WDHB Launches Alif, a Narrative Intelligence Studio

Alif is co-founded by WDHB and Imane Terrab, Ph.D., who has spent over fifteen years at WDHB developing the intellectual and practical foundations of narrative work with organizations. The studio grows out of a recurring observation: beyond strategy, structure, and process, what holds an organization together, or pulls it apart, is narrative. It is the stories people rely on to interpret change, align around purpose, and coordinate action.

Alif works upstream from storytelling and communications. Where most approaches start with the message an organization wants to deliver, Alif starts with the stories already at work: the ones shaping how people inside the organization think, feel, and decide.

“Narrative is the layer we kept coming back to. Alif gives it a dedicated home.”

— Sunil Narang, President & CEO, WDHB

Alif brings together elements of strategy, leadership development, and organizational advisory. It focuses on a layer that none of these disciplines typically addresses: the narrative infrastructure that shapes how organizations and teams make sense of what they are doing and why.

Collective meaning is a prerequisite of strategic alignment

Organizations and teams engage Alif at a range of moments: mergers that require building a shared story, strategic pivots that need new language and collective meaning, leadership teams seeking clearer direction. But also growing organizations that want to strengthen their narrative as they scale, teams navigating complexity without a shared frame of reference, or companies looking to reconnect with a purpose that has become abstract.

Through narrative audits, framework design, workshops, and ongoing advisory, Alif helps surface the stories driving decisions, identify where strategy and lived experience diverge, and build the narrative coherence needed to move forward together.

“Organizations don’t usually lack a story. They lack awareness of the stories already at work, the ones shaping decisions, behaviors, and identity without anyone naming them. That’s where we start.”
— Imane Terrab, Ph.D., Founder & Managing Director, Alif

Alif calls this discipline Narrative Intelligence: the ability to identify the stories through which people make sense of reality, and to work with them as part of how decisions and collective direction take shape. For organizations, it is the capacity to make the narratives driving alignment, resilience, and clarity explicit, and to develop that capacity as an ongoing practice.

Alif operates as a distinct studio with its own methodology and identity, closely connected to WDHB’s ecosystem. WDHB designs experiences that shift how leaders work and decide. Alif works on the narratives that shape identity, direction, and strategic choices.

For more information about Alif, visit www.wearealif.com.