Simon Greenwold keeps a baseball on his desk. He will tell you that everyone on a team needs to play their position. The catcher needs to understand what the center fielder does. The first baseman needs to understand what the catcher does. And all of that requires communication, understanding, and conscientiousness. He will also tell you that he was once advised, before taking a job in sales, to go re-read Death of a Salesman. He took the job anyway.
These are the kinds of details that make a conversation with Greenwold feel different from most conversations about higher education strategy. He has spent twenty-five years studying, teaching, and operating inside the academy, first as a doctoral student in literature and culture, then as a teacher and administrator at Northwestern, then in a leadership role at EdTech company 2U, and now as co-founder of Story as a Service, a strategic communications consultancy focused on higher education and mission-driven organizations.
His premise is simple and not widely enough practiced: before an institution can communicate externally, it has to understand its own story from the inside out.
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The Least Well-Understood Thing in Organizational Health
A friend on the faculty at Northwestern, now at Washington University in St. Louis, once told Greenwold something that has stayed with him for years: internal communications are the least well understood, least well researched, and most important part of organizational health.
This is the foundation of Story as a Service. Not messaging, not brand, not marketing, but the harder and more foundational question: what does this organization actually do, why does it matter, and what makes it genuinely distinct, optimally, unique? Only once that is clear can you teach anyone inside the organization to tell that story..
“Your DNA and my DNA are almost identical,” Greenwold says. “We are still unique individuals. I believe the same thing for organizations. In many ways they look almost the same, but there’s always something unique we can discover”
The work follows three steps. First, clarify the core story, a prerequisite for good planning and strategy. Second, teach and tell it to everyone who matters. Third, help individuals inside the organization learn to tell their own authentic stories on behalf of the mission. It sounds linear, but in practice it requires listening at a depth that most strategy processes skip entirely.
Translation as a Superpower
Much of what Greenwold does is translation. The people who have spent decades inside a discipline have language that is precise, appropriate for their field, and often incomprehensible to everyone outside it. Architects talk like architects. Lawyers talk like lawyers. Mathematicians talk like mathematicians.
The job of Story as a Service is to move ideas from that specialist register into, as Greenwold puts it, “nouns and verbs that anyone can understand.”
He describes a project with Princeton University’s Office of Innovation, which was bringing together three previously separate units into a new organizational structure. The challenge was not just what they would do together, but how to talk about it across an institution that values both cutting-edge science and the humanities.
The word they landed on was translation. It worked for scientists who think about translating bench work to commercial application. It worked for humanists who think about literary and cultural translation. It carried the whole campus into the same conversation without asking anyone to abandon their own frame.
They paired that vocabulary work with a visual language: a set of design choices that require the person interacting with materials to actively and imaginatively engage rather than passively receive. The story and the form reinforced each other.
Your Core Story Is a Shakespeare Play
Greenwold returns often to an analogy: an organization’s core story, he says, is like a Shakespeare play.
When Shakespeare wrote the play four hundred years ago and it was performed for the first time, it was different from how it is performed now. Now it might be a Netflix series. Different form, different shape, different social cultural political context, but still the same play. The characters are the same. The structure is the same. The meaning is the same.
This is how he thinks about institutions evolving through strategy without losing themselves. He describes work with Excelsior University, a school with a fifty-year legacy of serving working adults, military veterans, and non-traditional students, whose president has developed a forward-facing strategy called the Constellation Model: imagining a new kind of university system that extends across state lines and includes employer partners and nonprofit organizations.
For long-tenured staff, the strategy felt like a significant departure. The work was to show them it was an extension, a remake. The things Excelsior will do as a large star in this new constellation are the same things Excelsior has been doing for five decades. The form is new. The play is not.
The State of Higher Ed Right Now
When Greenwold talks about what he is seeing across the institutions he works with, he does not soften it. Higher education has been under pressure for a long time. The pandemic was a significant blow. AI is now, as he puts it, sitting on its chest. The political environment of the last year has added something new: a federal assault on the institution at a scale most people working in it had not experienced.
And yet something is happening that he finds genuinely impressive. People are getting back to work.
“Still have to teach students,” he says. “Still have to get the research done. Sharpen their pencils and figure out how to do it.”
He credits the mission-driven nature of the sector for this. Most of the people who chose to spend their careers in higher education, faculty, administrators, staff, students, did not choose it for the financial benefits. They chose it because they believe in what it does. That belief does not evaporate when funding gets cut or enrollment falls or the political wind shifts.
This is also, he notes, where communication becomes most essential: not in the good times when the message is easy, but in the difficult ones when people inside an institution need to remember why the work matters and be able to say so to the people outside it.
Three Things, Every Time
When Greenwold offers advice to people who want to use storytelling more effectively in their work, he keeps it to three. Because people remember three things.
The first is to be concise. A story that cannot be told concisely is a story that will not travel.
The second is to know your audience. His formulation: stakeholders hold stakes. Understand what they are holding before you speak, and let that shape how you tell the story. The same story told on a trucker hat looks different than the same story told in a white paper. The third is to use specific details. He cites a quote attributed to Stalin, uncomfortable in its source but devastating in its accuracy: five million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy. In any field dense with data and findings and outcomes, the story that sticks is the one with a person, a place, a specific and observable detail. The well-told anecdote outperforms the well-organized slide every time.
