I'm Serena Hatfield.
My career isn't a ladder. It's a game of twister.
I co-founded an indie print magazine (The Fernweh Collective), built an independent publishing house with ten books, worked in alternative education, and spent three years in management consulting. My studies made no sense on paper: mathematics, English literature, interamerican studies. The through-line was always pattern recognition and story. Seeing the narratives underneath. Questioning what everyone else accepts as fixed.
I call it Story Leadership: surfacing what's shaping the room before anyone speaks, then making it simple enough that others can act.
Studio Hatfield is where I teach it, the Radical Hope Club is where we practice it together.
Studio Hatfield is a think tank. A place to develop ideas and collaborate with founders, leaders and organizations navigating narrative, change, or hope. The investigation: those of us who sense that something is wrong. Something others can't articulate. The quiet refusal to accept the world as is. The ability to hold uncertainty about what comes next. Most people haven't given up. We've just been taught to keep our hope to ourselves. That isolation is the real crisis. Not lack of vision, but the belief that you're alone in having one. I write the Radical Hope Club newsletter for people who haven't given up.
What I Believe
Evolutionary Intelligence
An overlooked capacity that we need to lean into, not neglect.
Complexity is not a sign of depth.
It's usually fear. Meaning only emerges when the essential becomes audible.
Strategic imagination isn't soft.
What you imagine, you can lead. It's the prerequisite for any meaningful change.
Hope is a structural force, not a feeling.
It's not about optimism. It's about building infrastructure for action.
What you imagine you can lead. What you lead you can change.
Change = f (courage, imagination)