Creativity for Tom Lynham is built on one central belief – that stories are how people understand themselves, each other and the organisations they build. Across global brands, start-ups and public art installations the wordsmith and artist self-describes his professional role as a supporter that helps people articulate what they’re doing. Even his journey with Counterculture echoes this; having known founder Tom Wilcox since childhood, he was there for the initial brainstorm ideas as the ideas for the consultancy group evolved. Speaking via zoom from his minimalist office, his eloquence immediately made me sharpen up and listen to how a love for words and a background in design have driven an international career journey.
“We remember stories. We tell stories that we’ve been told to other people. Stories have a life of their own, whereas information on a page is pretty dead.”
Lynham’s practice is rooted in a quiet resistance to generic communication. He sees a growing dependence on AI tools as a risk that flattens the nuances of conversation; ‘People use the whole incredible array of communication to irony to metaphor to all those wonderful things that make communication really riveting … So it’s really trying to get people to believe in themselves rather than relying on a machine’.
He positions storytelling as a way for businesses to become truly distinctive, with his work acting as a kind of counter-corporate psychotherapy – long conversations, a keen listening ear, games that open up the imagination and allow people to stray from a narrowing work identity and voice. It’s an approach which has led to a highly varied client list, from global giants like IKEA and Lego to intimate start-ups. For Ikea, he worked as part of a large team on ‘Assembly guide for a better future’, a project that set out current and future goals to reduce its carbon footprint. The work needed to be message-led to capture a broad audience of 170,000 co-workers across 60 countries, encouraging them to generate new ideas, technologies and solutions for climate action.
Lego and the power of play
Lynham’s collaboration with Lego shows how storytelling can emerge from play. For the Lego House in Billund, Denmark, he asked a deceptively simple question: if the house could speak, what kind of voice would it have, and what would it say? He observed gendered play in workshops, with children constructing different worlds side by side, and fed this into the idea of Lego House as a place where different ways of imagination can coexist. Lynham also spoke with scientists and academics who continue to use Lego in their adult work, reinforcing his view of the colourful bricks as a universal medium for thought and storytelling.
“Creativity comes from a basic human need. It’s a mixture of curiosity and the need to make things.”
A team-building workshop for Counterculture pulls on the thread of this idea. Asking team members to build self-portraits out of Lego, some made literal models that mirrored their clothes and hair whilst others built abstract constructions that pushed on identity, attitude and their views. These models became prompts for discussions about how one’s personality can contribute to the organisation, with unknown hobbies sparking conversations.
“Once you get people around a table telling a wonderful story about some aspect of their work, it’s really infectious. In the end I don’t really have to write anything. I just become an editor of their stories.”
Finding symmetry in metaphors
Since the pandemic Tom has been steadily creating two-minute film pieces that he now screens for clients and design consultancies. Sometimes charming, other times disturbing, they are built entirely around metaphor, using the contrasting language of symmetry and asymmetry to prod people into finding analogies and a deeper inner awareness. In one film, viewers are invited to walk through a forest: ‘We probably only see about ten percent of what’s actually going on in a forest ecosystem. It’s exactly the same with an organization.’ The analogy is stark: instead of blindly following the narrow parameters of dogma and strategy, open your eyes to a greater awareness to make less arbitrary decisions.
“I’d love to meet some kind of organization or person who just really likes these films and would love to become engaged with me in helping to spread them around.”
In an era crowded with data, AI slop and chats with automated bots, Tom Lynham’s work is a powerful reminder that the power of ‘the wonders of storytelling in all its possible forms, whether it’s in films, music, novels or conversation. How do we talk to each other?’