories. There are French stories. There are Persian stories. There are Japanese stories. There are Maurie stories. It doesn't matter where you are, there are stories.
It is the language, the construction of how we think. That's why you must begin with story, then let the magic happen.
For more on Dr. Madelyn Blair's work and background, visit her official website: www.MadelynBlair.com.
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