Mild, Moderate, Severe
The most unexpected moment in the conversation belongs to Greenwold’s father-in-law, a Pan Am pilot and former Navy carrier pilot who once explained to him that there are three kinds of turbulence: mild, moderate, and severe. In thirty years of flying, the man encountered moderate turbulence perhaps a couple of hundred times, and severe turbulence fewer than ten.
The point Greenwold draws from it is practical and transferable. Most of what we experience as severe, both in organizations and in the wider culture, is actually mild. It feels horrible. It feels like things are flying around the cabin. But almost always, if we can stay calm and understand the context, there is a way through.
“That’s the spirit,” he says. “Be calm. Recognize that we’re going to figure out a way through.”
It is, in its own way, a story. Concrete, specific, memorable, told at exactly the right moment in the conversation to make an idea stick. Greenwold uses the tools he talks about while he talks about them.
That is, perhaps, the most useful thing you can know about someone who helps organizations find their voice.
Listen to the full conversation with Simon Greenwold on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Simon Greenwold
Jason Gorman (00:00)
Welcome to the Learning Experience Ops Show, where we talk about making learning better that is future ready. I’m Jason Gorman. I’m the founder and CEO of Jackrabbit Learning Experience. In learning experience operations, storytelling is surprisingly practical. There is applicability to making learning experiences, right? Of course, stories make ideas stick for our learners. They make concepts easier to remember, more engaging, more usable, more fun.
⁓ And for learning professionals, storytelling is also one of our best tools for communication and for influence. We are constantly in conversations. We are trying to create buy-in with the subject matter expert or connect with the faculty person or sell our case to a leader or communicate across organizations or with a client. And very often, we’re in a place where we have to do those things, but without direct authority to just
make things happen on our own. so storytelling is a critical skill for all those reasons. And so I’m excited for today’s conversation. Simon and I are business partners at a company called Story as a Service, which is focused on, you may have guessed by now, storytelling. And so this conversation that we’re going to have, even though we talk many times a week, this is good opportunity for us to record it. It’s kind of a conversation from inside the work.
So Simon Greenwald is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Story As a Service, a strategic communications consultancy that specializes in work with, for, and on behalf of higher education. Before starting Story As, Simon spent over 25 years as a leader
at pioneering EdTech Company 2U and in multiple executive roles at Northwestern University. At each stop, he has designed and enacted meaningful strategies and programs that stick. As a recovering scholar of literature and culture, he understands the power of story to move and compel individuals and groups and is excited to bring the lessons of narrative force to leaders of mission-driven organizations.
Welcome to the podcast, Simon.
Simon Greenwold (02:06)
Thank you for having me, Jason.
Jason Gorman (02:07)
All right, well, you ready to do some lightning round questions?
Simon Greenwold (02:09)
I think so.
Jason Gorman (02:12)
Okay, so tell me
your 30 second elevator pitch about… ⁓ Yes, no, I’m
Simon Greenwold (02:16)
Are you timing me? There’s a timer on that.
30 seconds for me is I live in Evanston, Illinois, and ⁓ I’m delighted to look out and see the sun shining on a snowy March morning, ⁓ I guess early afternoon. And ⁓ couldn’t be happier being a business partner with Jason Gorman in the little startup that could Story as a Service. In terms of
Jason Gorman (02:45)
That’s sweet. We should all
James here too, probably, right? Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (02:49)
Absolutely. I didn’t know if
it remain to mention James Altman, our, the third stool of our incredibly strong three-legged stool that is story leadership. And in terms of story as a service, the 30 second pitch, would say, I would say that we do three things, speaking of three stools and people remember three things in storytelling. We do three things. We do strategic facilitation that starts with.
Jason Gorman (02:58)
That’s right.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (03:13)
understanding and clarifying an organization’s core story, your core story. Once we have that, it’s a prerequisite for strategic planning. We can do a strategic plan with you. the second thing is then ⁓ teaching and telling that strategic plan and that organizational story to everyone who matters and matters most to you.
And then the third leg of the stool is individual storytelling ⁓ on behalf of the organization. So teaching faculty, students, staff, staff, others ⁓ how to tell the most authentic, compelling stories on behalf of the mission vision values of the organization that you’re serving.
Jason Gorman (03:53)
And
next question is, of all of the things that you do, what is the thing you love the most in your work?
Simon Greenwold (03:59)
talking to people. Actually, the coolest part about my work, whether it was at university, whether it was in technology, whether it’s what we’re doing at Story as a Service, it’s getting to meet really interesting people, doing really interesting things, ⁓ making tremendous impact, whether that’s in climate, in health.
in humanities, literature, and the arts. It’s ⁓ every day, it’s a different conversation with some really interesting person doing a really interesting thing. And our work is about bringing that out into the world in original, creative, compelling ways.
Jason Gorman (04:34)
To say as a podcast host, that’s like my dream answer. What’s your favorite thing is talking? Great, we’re doing the right thing.
Simon Greenwold (04:40)
Yeah,
hopefully that’s of your favorite things too. Thank you.
