The invention provides a unique system for assessing and impacting aspects of an organization or community which affect its collective success in the marketplace or health in the society and its ability to evolve to manage future uncertainties. These organizational aspects are often intangible in terms of assets and challenges, but nevertheless play a strong role in an organization's or community's collective capacity to succeed in its endeavors. Many management theories are based on mechanical models of the organization, which tend to ignore intangible aspects and expect individuals and organizations to act in a machine-like, predictable way. The understandings that have arisen from the study of complex adaptive systems make it clear that organizations are more accurately represented as complex ecologies whose coalescent behavior cannot be easily predicted or controlled. In this context a very old skill can be brought out of the shadows and made valuable use of: the human capacity to tell stories.
Since ancient times human beings have told stories for many purposes, including the transmission of complex knowledge, cultural values and beliefs. Managed and purposeful storytelling can provide a powerful mechanism for the disclosure of intellectual or knowledge assets in organizations. It can also provide a non-intrusive, organic means of producing sustainable cultural change, conveying brands and values, transferring complex tacit knowledge, and supporting decision making and strategy. In any human organization or community stories and storytelling are like an underground river, not easily visible but intricately bound up in the way the organization and its members think and act. Learning to understand and navigate that river, not only at points where it wells up above ground, but throughout its course, creates a unique and powerful device for those who wish to maintain or improve the collective health or success of any organization or community. Navigating the underground river of story without sufficient skill and knowledge is fraught with peril, however, because stories, like all powerful things, can be dangerous. If used poorly they can even cause harm.
Since story became fashionable an increasing volume of practice focuses on constructing better or more meaningful stories. This is also one of the most fertile sources of revenue for those transferring the traditional skills of storytellers, script writers, journalists and others into an organizational setting. All organizations have messages that they wish to convey both internally and externally. Effective communication needs a story to be told in a convincing and attention grabbing or retaining way. In consequence, it is not surprising that the novelty of a Irish Seanachie at a company event, or a group of actors using techniques of value transfer or reinforcement traceable to the forms of medieval morality plays, can have a considerable impact on audiences jaded by a surfeit of corporate videos, tightly scripted messages and idealized examples of “best practice”.
There are several dangers with entering this field enthusiastically but without adequate understanding. All too frequently there may be resistance in the audience to being “told a story”. A fictional or allegorical story may engender cynicism or dismissal: “so now they are telling us fairy stories” or “that was very entertaining, but why can't they just say what they mean”, to take but two examples. A factual story is even more fraught with peril: to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth requires both a prestigious feat of memory and a suspension of the normal human tendency to reinvent history to confirm with the requirements of the present. More importantly, the bare facts are boring; they do not make for a compelling story. In order to create a story there is a need to select the most compelling of the facts and provide appropriate emphasis: create tension, introduce clear protagonists, build a proper context, spell out the message—in other words all the tools and techniques of a script writer or journalist. The danger here is that the emphasis and selection may not correspond with the experiences of other people in the organization. Some of them may have been a part of the original story, or know people who were. It only takes one person to say “but that's not what really happened”, or “but that's not the complete story” and the whole process is undermined.
The label of propaganda, once won, is difficult to shake off, and it is an easy one for an organization to form. One of the dangers here is the “Janet and John” story. Janet and John are the two central characters of a series of books used to teach reading to British four and five year olds some years ago. The trouble with Janet and John are that they are so good; it is enough to make any self-respecting and intelligent child sick. All Janet and John stories ended happily as any naughty behavior received inevitable punishment and moral or noble actions received reward and recognition. The problem is that most centrally dictated communication in organizations takes a Janet and John approach. It tries to tell things as they should be in some idealized vision of cooperative behavior and sacrifice to achieve corporate goals. Stories of best practice hold up a team or division as a role model for others to copy; they are portrayed as fulfilling the Chairman or CEO's vision, embodying the organizations core values of customer satisfaction, hard work and so on. Within the context of senior management they may even be seen to have been successful, partly because senior managers are all too often told the stories they want to hear and are insulated from negativity; partly because most human beings tend to see what they want to see, particularly when they have just spent large sums of money on a communications or cultural change program. Several years of using techniques derived from anthropology to capture water cooler stories after some official act of story telling shows a near universal occurrence of “anti-story”: the cynical and naturally occurring counter reaction to a official story of goodness that does not reflect the reality of the audiences experiences or perception of those experiences. In organizational change and communication, perception is all.
