Dangerous Stories Studios: What I'm Building in 2026

I’ve spent the last few years watching therapy disperse into ambient culture. Therapeutic language now lives everywhere, in LinkedIn posts, podcast conversations, product design, AI chatbots, but often stripped of the relational depth and narrative richness that makes it transformative. In his most recent newsletter Oliver Burkeman wrote, “The most important benefits of therapy arise from the fact that someone else – a conscious, emoting awareness – is really there, holding me in mind.” I couldn’t agree more.

This dispersal isn’t good or bad (well…). It’s just what’s happening. And it’s changing what people need from those of us who love the work of human transformation.

People don’t just need healing anymore. They need help navigating transitions. Imagining viable futures. Making sense of lives that no longer fit the scripts they inherited. They need what I’ve come to call cultural architecture, the capacity to design new ways of being when the old ones stop working.

So I’m doing something different in 2026.

Introducing Dangerous Stories Studios

For years, I’ve been developing practices that blend narrative therapy, futures thinking, chronotope theory, and design sensibility. I’ve been calling it “futuring work” helping people restore their capacity to imagine and build the futures they actually want to inhabit, rather than the ones that colonize their imagination.

Next year, I’m bringing all of this together under one roof: Dangerous Stories Studios.

This isn’t a practice. It’s not even really a business. It’s a studio, a space for making new possibilities thinkable, then buildable. A constellation of offerings designed for people in liminal space, people whose stories are changing faster than their sense of self can keep up.

Here’s what I’m building:

A New Podcast

I’m launching a new podcast that will go alongside “The Radical Therapist.” Same spirit, same willingness to question therapeutic orthodoxy and cultural assumptions, but with a sharper focus on the futures we’re building together. Less critique more composition.

Each episode will explore how stories shape what becomes possible. How the narratives we inherit limit or expand what we can imagine. How to recognize when a story has outlived its usefulness and how to craft one that fits the life you’re actually living. Guests will include narrative therapists, futurists, designers, artists, writers, theologians, healers of all sorts and people doing the messy work of cultural transformation in real time.

Quarterly Futuring Sprints

Four times a year, I’ll be running Dangerous Stories Futuring Sprints, intensive 3-hour online experiences for people navigating major transitions.

These aren’t therapy. They’re not coaching. They’re participatory futures work. You’ll map the signals of what’s emerging in your life, identify what’s ending, and prototype new possibilities through scenario work and chronotope mapping.

Each sprint is limited to 20-25 people. Small enough for real dialogue. Large enough for the collective intelligence that emerges when people in transition find each other.

Dates: March, June, September, December 2026.

The Futurecraft Mastermind (October 2026)

At the end of the year, I’m running something I’ve never done before: a 3-month intensive mastermind for 8-12 people who are redesigning their practices, projects, or identities.

This is for therapists who know they’re becoming something else. Creatives launching new work. Founders in transition. Anyone who needs sustained relational support and high-level strategic thinking while navigating a major reinvention.

We’ll meet every two weeks. Do deep work. Scenario mapping. Hotseat sessions. You’ll have direct access to me between sessions. And you’ll be in community with other people doing the hard, imaginative work of building futures that don’t yet exist.

Applications open in September. Early conversations happen now.

The Dangerous Stories Studio Membership

And because all of this needs a home base, a place for ongoing practice and community, I’m opening the Studio Membership in early 2026.

This is where the work lives between the big moments. Monthly gatherings. Practices and prompts. Access to recorded Dangerous Stories Labs and Storyfield sessions. A community of people committed to staying awake to the stories they’re telling and the futures they’re building.

Think of it as a creative practice space for people doing cultural architecture work in their own lives.

Why “Studios”?

I chose the word “studios” deliberately.

A studio is where things get made. Where rough drafts become finished work. Where you can fail, iterate, and try again. It’s a working space, not a polished showroom. Collaborative studios are places where peers gather to push each other’s thinking and craft.

That’s the energy I want to bring to this work. Not the clinical remove of many therapy office’s. Not the guru-on-stage vibe of so much transformational work. But something more like an artist’s studio or a design lab, a place where people come to build the futures they want to inhabit.

An Invitation, Not a Funnel

I’m not interested in building a traditional business funnel. I’m not trying to move you from “awareness” to “consideration” to “purchase.” That model assumes I have something to sell you, and your job is to be convinced.

What I’m building is a constellation. Different entry points depending on where you are and what you need. Some people will start with the podcast and never go further. Some will do a sprint and that’ll be enough. Others will find their way into the membership or mastermind because they need sustained support for a longer journey.

All of it is designed to serve the same thing: helping people recover their capacity to imagine and build viable, desirable futures.

If that resonates, I’d love to have you in the studio.

What’s next:

• Podcast launches January 2026

• Studio Membership opens March 2026

• First Futuring Sprint: March 2026

• Mastermind applications: October 2026

Want to stay in the loop? You’re already here. I’ll be sharing more details about each offering as we get closer. And if you’re interested in early conversations about the mastermind, just email me or DM me.

The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we design together.

Let’s build something dangerous.

— Chris

Come learn with me!

Excited to be partnering with the Casperson Training Center in February.

In times of uncertainty, clients often find themselves stuck in stories that limit their sense of possibility. Narrative therapy has long emphasized how people live through and with stories, yet

the question of time and future remains under-theorized. This workshop introduces two vital concepts for contemporary practice: futuring, practices that help people imagine and author

futures worth living into, and chronotopes, the time–space patterns that shape how life stories are organized and experienced.

Drawing from Michael White’s work on liminal space, Pierre Wack’s scenario planning, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes, we will explore how therapists can scaffold imaginative practices with clients who face impasses, transitions, or crises of meaning.

Register Here: