About No Lip Service

Storytelling + narrative services for organizations + leaders creating change.

The Narrative Home | Tell Ethical Stories | Tell Useful Stories

Stories are the language of change.

We are living in a time of accelerating change — we have more information than ever before, but it’s harder to make sense of the world. Human brains just can’t cope with copious, complex information: that’s why we need stories.

Stories aren’t for manipulation or persuasion — at least, that’s not their origin. Stories are how we first learned to learn. Stories are how we first collected knowledge, and how we shared knowledge before books or schools. We’ve lost that tradition in our mistaken belief that stories and science are in opposition to one another. They’re not: stories bridge what is and what could be, and science finds ways to make it so. They’re two sides of the same coin, differentiated only by time — one deeply rooted in the present and the other connecting us to the past or the future.

Communications practice has been in a state of disruption since digital media rapidly collapsed the divisions between communication and narrative, statement and story, person and public figure, narrating and living. We have no choice but to incorporate storytelling into our practice to cope with the rapid rate of change and the incoherence of infinite information.

No Lip Service seeks to bridge communications practice + narrative study for this new era of communications, and runs these projects at the intersections where they meet:

Story-Modeling™: a method for telling Useful Stories that generate knowledge about the real world.
Tell Ethical Stories: towards industry standards and best practices for ethical storytelling in communications.
The Narrative Home: a home for the narrative ecosystem, bridging communications practice and narrative study.

Fiona J. Ramsey
Storytelling, Communications + Media Relations

Owner, No Lip Service LLC
Founder, Story-Modeling™
Tell Ethical Stories
Tell Useful Stories
The Narrative Home

Fiona has worked in communications, storytelling and narrative change for 20 years, with startups and nonprofits at the intersection of tech and the way we live, including crowdfunding, microfinance, the sharing economy, the future of work, the future of care, and the future of organizing.

Fiona’s career in communications began as founding team member and Dir. of Public Relations at Kiva, seeing the organization to $100 million loaned in 4 years with zero marketing budget. She was one of the first communications practitioners working with personal storytelling in the digital story economy. Fiona has coached more than 100 founders, CEOs, staff spokespeople and organization members in storytelling, press interviews and public speaking, including group trainings. She has placed stories in top-tier outlets including NYT, WSJ, Glamour, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, San Francisco Chronicle, WIRED, FRONTLINE/World and has been published in top-tier publications as a ghostwriter. She provides PR crisis support selectively.

When digital media turned organizational communications toward storytelling — specifically instrumentalized personal storytelling — Fiona developed the theory and method of Story-Modeling™ to address practical and ethical issues of personal storytelling in the digital story economy. In 2025 Fiona launched The Narrative Home — a place to find events, organizations and research at the intersection of narrative and communications — and Tell Ethical Stories, advocating for industry standards and best practices for organizational storytelling in communications.

Fiona has a B.A. (Literature, History) from the University of Melbourne, Australia, completed the Ohio State University Project Narrative Summer Institute of 2022, is a certified Narrative 4 Story Exchange facilitator, a member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and has attended Narrative Matters since 2023. She will be presenting “... And that’s why I decided to…”: Personal Stories as Scientific Models and Why It Matters at the Narrative Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2026.

Fiona is from Melbourne, Australia and lives in Colorado, USA.

Areas of Interest

Instrumentalized storytelling, ethical storytelling, AI + narrative, literary Darwinism, organizational storytelling, narrative cognition.

Working Papers