Jason Gorman (04:44)
Yes, it is. is. Especially you,
Thinking about the future, what is one thing that you feel inspired about?
Simon Greenwold (04:54)
So I have a 17 year old daughter who is applying to college, getting into college, which is exciting. I’m inspired by her and her creativity and originality. She is an amazing writer. She’s a terrific storyteller. weekend she was sending her pieces out for publication to different journals and I’m inspired by that.
Jason Gorman (05:04)
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (05:19)
and what she represents because there’s lots and lots and lots of hers in the world, as which, and you have a couple too.
Jason Gorman (05:27)
Yeah,
that’s wonderful. Well, let’s look at the opposite side of that coin. doesn’t necessarily have to relate to her, but also thinking about the future. What is one thing that has you feeling anxious?
Simon Greenwold (05:40)
Well, future. Yeah, the future aspect of the future. When I worked at the university and I had staff, now I don’t have staff, I just have wonderful colleagues like you and partners. But I like to say, let’s worry about the things that we know versus the things that we don’t know. There’s infinite things that we don’t know that we could be worried about. And it’s natural to worry about them.
Jason Gorman (05:41)
It’s the future aspect of the future. Yeah, that narrows it down.
Simon Greenwold (06:05)
I try to focus on sort of the most immediate things in front of us and deal with the kind of the things that lay right in front of us. So, there’s of course existential dread about the world and what the future holds for sure, especially for our kids in the world that we are bequeathing. But… ⁓
I mostly am a relentless optimist and so while I do have anxiety about the future, I generally approach it with a feeling and spirit of goodwill and hopefulness.
Jason Gorman (06:42)
That’s great. And just for anybody listening, I will say this for the public record, Simon, there are many, many days where I’m not a pessimist, but I’m not an optimist. I’m something in between. And there are a lot of days where I’m being maybe I’m not being optimistic enough. So I do appreciate your optimism greatly.
Simon Greenwold (07:00)
No, and
I will say you and Jane both, like I do have a tendency from like when I used to play basketball, I could have the best shooting day in my life, but still remember, like go to bed thinking about the two shots that I should have made and I didn’t, right? And this was the 10 that I did. So I also rely on you guys for that kind of affirmation and reminders too, because we all can kind of get into those little pockets or pits of potholes of despair.
Jason Gorman (07:13)
Yeah.
I love a good love fest on a Monday. This is wonderful. Okay, last lightning round question. What’s the skill, any skill, doesn’t have to be work related that you’re trying to pick up right now.
Simon Greenwold (07:35)
⁓ Actually, last night, my wife and I made steak tartare for the first time. And so ⁓ I know that you are not a red meat eater, but we got a lovely sirloin from our wonderful butcher here. ⁓ And we ⁓ made steak tartare, which I had never done before. And so that was a that was a skill.
a thing that I wanted to cross off the list. And so I was able to do that more broadly. I really need to learn how to play an F chord on guitar. And so that is a skill that I am hopeful to achieve in the coming months.
Jason Gorman (08:17)
Lovely. All right, ready to get into our other questions?
Simon Greenwold (08:20)
Yeah, there’s more. Yes. ⁓
Jason Gorman (08:22)
There’s, all right, let’s say you’re hanging
out with a friend who’s kind of outside this world. Maybe they’re not, they don’t work in university. They do something else. And they ask you to just explain what you do. How do you explain what you do to somebody who isn’t like a person who does the kinds of things that we do?
Simon Greenwold (08:43)
Yeah, yeah. like the thing that I try to focus on most is about communications are the most important thing for organizational health. Internal communications, you Jason, you actually helped create the story as a service tagline, your story from the inside out. Like I think that sort of figuring your own core story out, like what do you do? Why does it matter?
How is it distinctive or optimally unique? And your DNA and my DNA is almost identical. We are still unique individuals. I believe the same thing for organizations. So, you know, when I think about, I talk about our work with friends, you know, it starts with this idea that in order for organizations to work, they need to have a healthy communications infrastructure. Good friend of mine.
Jason Gorman (09:34)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (09:34)
Good friend of mine who’s now the dean at, he was at Kellogg and now he’s a dean at Wash U at their school of business. He said up and point to me that internal communications in an organization are the least well understood, least well researched, most important part of organizational health. And I will also say that Mike also told me when I went to work at 2U, I said it’s the work is relationship management and business development.
And he said, you know, that sales, you should, you should just go read death of a salesman again, before you go take that job. And I was like, I know it’s sale. I know what that I know it is. But, but I said everything that we do at work, especially when you talked about managing with influence for especially for learning design professionals, like everything that you do at a university, not even outside of university, but within a university, it’s all about persuasion, it’s all about. So
Jason Gorman (10:02)
you
Simon Greenwold (10:18)
And he was like, yeah, you’re right. When I’m teaching my MBA students, like I’m selling my syllabus to them. I’m hoping they buy it. And it’s like that’s, and so good stories in the classroom actually help your students. So anyway, in terms of like how I described the work is like, it’s about helping organizations figure out how to communicate more effectively internally in order to communicate more effectively externally.
Jason Gorman (10:41)
Mm-hmm.
