Your engagement survey tells you how people rate things. This tells you what they are not saying.

The Fundamentals is a workplace programme that uses a children's picture book to reopen conversations adults have quietly stopped having. It starts with an hour that anyone can attend, moves into a four session writing series for a smaller group, and ends with a written culture report delivered to your leadership team.

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THE CASE

People learned to stop saying things, and nobody noticed when.

Most of what makes a workplace difficult is not policy. It is the accumulated habit of not saying the thing while it is still small. Someone absorbs a comment. Someone assumes bad intent. Someone avoids a colleague for eight months and calls it being busy.

Annual engagement surveys are not built to catch this. A rating scale can tell you that trust dropped four points. It cannot tell you why, and it cannot tell you what people would have written if you had asked them to write instead of to rate.

This programme asks people to write. What surfaces is specific, and it is usable.

HOW IT WORKS

An activation, an intervention, and a document.

Part one. The Story Hour, 60 minutes, open to everyone

A live read-aloud of The Amazing Zoe: A Queen Like Me, followed by a facilitated conversation. It is a children's book, read to adults, on purpose. People arrive expecting something light and leave having said something they meant. This hour creates permission.

Part two. First Lessons, four sessions of 90 minutes, closed cohort of 12 to 20

A structured writing series built on five ideas drawn directly from the book. Participants write in a workbook, nothing is read aloud unless they offer it, and no writing experience is assumed. This is where the change happens.

Part three. The Fundamentals Report, delivered ten business days after the final session

An anonymized culture insight document for your leadership team. Pulse movement across the programme, five to seven themes that surfaced in the writing, the specific places where your stated values and your lived experience diverge, and three recommendations. This is the piece you can put in front of a board.

Optional. The Anthology session

A fifth session in which the cohort selects and edits pieces for a professionally bound internal anthology. Organizations that run this often go on to commission a full corporate legacy book.

THE FIVE FUNDAMENTALS

Five things we all learned as children and mostly stopped doing.

Every session returns to these. They are taken from the events of the book, not invented for a corporate audience.

  • Say the thing that hurt.

    Name it out loud while it is still small, before it hardens into eight months of avoidance.

  • Assume they are repeating, not attacking

    Most harm in a workplace is absorbed and passed along rather than chosen.

  • Go and learn what you were never taught.

    Comfort is not the same as education, and the gap in your knowledge is your responsibility to close.

  • Come back.

    Returning to the same room is the repair. Avoidance is the only permanent damage.

  • Bring something of your own to trade

    Inclusion is an exchange, not an accommodation granted to somebody

FORMATS AND INVESTMENT

Four ways in.

The Story Hour, virtual

One 60 minute session delivered online. Unlimited attendance. Includes the three question pulse and a short written summary.

From $1,800

The Story Hour, in person

One 60 minute session on site, with signed books for attendees. The bookmobile can be added for an outdoor version.

Quoted on headcount

First Lessons series

The Story Hour plus four 90 minute writing sessions for a closed cohort of 12 to 20. Includes printed participant workbooks and reflection cards.

Quoted per cohort

The full programme

Story Hour, four First Lessons sessions, pulse survey at three points, the Fundamentals Report authored by Valene Campbell, and a leadership debrief session.

$14,500

Signed copies of the book for every attendee can be included in any format, with a discounted rate on 50 copies or more. HST applies to all pricing. Partnership pricing is available for non-profits and charitable organizations.

WHAT LEADERSHIP RECEIVES

The Fundamentals Report.

Ten business days after the final session, your leadership team receives a written document containing:

  • Movement across the three question pulse, measured at the start, midpoint and close.

  • Five to seven themes drawn from what participants actually wrote • The specific points where your stated values and the lived experience of your people diverge, described plainly

  • Three recommendations you can act on without buying anything else from us

  • A one page summary suitable for a board or executive committee

Our ethics guardrail

The Report is anonymized and thematic. We do not attribute a quotation to a person, we do not identify individuals by role where the team is small enough to make them recognizable, and we do not hand over the writing itself. Participants are told this at the start of session one, in plain language, before they write anything.

We also recommend against placing leaders in the same cohort as their direct reports. If you want leadership to take part, we run a separate cohort.

FIT

Who this is for, and who it is not for.

This works well when

  • Your organization has just been through a restructure, a merger or a difficult year

  • Engagement scores have moved and nobody can explain why

  • You have an employee resource group that wants substance rather than a lunch

  • You are building a culture or belonging programme and need something that produces evidence, not attendance figures

  • Your learning and development budget is looking for something that is not another e-learning module

This is not the right fit when

  • You need mandatory compliance training with a completion certificate

  • You want a one hour keynote and nothing further. In that case book the Story Hour on its own and leave it there, which is a perfectly good outcome

  • Leadership is not prepared to read the Report or act on it. The programme still runs well, but you are paying for a diagnostic you have decided in advance to ignore

WHO RUNS IT

Facilitated by the author who wrote the book.

Sessions are led by Valene Campbell, Founder and Managing Director of Zou Zou Media House and author of The Amazing Zoe series, alongside trained facilitators from our team. Every session runs to a written script with defined protocols for emotionally charged moments and personal disclosures, developed for our senior memoir programmes and adapted for workplace settings.

We are not therapists and we say so in the room. Where something surfaces that needs professional support, we direct people to your employee assistance programme and we do not attempt to handle it ourselves.

FREQUENTLY ASKED

A children's book. For adults. Really?

  • Nobody is made to write and nobody is made to share. The prompts are structured so that a participant who writes three lines still gets value from the discussion. In practice, resistance drops sharply after session one.

  • The Story Hour runs well virtually. The First Lessons series is stronger in person, and we will tell you that before you book rather than after.

  • Typically six to eight weeks from the Story Hour to the Report, depending on how you space the sessions. Weekly and fortnightly cadences both work

  • Most often learning and development, wellness, or culture and engagement. It is not a heritage month booking and we do not recommend positioning it as one internally, because that limits it to a single month and a smaller budget.

Really. A picture book gets past the defences a leadership workshop triggers immediately. Nobody arms themselves against a story about a six year old. That is precisely why it works, and it is the most common reason people book the second session.