Interventional storyteller and cultural strategist
Helping people choose a better story
Will Cady, interventional storyteller and cultural strategist, helps people choose a better story.
A story of becoming
Adapted from Which Way Is North
Writing your story is an act of apprehending who you are. Sometimes all that's needed to discover yourself is to draw a line between two moments in your life and follow where it leads.
Delphi, the end of 2019
We are obsessed with predicting the future. Agencies and experts flood our feeds with hot takes and trend reports, dispatches in a voice we long to hear. Will had spent years writing them as a creative strategist at Reddit when a conference in Greece ended with a detour into the mountains, to Delphi, where oracles once sat over a crack in the earth and told kings what they saw. Pilgrims, merchants and gamblers crowded its slopes, making it, in Will's words, “a Las Vegas, Vatican City, United Nations, and Louvre Museum combined.”
In the bright light of Apollo's ruined temple, Will recognized his own work, and the work of a whole generation of creative strategists. Their job, he would later write, is “a paved highway over the dusty trail of a much older vocation.”
Las Vegas, weeks later
From the clarity of Delphi's mountain air to the climate-controlled, perfumed air of a Las Vegas casino suite. During CES, industry leaders from nearly every kind of brand sat down across from Will, one after another, and asked the oracle's question.
“What do you see?”
In the last session of the week, alone with a global brand's most powerful buyer and worn into an earnestness born from exhaustion, Will took a risk. He told him the truth. “Something is coming. I don’t know what it is, but something is coming.” Where the horizon used to be, he saw a cliff, and one word kept rising.
“Heal.”
“We look at the future and we want to change it, but what about healing it?”
The buyer's face softened, and he nodded. A long silence held them in a human moment.
Soon after, the world went into lockdown, and the media industry began a transformation that is still unfolding.
Those two rooms showed Will the vocation he had already grown into. Strategists, forecasters and cultural theorists are the latest keepers of a role as old as culture: the oracle, the storyteller, the spiritual guide, the keeper and giver of visions. What we call it matters less than how we wield our most human gifts.
Will makes no claim to being special. He champions the humanity in all of us that leadership somehow asks us to forget, though leading well depends on it, and he tells his own story openly so that others who do this work feel permission to step into theirs.
What he saw in that suite became Which Way Is North, written through 2022 as ChatGPT arrived, and now read as a threshold document for the human role creatives hold as AI remakes the economy. The word he heard became HEAL MVMNT. On stage and on the page, Will helps people recognize that role in themselves: to read the future in the room, and to see the part of it only they can make.
Who are we trying to be when we try to see the future?
Interventional storytelling
Every organization is deciding what its new power is for
Technology has given people enormous power, and the stories they tell decide what it gets used for. Will steps in at that moment of choice, bringing the judgment, meaning and imagination that keep a decision human. He calls it interventional storytelling.
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On stage
Keynotes and workshops on creativity, AI and the human role in what comes next, for conferences, leadership offsites and creative teams. Formats include fireside chats and live tarot sessions.
See the talks -
On the page
Which Way Is North, his handbook for human creativity, and his columns and articles on culture and technology. Next comes Tarot for Storytelling, a guided course built on the book.
See the book
The applied art of asking better questions, to open paths into better stories that lead to better decisions.
Will’s record across four careers
The MakerRegional Emmy-winning composer and authorA New England Emmy for composition and arrangement, and more than 3.5 million streams of his music. Author of Which Way Is North, an Inc. must-read.
The MarketerFounded Reddit's in-house creative agencyBuilt KarmaLab from the ground up, opened the Los Angeles office and helped take Reddit to IPO. Adweek Top 50 in Tech, Media & Marketing.
The MysticResident mystic for Reddit and Soho HouseWell over a thousand tarot readings, and the opening meditation for the World Mental Health Day Festival.
The MythographerColumnist where culture meets technologySince 2023 his SPIN column has tracked what happens when music, myth and archetype meet new technology. He also writes the Which Way Is North Substack.
For event producers and bookers
Speaking
Keynotes, workshops and live tarot sessions on creativity, AI, belonging and the stories that decide what technology is for. Audiences leave with a better question and a better story to act from.
Book Will to speakThe book
Which Way Is North
Written in 2022, on the threshold of the age of intelligent machines: a handbook for remembering what is human and finding original thinking. An Inc. Fall 2023 must-read and Next Big Idea Club pick.
See the book
The course
Tarot for Storytelling
A forthcoming course on reading the cards as structured questions, to find the adjacent story that leads somewhere better. Launching December 2026.
Explore the course
The vision Will champions
STEM for growth. HEAL for repair.
The four disciplines that keep progress human.
HealingEnvironmentsArtLanguage
Humanity has poured extraordinary ambition into technology, while its moral and emotional development has lagged behind. Will is championing a remedy: give Healing, Environments, Art and Language the same seriousness and investment that STEM receives. They are the four domains where meaning forms long before it becomes policy, product or platform.
It is the big idea he brings to stages, and the work of HEAL MVMNT, the movement he founded with Rachelle Cady to help organizations align what they build with what they value.
In his words
Speaking inquiries
Bring Will to your stage
Keynotes, workshops, fireside chats and live tarot sessions, in person or virtual. Tell us about your event, and Will’s team will follow up.