That’s terrific. And if, let’s say there’s somebody who is a little closer to what it is ⁓ that you do, is there anything else that you would add in addition to what you just said?
Simon Greenwold (10:55)
Yeah, yeah, I’d say in the intro, I think we certainly over index on higher education, nearly everything that is in higher education. But we do have some amazing clients ⁓ that are not-for-profits in education and learning. ⁓ Even we actually have a partner that’s in education technology that’s a for-profit benefit court that are also involved in education and learning. So that’s the broader envelope. ⁓ What I’d say…
Jason Gorman (11:01)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (11:23)
like when we’re talking, I’m, you know, if I’m talking to somebody who’s a little bit closer to work is that we all know that academics or even people who are just immersed in their own ⁓ professional discipline and arena, they speak in a particular vocabulary, a jargon of architects talk like architects, right? Lawyers talk like lawyers, mathematicians talk like mathematicians, you know, and so on and so forth. And oftentimes those folks
Jason Gorman (11:42)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (11:50)
as extroverted and as compelling as they might be, they might need some work, need some help in ⁓ translating their vocabulary into nouns and verbs that anyone can understand. That would make people say, it would make things that’ll help people remember the things that you’re saying. And so if I’m walking the halls at a university or I’m at an academic conference, I’m talking about what we do.
A lot of it is about giving examples of work that we’ve done to translate academies or professional jargon into nouns and verbs that people can understand and putting them into some sort of original content that is compelling.
Jason Gorman (12:31)
So actually maybe just to make this ⁓ that much more concrete is there a quick example you could give of a project that has been done that really just where we did the things that you just described just to say like this was the this was sort of the case and the problem they had and this is
Simon Greenwold (12:51)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There was a project with Princeton University. You’ve heard of it. It was actually a very cool project. They were taking three different units and creating a new business unit within the Office for Research. was called Office of Innovation. And it was bringing in their commercialization groups and other kinds of outreach and engagement groups.
and three parts of the org that were not sort of sort of strongly connected before, or formally so, organizationally so. And so our work was to work to come in.
and work with them to create their, like figure out what are their things that make them unique? Like what do they do? How are these three things together different than the three things apart? So what do they do? How does that matter? What kind of impact are you trying to have? It’s just so interesting. Princeton, in our conversations with them, in our listening sessions, their…
Jason Gorman (13:45)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (13:50)
know, they’re talking about being in some ways risk averse as a university. They’re kind of perfectionist and, know, Princeton doesn’t make mistakes, which is obvious, right? Except when you’re entrepreneurial or you need to be innovative in order for innovation, you have to be willing to fail. Fail fast, learn, move. And so how do you imbue a culture with that? How do you like in the world of translation of ⁓
Jason Gorman (13:58)
.
.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (14:17)
of research, so much of that is in the sciences and engineering. And at Princeton, which focuses really holistically on learning and really cares about humanities and social sciences, to their credit, their chief innovation officer wanted to try to bring in the whole university. And so we actually used the word translation as a real key ⁓ driver for the message for the office because translation works for scientists. Like we want to translate bench to bedside, right? Or translate our
lab work to something commercial. Right. But it also means something to the humanists. It also means something. It brings it brought in the whole campus. And so there was just a real concentration on vocabulary and really focusing in on words. And then what we ended up doing with them, and it’s super cool. You can actually see it on in their, in their materials. Now we actually created a specific visual language to go along with the vocabulary that we, that we developed with them.
Jason Gorman (14:48)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (15:14)
that ⁓ forces one to innovate while they are interacting with the office. And I won’t go into it more, but it was a pretty wonderful original visual language that we did to compliment the story work that we did, the narrative work that we did. And I’ll give a shout out to our… ⁓
strategic partner Marco Kindler von Knobloch at multiple Studio with whom we did that project, their Madrid-based studio that was I think their first US-based project and now we’re to be doing a lot more with them.
Jason Gorman (15:43)
Mm-hmm.
Wonderful. So what you just described is really kind of taking this, ⁓ it’s kind of a complex novel challenge, communication challenge, right, that Princeton had, but a lot of our clients have. And there’s a distillation. That’s a very common thing in the work. It’s just taking something that is hard to communicate or difficult or somebody, if you are really just…
Immersed in your technical background. It’s hard to come up with the words that somebody may be on the street or you know Who’s looking at funding you but doesn’t really understand what you do? is going to respond to And so this is my next question is about some of your past experiences so You know you I mentioned in my intro that you know, you were an instructor at Northwestern You were in leadership at Northwestern worked it to you
And I’m kind of curious what were some of the skills that you learned and you were using in these past parts of your career? That you feel like a really critical to doing a work. Well now
Simon Greenwold (16:51)
Yeah, yes, it’s funny running my own little company with you. I actually feel more like an academic now than I ever felt like when I was actually an academic or an academic administrator in the sense that, and this is an overgeneralization, but generalizations are generally true. I get to…
Jason Gorman (17:02)
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (17:16)
research things. I get to learn about lots of things. Like when I was working on my PhD and studying and I was a full-time student, like, well, it was a, obviously when you’re working on a dissertation, you’re trying to learn a whole lot about a little thing, but you’re still learning a whole lot, right? And you’re constantly trying to figure out other perspectives on that thing that you’re trying to unpack and understand.
