Isabella Martin is the Co-founder of  ClimateCulture a purpose-driven creative studio whose approach aims to inspire cultural shifts toward sustainability, climate action and systems change.

Between stories

I grew up in a sheltered, sun-soaked, privileged pocket of Sydney. I don’t remember ever reflecting on the culture of this corner of the world – because I didn’t have to, and because it simply wasn’t visible to me. Yet I always sensed that somewhere else there must be more: more to see, more to feel, more to experience.

It wasn’t until I moved overseas that the stories I’d been living by started to come undone. Not dramatically. Just a quiet reckoning with my core beliefs and conditioning. 

That’s when I entered what I now think of as a liminal space: the cultural in-between, familiar to anyone who has lived through big change. A fertile pause between the dissolution of old stories about who we are and the slow emergence of new ones.

For me, as for most people, these stories were deeply personal: I need to achieve to be worthy. I need to stay busy to matter. I need to be visible to belong. They kept me stuck in jobs and relationships that weren’t aligned, chasing metrics that didn’t fulfil me, mistaking motion for meaning. 

I noticed how familiar they were – not just to me, but to friends, colleagues, even strangers. I heard people describe the same pressures in almost identical words. I saw the same stories echoed in books, films, music and art. 

What began as a personal unravelling started to feel much bigger. 

Slowly it dawned on me: maybe these weren’t just personal stories. Maybe they were cultural stories in disguise, the same stories that shape our collective systems.

Invisible scripts

Every society runs on these invisible stories. They are the unseen scripts directing what we value, what feels normal, and what we believe to be possible or impossible.  

We’re all familiar with them at some level: Work hard and you’ll succeed. Growth is progress. Independence is strength. More is better. Time is money. 

I began to think of these stories as the invisible software running our lives – and, by extension, the institutions and societies we move through. Once I noticed them, I couldn’t un-see them. 

The difficulty was noting them in the first place, and I’m not sure I ever would have without two things: leaving home and getting therapy. Travel gave me physical distance; therapy gave me mental distance. It became its own liminal space — a place to examine the beliefs I’d mistaken for truth, and to sit in the discomfort of not knowing who I’d be without them.

I sifted through the “shoulds”, the striving, the feeling of needing to be more. And as I laid them out one by one, I realised they didn’t come from nowhere. They were echoes of the stories I saw all around me, stories I had absorbed without question. 

That’s when a new question emerged: What if the crises of our time aren’t just technical, or political, or environmental – but cultural? What if they’re symptoms of stories that no longer serve us?

A cultural crisis 

As Yuval Noah Harari writes, “Culture has shaped our brains, our thoughts, and our dreams. We hardly ever realise it, but in countless subtle ways, culture influences how we think, what we want – and what we take for granted.” 

Culture is the sum total of our shared ideas and beliefs. And I see these beliefs most clearly in the stories that we tell ourselves, individually, organisationally and societally.

Take these commonplace organisational stories: Faster is better. Visibility equals worth. If you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind. Are we pausing long enough to ask who these stories reward, and who they quietly exhaust? Whether they trade creativity and innovation for the sake of efficiency, speed and control? 

For many years, I worked with organisations big and small, unconsciously living and breathing these stories. And over time, as the pace and pressure wore me down, I began waking with a familiar sinking feeling and the same question looping through my frazzled morning brain: Is this really it? 

Because we rarely notice these underlying beliefs, we mistake them for truth instead of fiction. In reality, they are constructed consensus, continually reinforced through language, education and the media. 

But how do we change a story we can’t see? 

The deep code  

For a long time, I kept circling around this question until I stumbled on something that helped: systems thinking. Or more specifically, how systems actually change. 

Systems thinker Donella Meadows showed that true change in a system doesn’t come from swapping out the elements of the system, but from shifting its “deep code” – paradigms, its culture.

The clearest way I’ve come to understand this is through the lens of relationships. Many of us, myself included, have found ourselves dating the same kind of person over and over. For me, it was the emotionally unavailable type. Once I’d realised they weren’t right for me, my instinct was to swap out the person, the element of the system. The pattern soon repeated. 

The problem wasn’t the person. It was the stories feeding my choices. 

For everyone these stories are different: I only deserve love if I work for it. I can fix them. Closeness is unsafe. But until you shift the story, the system will keep producing the same result.

The breakthrough came when I stayed in the discomfort long enough for those beliefs to loosen. The pattern dissolved because the culture of the system had changed: my mindset around the relationships.

At least, that’s the theory. In practice I’m still catching myself in old patterns, still learning, still wondering how deeply embedded these stories really are. 

Meadows came to see that the same is true collectively: when we shift our stories, we redefine what our society aims for. And that’s when everything downstream can begin to transform: how we design, organise, teach, govern.  

Change the story, change the system. 

How stories build worlds  

Storytelling doesn’t just mirror reality – it constructs it. Humans evolved to cooperate in large numbers not through instinct but through our shared beliefs. Storytelling is how we transmit culture, how we pass down knowledge, how we adapt across generations. Early humans weren’t held together by biology alone, but by shared stories of a common mythical ancestor, a sacred symbol, a unifying empire.

These stories shape our institutions, laws, and economics, even if they aren’t objectively real. Take “The American Dream”, a story that has globalised our obsession with individual success.

Stories have shaped everything from our workplace culture to our sense of self-worth. And as our world speeds up and becomes increasingly complex, the cracks in our dominant narratives are harder to ignore. When stories persist beyond their usefulness, they become conceptual traps, limiting our ability to respond to new realities.

I think that this is how we’ve found ourselves, right now, in a liminal space. Between stories, culturally and civilisationally. The old stories of progress, growth and control are breaking down; and the new ones centred on interconnection, regeneration and reciprocity are still taking root. 

And while living in the in-between is uncomfortable, it’s also fertile land. A threshold. The space where imagination becomes possible, not despite the uncertainty, but because of it.