Why Your Organization Is Sitting on a Gold Mine of Untapped Human Insight
And the stories you're not collecting might be the most valuable data you don't have.
Have you ever watched someone give a formal performance review that tells you almost nothing about what that person actually experiences at work?
Do your employee surveys come back full of scores and ratings, but leave you with no idea what's actually driving those numbers?
Have you ever had a gut feeling that something was off in your organization's culture, but couldn't point to a single data point that proved it?
Here's the thing most leaders don't want to hear: the richest, most actionable intelligence about your people isn't sitting in a spreadsheet. It's sitting in the stories your employees carry around with them every single day.
The problem is nobody's asking for those stories in a way that actually surfaces the truth.
James Warren has spent the last three decades figuring out how to change that. And what he's found will make you rethink every engagement survey you've ever sent.
(00:00) The Princeton Economist Who Became a Storytelling CEO
James Warren didn't follow a straight line to get here.
He studied economics and literature at Princeton, followed by creative writing at Columbia, then spent nearly 30 years in marketing, strategy, and brand management. At some point, the corporate world started to feel too narrow for what he actually wanted to build.
So he made the leap.
James is now the founder and CEO of ShareMore Stories, a human experience insights company. Their flagship product, the SEEQ platform, helps organizations uncover the emotional drivers behind employee and customer experiences.
His work is built on one foundational belief: if you want to understand what people actually experience, you have to let them tell you the whole story.
(07:00) The Hidden Truth Your Organization Doesn't Know About Itself
Ask your employees about the most memorable experience they've ever had at work.
Not the sanitized version. Not the answer they'd give in a performance review. The real one.
That's exactly the kind of question James and his team have been asking for years. And the answers surprise people, including the people giving them.
When ShareMore Stories' platform product SEEQ walks participants through a structured storytelling experience, something shifts. Someone starts talking about a process they want to improve. Five minutes later, they're tracing the whole thing back to a moment from their first week on the job that shaped everything about how they operate today.
They didn't know that story was still running in the background.
Here's the gap James is working to close:
What surveys tell you: scores, ratings, rankings
What stories tell you: why those numbers exist in the first place
What lives in the "why": the emotional context that actually drives behavior, loyalty, and trust
Organizations that only collect data at the surface level are making decisions with incomplete information. And the piece they're missing is almost always the most important one.
(14:30) Why the Fishbowl Problem Is Costing Leaders More Than They Realize
Here's a scenario worth sitting with.
A well-meaning leader pulls someone aside after a brutal stretch and says: "We really appreciate everything you sacrificed to get this done. Working through being sick, missing those bedtimes — it means so much to the team."
That leader thinks they're recognizing effort. In their mind, it's a moment of genuine gratitude.
What the employee hears is something else entirely. They hear: this is what it looks like to get ahead here. This is what we reward.
Leaders are constantly being watched in ways they don't fully register. Every comment, every recognition, every casual acknowledgment gets filed away by the people around them.
The trust-building implications are significant. Small moments erode confidence long before anyone names it out loud.
The antidote isn't a training module. It's a genuine shift in self-awareness. The willingness to stop and ask, regularly: what signal am I actually sending right now?
That question, asked honestly and often, changes everything about how a leader shows up.
(22:00) What Belonging Looks Like When It's Built on Adversity
Most organizations treat belonging as a comfort equation. Reduce friction. Increase psychological safety. Make people feel welcome.
That's not wrong. But James's recent research with a group of community leaders turned up something that complicates the picture.
When participants were asked to describe the experiences where they felt they truly belonged, one theme kept surfacing: challenge and adversity.
Not as the opposite of belonging. As a pathway to it.
James walked through what they found and why it makes sense. Step by step:
The group was diverse in background but unified in one way: they were all actively leading things, taking real risks, doing work that carried real stakes.
Almost all of them traced their deepest sense of belonging to environments where they were allowed to struggle, fall short, and be supported through what came next.
The conclusion: psychological safety isn't just about removing fear. It's about creating space for people to attempt hard things and know the ground won't disappear beneath them when it doesn't work.
The kind of belonging that actually sticks? It gets forged in difficulty, not in the absence of it.
(28:00) The Leadership Move That Turns Failure Into a Finding
This is the section most leaders need to hear twice.
James made a case for what he calls a culture of experimentation, and it reframes the entire conversation around risk and failure at work.
Old model: outcomes are binary. It worked or it didn't. Every attempt carries the full emotional weight of that verdict.
Experimentation model: a small bet that doesn't pan out isn't a failure. It's a finding. It tells you something you needed to know, at a cost you deliberately kept low.
The shift matters because it changes what people are willing to try.
Teams that know their leader will read a failed experiment as data rather than a disaster will take more swings. They'll flag problems earlier. They'll stop spending energy managing how a setback looks and start spending it on learning from it.
Building that culture takes a specific kind of leader. Someone with enough emotional intelligence to absorb external pressure from above and convert it into a protected space below. Someone who can say, out loud, to the people above them: I need some runway to let my team experiment their way to a result.
That's not a small ask. The teams on the other side of that protection tend to build things worth building.
So What Are You Actually Listening For?
You can send all the surveys you want.
You can run focus groups, hold town halls, host listening sessions. All of those things have value.
But if your questions only have room for scores and ratings, you're designing out the very thing that makes human insight useful.
The stories people carry are where your real data lives. The experience that shaped how someone interacts with their manager. The moment they decided to trust this organization or stop trusting it. The memory that runs quietly beneath every answer they give to a structured questionnaire.
There's a lot more in the full conversation. James and Traci go deeper on the role emotional intelligence plays in leadership development, what it actually means to build culture intentionally versus accidentally, and what the next generation of human experience research is starting to surface.
If you lead people and you've ever had the sense that you're only seeing a fraction of what's really going on, this one's for you.
Connect with James Warren: LinkedIn | SharemMoreStories.com
Connect with Traci here: https://linktr.ee/HRTraci