And then, so there’s like a level of like research and just the intensiveness of study that I have to do now in our work. I, when I’m going to interview a faculty member or dig into an organization and figure out what their core story is, you have to learn, you have to listen, right? So there was a real piece of that that is part of this work. When we facilitate our
our workshops, ⁓ both the organizational sort of strategy workshops, but also the storytelling for impact workshops that we’ve developed. ⁓ We can talk more about those in a bit. ⁓ But that facilitation, I’m like in front of a classroom again. And I feel like the way that I used to teach was, well, I feel like I’m being a bit didactic right now. I tried not to lecture.
Jason Gorman (18:33)
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (18:37)
I tried to just ask lots of questions. I knew I had three to five things that I wanted to accomplish by the end of that hour, hour and a half session in my class. If I could ask those questions, solicit that, know, draw out the answers. It’s a lot of what we do in this work now, but also just frankly, you know, working in higher education for as long as I have, both as a student, teacher, an academic administrator.
Jason Gorman (18:45)
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (19:03)
working from the outside, when I worked it to you, I was in partner relationships, account management. And it was just all about sort of understanding how things work and how to get things done, right? And understanding that from that side of the looking glass and higher ed, It’s a different thing, it’s a different culture. And so really sort of…
Jason Gorman (19:14)
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (19:25)
understanding that and bringing that into the work now, it helps our partners, it helps our clients because we’ve seen a lot and it can help them solve the problems that they’re having on their campus, even if we’ve never set foot on that campus before, virtually or otherwise. We know like there’s seven jokes in the world, there’s probably only six academic administrative problems that need to get solved and we’ve solved them in some way.
Jason Gorman (19:30)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Hmph.
Storytelling right now has a bit of a buzz. It feels like, know, we’ve been doing the work that we do, so maybe it’s because of that I’m just seeing it more in the world. I suppose that’s possible, but I do feel like I hear other people just talking about storytelling as a thing. I’m curious, so if, let’s say, there’s a faculty member somewhere that we haven’t met who’s listening to this or somebody else in higher ed.
leadership is listening to this right now. What would you want them to know? What would you say to them about why storytelling actually matters in this moment that we’re in right now?
Simon Greenwold (20:25)
Yeah. So, I I studied the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union is built on a story, right? It’s a utopian vision of how society can or could work, right? And there is a story being told that then by politicians that then was lived through that culture, ⁓ we see it in our politics here and the way that narrative
is being used to shape the truth or not. And so I think we can understand from a kind of a macro perspective the power of narrative. And from a micro perspective, it’s just important to understand that stories are not just a nice thing to have, right?
we have to recognize that every single thing we do before we just hopped on, how was your weekend? Well, on Saturday I did this, he told a story. On Sunday I just, I was kind of alone, I just hung around. That’s still a story, right? You still, you know, the level, every single thing we do as humans is to tell stories to each other when we are ⁓ at leisure.
We watch stories, we watch shows, we watch movies. Every song, a pop song is a story, right? So we’re narrative processors. We hunger for them. We want them. We feed on them. And so for the faculty member, just to understand, you know what? Your data is important or the language that you use in your literary journal is important.
And I would never tell you not to speak in that language or use that kind of data, but understanding that there’s ways for what you’re doing to stick with the people that need to understand it, need to hear it, right? If you can use some of the things that ⁓ in our leisure.
Jason Gorman (22:08)
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (22:14)
make stories so compelling, if we can recognize that and then bring it into our workplace just a little bit, it’s almost like a superpower. You’ve all of a sudden, you started to do certain CrossFit exercises and you’re like, holy crap, I can actually like run that mile faster than I thought I could, even though I didn’t think I was doing the exercises for that, right? Storytelling is kind of like that. There’s certain exercises that you can do, you can get better at it.
Jason Gorman (22:16)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (22:39)
And it helps you and then helps your organization just, I think, thrive in ways that are unexpected even, but definitely help promote the success of what you’re trying to achieve.
Jason Gorman (22:51)
I can think of a couple examples, but I’ll ask you a question. ⁓ What is an example of a client that had this exact thing that you’re talking about, where there’s just a lot of data, they’re doing the research, they have a way of talking about what they do academically, but they needed to kind of bring it down. If you can talk in specifics, that’s great. If not, you can talk in generalities. But I’m kind of curious for you to unpack a little bit this process of going from the…
the very intellectual, the very data-driven, the very technical into the story-driven, what is the story-driven version of the technical and the data-driven.
Simon Greenwold (23:30)
Yeah, we’ve had a lot of wonderful clients, you know, and I gave an example of Princeton before and maybe for ⁓ maybe to show the diversity of the kinds of places that we work with, know, Princeton is a well, obviously, it’s an N of one.
But even universities that it represents, elite private universities or colleges and universities, that’s a lot of the work that we do is with research university and research units, institutes, centers and such within those universities. But we also do lot of work with universities that don’t have a massive research enterprise. Some, but that are R2s or that are purely ⁓ sort of tuition driven.
