Shifting Perspectives is a storytelling-based toolkit designed by Good Health Design to help people surface assumptions, explore lived realities, and reimagine new possibilities. Centred around real-world scenarios drawn from contemporary research, the toolkit supports critical thinking and empathy through facilitated workshops that explore the complexities of individual, whānau, and systemic experiences across the health and wellbeing landscape.

At the heart of the toolkit are six compelling scenarios across diverse contexts — hospital and emergency care, mental health, whānau violence, dementia, deafness, and homelessness. Each scenario introduces fictionalised yet relatable characters and situations that invite reflection, provoke discussion, and encourage deeper consideration of the unseen forces that shape people’s lives. Participants are guided through a series of interactive activities such as journey mapping, empathy mapping, and systems thinking to unpack the scenarios and examine their own biases, responses, and ideas for change.

Rather than telling people what to think, Shifting Perspectives creates space to think with others. The toolkit has been used in a variety of education, research, and community settings to enable more thoughtful, culturally grounded, and emotionally attuned conversations about health. It has proven particularly effective in wānanga-based contexts, where the narrative format allows whānau to safely explore difficult issues by projecting their experiences and aspirations onto the fictional characters.

For example, the whānau violence scenario has been a core resource in the Kei Roto Tō Tātou Rongoā project, where it supported whānau participants to reflect on what healthy relationships might look like, and where to find help when things become unsafe. Participants shared that the story-based approach made it easier to engage with sensitive content and talk about their own realities. In response to this success, the team is now developing a follow-up to the original story that continues the narrative, allowing whānau to further explore relational dynamics and identify safe people in their communities.

The toolkit is accompanied by a growing collection of facilitated workshop guides that introduce creative and reflective research methods. These include:

• Journey Mapping – tracing a character’s experience over time to identify moments of impact and intervention.
• Empathy Mapping – exploring what a character thinks, feels, says, and does to build richer understanding.
• Levels of the System – mapping how an issue plays out across individuals, communities, and structures.

Designed for facilitators, educators, community leaders, and researchers, these guides support the meaningful integration of storytelling and systems thinking into workshops that centre human experience.

You can purchase a copy of Shifting Perspectives on The GHD Shop.