Jason Gorman (23:54)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (24:11)
largely online or even exclusively, exclusively online, ⁓ doing workforce acceleration, workforce development, largely for, for working populations, military veteran populations. Like in many ways that’s the mainstream of higher education, but Princeton isn’t the mainstream of higher education. And it’s a total pleasure working across that whole continuum. In terms of a project, you know, I’ll, I’ll talk about one of our best and awesomest clients, which is Excelsior University, which is just coincidentally headquartered
Jason Gorman (24:22)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (24:41)
in my hometown of Albany, New York. I’ve known their president, David Skable, a real long time back to when I was a PhD student at Northwestern and he was a young associate dean at Northwestern, I want to say. ⁓ David has done lots of wonderful things and has been president of Excelsior for about five years. Took it from being a college to university. ⁓ And he’s one of the more entrepreneurial, innovative leaders in higher education out there right now. And he has…
a vision and a strategy for ⁓ how Excelsior can operate within this incredibly volatile, precarious higher education environment we’re in, where there’s tons of university closures and tons of, and a demographic cliff and all of the things that if you read the Chronicle, you hear every day.
Jason Gorman (25:26)
you
Simon Greenwold (25:33)
Anyway, they have a strategy that’s called the Constellation Strategy, which is a strategy to create a new kind of university system, not a system like the Cal system or the SUNY system or the Wisconsin system where there’s a school here and a school there and a school there. And if you’re a student at one of them, you don’t really have access to the things that the others. And he’s imagining like, if you could create a university system that could do that? But it wasn’t just within a state, it was within the whole country. And what if that constellation…
Jason Gorman (25:51)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (25:55)
involved nonprofit organization or some employers or you have like internship opportunities. It’s just, it’s a different way of thinking. This, a lot of what we did with, with Excelsior was to help sort of really understand what the strategy is and also then how to execute on it. And then to help the legacy employees at Excelsior understand that the
work of the future was really the work of the present, right? And understanding that the things that Excelsior, the three things that Excelsior is gonna do as a large ⁓ planet in this constellation, or star in the constellation, ⁓ are the things that Excelsior has been doing for over 50 years. And for people who were there a long time to, again, to understand, ⁓ like, this is just an extension.
Jason Gorman (26:24)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (26:45)
of what we do, not a totally new thing that’s gonna make us like have to do everything differently. Might be, might have to do some things differently. But that work, it’s a little different. think I didn’t realize an answer the question a little differently than how you asked it. But it was about taking a concept that was scary for the staff in a lot of ways, this future facing concept and realizing that actually it’s less, it’s actually just an extension.
Jason Gorman (27:04)
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (27:10)
of what we have been doing rather than some sort of weird pivot. And then, and I like to say, think of it this way. Your core story of an organization is like a Shakespeare play, right? When Shakespeare wrote the play and it was performed 300 years ago, it’s different than it’s performed now. Right now it might be a Netflix series, right? It’s a different form, it’s a different shape, but it’s still the same play.
Jason Gorman (27:21)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (27:33)
And I think organizations, as they evolve, as they do strategy and think about reimagining themselves, they should be thinking of themselves as a Shakespeare play. I think it’s a useful way of taking something that has a past, a legacy that has to be respected in the present in order to kind of push forward into the future.
Jason Gorman (27:52)
Well, I actually appreciate what you said about talking to working with lots of different kinds of colleges and universities there are There are ⁓ they really do vary a lot ⁓ And I think one of the things I really was excited to talk about in this conversation
Because you are having so many conversations with so many different leaders and so many kinds of institutions of higher ed right now I’m kind of curious if you could talk a little bit about the Kind of zeitgeist What are people in higher ed? It’s a challenging time for higher ed for a lot of reasons a lot of funding has gone away There’s been a lot of pressure in other places. There’s you know, they’re enrollments ⁓
Foreign student enrollment is is challenged. It’s it’s a it’s a lot But what are people? Feeling in higher ed right now. What would you how would you describe what you?
Simon Greenwold (28:45)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I, the there’s a great Chekhov quote. I think it’s a Chekhov quote. I attribute it to him. might not be right, but we can check. moron can handle a crisis. takes a genius to handle liberty of life. Like what I’m, what I’m seeing across, whether it’s the, you know, the three car garage university or the, or the one car garage university, like whether, last year, well, I should start.
Higher Ed has been under duress for a really long time. It’s actually been, it’s, you know, my former boss, Andrew Wachtell, dissertation advisor, former dean, who’s like, he would say that higher than the last unreconstructed industry in the world. Like it’s still waiting for its disruption. I think we’re there. Like, I think it is officially being disrupted now by, you know, the pandemic gave it a good whack and now AI is now on its chest, right? I think…
Jason Gorman (29:29)
Mm-hmm.
you
Simon Greenwold (29:39)
So, but if you’ve been in this and you read the Chronicle every day, like as I have for last 25 years, there’s always some existential thing, right? It’s worser now, right? I mean, as I just said, that I, yeah.
I actually, I just read to a bunch of PhD students that I did a session of WTF, are you going to do with a PhD? said, the job market was always horrible. Now it’s horrible. Right? is. But again, let’s just recognize that higher ed has been under duress a really long time. Things have not been great for a long time. It hasn’t been disrupted though in quite the way that it is right now. And then there’s that external disruption of politics. And, you know, 2025 was the worst year.
Jason Gorman (30:05)
you
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (30:24)
higher ed ever had, I think in terms of just like the federal assault on the institution, right? And I think everyone was, you know, were quite rightly shocked and awed by the awfulness of it. think what I have seen in the zeitgeist is, you know, what happens, we are hardwired.
to get back to work in the fall. We are hardwired to sharpen our pencils and let’s get to work. And what I sort of felt like happened and what I see happening still is things suck. And again, they suck harder now than they sucked in a long time. But the leaders, not just leaders, the faculty, the students, the administrators, you gotta get the work done.
Jason Gorman (30:51)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (31:16)
Still have to teach students, right? We still have to get the research done. We have to figure out how to do it, right? How do we do it in ways that aren’t dismissive of the zeitgeist, right? How do we do it in ways that acknowledge the things that we care about, the values that we want to continue to promote? As you know, we just did this big project, a Sloan-funded project with the Ivy Plus on diversity, equity, inclusion. We did that in the last year.
Jason Gorman (31:42)
Yeah.
Simon Greenwold (31:42)
It’s been hard, but there was still a desire to do the work. And I think that’s the thing that I am impressed by is the people. And we said it in my introduction, like we love to work with mission-driven organizations, right? These organizations that are like, whether it’s teaching students or doing groundbreaking research or both, How do we get that done?
Jason Gorman (31:48)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (32:08)
How do we continue to get it done in the most responsible ways and the most efficacious ways? I think that’s where we can help. ⁓ But that’s what’s been gratifying to see is the willingness to do the work, ⁓ even though things still suck.
Jason Gorman (32:24)
you
So just pivoting off of that answer, because that’s great. If you could give, I don’t know, three to five good, solid, concrete pieces of advice for somebody in higher ed who thinks that storytelling could help them in some aspect of their work. We’ve already named probably half a dozen different ways that storytelling could be a benefit. What are some kind of universal?
ideas, concrete things that people might try to do and apply in their work.
Simon Greenwold (32:52)
Yeah.
Well, it’s a great question too, because I the third leg of the stool for what Story Asset Service does is ⁓ teach individuals how to tell stories on behalf of an organization. So a lot of what we talked about is that organizational narrative. And that’s the mainstream of what we do for sure. I’d say it’s 80 % of what we do, although we’re looking to do more of the in-person workshops, especially for learning designers, ⁓ as we know.
I want to give a shout out to our partner Mario Juarez who helped develop ⁓ this Storytelling for Impact ⁓ course that we’ve taken to try and apply to learning professionals, higher education, diversity in higher education. So shout out to Mario for his partnership and general awesomeness. Three things to remember from storytelling is that people remember three things.
Maybe four, maybe five, but three. When you’re telling a story, really try to be concise. Consider your audience. One of my favorite lines, you’ve heard me say it a million times, is that stakeholders hold stakes. Try to understand what they’re holding. Because if you understand what they’re holding, ⁓ you’ll be able to get your thing across to them.
Jason Gorman (33:45)
you
Simon Greenwold (34:11)
more effectively and as I often say, sometimes that story needs to get told in a white paper and sometimes it needs to get told on a trucker hat, right? Same story, different message depending on the stakeholder or your audience. So three things and ⁓ consider your audience, remember your audience. And again, that goes for individual storytelling as well as organizational.
Jason Gorman (34:20)
you
Simon Greenwold (34:36)
And then remember that people remember details. Again, back to my academic background, Stalin, I think, said, and it’s horrible, but five million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy. Remember that when you’re telling stories, when you’re telling stories about data.
Jason Gorman (34:41)
Mm.
Simon Greenwold (34:59)
like one really well told anecdote with specific details of seeing people, pain, place, right? That’s gonna make people remember the thing that you’re trying to get them to remember. So those would be the three things.
Jason Gorman (35:14)
Thank you. All right, we just have a couple questions left.
right, so ⁓ here we go. You have a lot of interests, so I know you. We’ve covered a tiny little fraction of the things that you are involved with, get up to are interested in. You’re holding a baseball.
Simon Greenwold (35:29)
baseball season starts. I’d be more excited.
Jason Gorman (35:29)
Currently right like that’s that’s
one of that’s one of the things is baseball. But anyway, what? What’s something that you have borrowed from an unusual place that has nothing to do with storytelling nothing to do with higher ed nothing to do with academia That is important in your work So an idea from some other part of your experience in the world that you use in your work
Simon Greenwold (35:52)
So I was gonna talk about Russian literature, but then that’s still kind of my work, so I’m not gonna do that. I just told a story to…
Jason Gorman (35:56)
Thank
Simon Greenwold (36:00)
Actually that David’s gable. I mentioned the president Excel here. I just had breakfast with him on Friday. He coincidentally lives here in Evanston’s, know, Skokie Evanston and commutes to Albany. So it’s just a fun thing. So we’re having breakfast and he had it was this incredibly gusty day and bad turbulence and he was able to land. He was a little delayed, but it was fine. As long as you take off and land, it’s okay. But I told him a story.
Jason Gorman (36:13)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (36:28)
we were talking about just work and workplace turbulence, right? And I said, actually, my father-in-law was a Pan Am pilot. And for a long time, his email was a747drvr at hotmail or something, whatever it was. And Yahoo, maybe. And ⁓ if that’s still there, probably, that’s, I shouldn’t foreshadowing now. But anyway.
Jason Gorman (36:33)
Mm-hmm.
Thank
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (36:53)
I remember having a conversation that is like, you close your eyes and you think about a Pan Am pilot, like that’s my father-in-law, like six, three, slick back, hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, like quiet, earnest, right?
He was a Navy pilot. his hook ⁓ from landing on aircraft carriers. He had his hook from the Navy in Vietnam hanging over the garage. He’s like the opposite my father who is ⁓ a wonderful, crazy Jewish artist from New York. It’s like the complete opposite person. years and years and years ago, Kurt told me that there’s ⁓
Jason Gorman (37:29)
you
Simon Greenwold (37:37)
Father-in-law told me there’s three kinds of turbulence. There’s mild, moderate, and severe. And that ⁓ mild turbulence can even be like you pulling against your seatbelt a little bit during the flight, even when the pilot says flight attendants in your jump seats, that’s still mild most of the time. He said in all the years of flying, there was moderate turbulence, maybe.
Jason Gorman (37:58)
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (38:04)
a couple hundred times, but again, this is in 30 years of flying, right? And that’s like, things are a little bit like feel like, oh, you’re like really holding onto you. And then like, and severe is like things are flying around the cabin, and that like happened like less than 10 times or something like that in all these years of flying. So the message is like when you’re feeling it.
it usually it’s been it feels mild. I mean, it’s it feels horrible. It feels severe. It’s probably 99 % of the time. It’s still mild. I don’t want to say that it’s not all sometimes things can be awful. Right. But you so and I so I think about this at work. Right. When I like it or the or the moment for the culture, social, cultural, political moment we’re in right now sometimes because it does it feel like it’s severe turbulence? You know, or is it?
Jason Gorman (38:30)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Simon Greenwold (38:50)
It might feel like that, but it might actually just be mild. We just need to figure out how to ride it out. Right. And I don’t mean to say that crises don’t happen and things aren’t severe. Certainly in the world right now, it’s severe, you know, but in terms of our work, in terms of how we work with our clients, our partners, so much of it is just like, how do we understand the context? We really appreciate it. Be calm.
Jason Gorman (38:54)
Hmm.
Sure.
Simon Greenwold (39:14)
Right. And recognize that we’re going to figure out a way through it. Right. That’s the, so I think that’s a relevant example, since I literally just had that conversation a couple of days ago, it was top of mind for me. So I could, I could have done a baseball one though. My next podcast will come up with a good baseball. Good. Everybody, everybody needs to play their position. That’s a good one for an organization. Everybody needs to play their position.
Jason Gorman (39:30)
Next time we’ll do a baseball one. We should do a whole base. I don’t know anything about baseball, but we can do a whole one
There you go.
Simon Greenwold (39:42)
First base needs to understand what the catcher does, catcher needs to understand what the center fielder does. Everybody needs to play the position for the team to be successful and to communicate. Okay.
Jason Gorman (39:49)
I love that.
We got two. We got a bonus one. So, okay, last question. There’s always a question. Last one is always from a previous guest. This one comes from Louis NeJame And ⁓ he has assured me that I’m not butchering his name when I say it, but I’m not sure. Louis, I hope that was okay. And here it is.
Simon Greenwold (39:54)
That’s who for.
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (40:14)
What is something that you believe about learning design that most people would disagree with?
Simon Greenwold (40:24)
So you’re the learning design expert. I’m a learning design fellow traveler, but I’ve been a fan of Jack Rabbit as long as Story as a Service, even since before Story as a Service was a thing. The thing that it’s what I would disagree with, what’s the question?
Jason Gorman (40:41)
Yeah, what is something that most people believe that you would disagree with?
Simon Greenwold (40:45)
People, well, most people believe I would disagree with many things, but about learning design in particular, I think, and we’ve talked a lot about this, the disruption of AI, it is going to disrupt, but it is not going to ⁓ fully upend the industry. I think, again, I just having watched the Academy Awards last night and the beauty of art and things that are made.
Jason Gorman (40:49)
Thank you.
Hmm.
Simon Greenwold (41:10)
and the things that are made that are memorable. In learning design, yes, is AI going to disrupt? It is for sure going to disrupt, but for learning designers,
There’s going to be a, I think many would say that the industry is going to be kind of, it’s going to go away even. And I don’t, I would say absolutely not that there’s way too much humanity that’s necessary in it for good learning, real authentic learning to happen. And so that’s why I would say to the learning designers listening in, keep at it.
Jason Gorman (41:46)
At the very top of this conversation, you were described as an optimist, and now we are ending on a very optimistic note. So I would say, this is, no, this has really worked out. ⁓ Simon, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. This is really fun.
Simon Greenwold (41:51)
yeah, I wasn’t BSing, man.
I appreciate you,