A survey of current literature and practice identifies four major approaches to the use of stories within an organizational context. Although all of these approaches have some use, some are more complete and purposeful than others, and none includes all of the components of the system described here or achieves its outcomes. The approaches are as follows.
Narrative research
The use of narrative as a research tool grew in prominence with the growth of postmodernism and its emphasis on the authenticity of narrative. A broad range of literature contains several examples of capturing and interpreting such anecdotal material. Most recently Gabriel's book Storytelling in Organizations (2000) provides a useful review of literature in this area. Gabriel summarizes the narrative research approach thus:                “ . . . stories open valuable windows into the emotional, political, and symbolic lives of organizations, offering researchers a powerful instrument for carrying out research. By collecting stories in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, we gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences.”        
Narrative organizational research methods depend on the researcher to provide the analysis as an “expert,” and do not attempt to use the material to construct stories in a dynamic discovery process. Also, most research in this area is reductionist in nature, attempting to identify and isolate “facts” amenable to rational analysis.
Anecdote Enhancement
A second group of methods creates or reflects on actual organizational stories and enhances or expands these to make a point. Denning's book The Springboard (2000) is a lyrically told story which weaves together several actual stories from the World Bank. Another example is 3M's practice of using “strategic stories” in business planning (Shaw et al. 1998). Anecdote enhancement can be effective; however, there are three problems with it.                I. Clumsily enhanced anecdotes can misfire. Told by a gifted storyteller who resists the temptation to embellish the story or skip inconvenient elements—and few resist this temptation—an enhanced anecdote can work. The danger enters when readers seek out the real “facts,” which may differ from the enhanced version of the tale, or when readers question whether the story's context is repeatable. “That would never be allowed if I did it”—a common anti-story response—is only marginally better than “If you believe that, you'll believe anything.” On the other side of believability is the danger that the story will be too close to the day-to-day experiences and reality of its audience. If a story fails to take its audience members outside of themselves in order to gain new perspective, it may instead reinforce existing prejudice and cognitive filtering.        II. This approach precludes the use of fictional stories, which can provide powerful insights and access to deeper truths.        III. We have seen a tendency, reinforced by techniques such as appreciative inquiry, to look only for positive stories. While this may be valid in individual counseling, it is not advisable in the context of organizational storytelling, where the most powerful and useful stories are often negative (Snowden 2000).Fictional Exploration        
A third group of methods freely embraces fiction, seeing storytelling as a means of conveying meaning, stimulating response, and enhancing understanding of complex issues. An illustrative example is a recent monograph from The Spark Team (2000), which contains a fully developed “Treasure Map Fable.” The fable's stated intent is to “develop a common understanding through the exploration of the ambiguity—whilst accepting that it will always be there.” Annotation links in the fable text connect its metaphors to real-life problems and solutions. For example, in the following excerpt:                “The Sceptic was teamed up with the Eternal Optimist, a nice chap with a sunny disposition, but he hadn't been living in the kingdom for long, and the Sceptic thought that people wouldn't talk to him. They barely opened up to each other . . . . ”        
The word “kingdom” is followed by a link to an item labeled “Elicitation” and beginning thus:                “For interdisciplinary teams to work effectively, they need to be considered as creating new knowledge domains, consciously using techniques such as elicitation, which is a kind of mapping of perceptions . . . . ”        
Thus the fictional format in this quote tackles real issues indirectly using metaphor and analogy. There are, however, dangers in the fictional exploration approach.                I. The facilitator, analyst or story writer has a major impact on the project in terms of content as well as process, and this influence can be dangerous and potentially manipulative.        II. The issue of audience resonance is more haphazard with the use of fiction than with the use of purposeful stories based on anecdotal fragments, as is advocated in the system described here.        III. More cynical audiences may see the fictional exploration approach as trendy, or at worst propaganda dressed up in childish format, and it may lose impact as a result. The Spark example does not fall into this danger, but it was constructed by gifted individuals with many years of experience. For story-based techniques to be pervasive, they must be scaleable. The best use of storytelling is a balance of science and art: science for scalability and art for impact.Story as Story        
The final group is interested in story per se, wherever it occurs. It includes folklorists, journalists, oral historians, ethno-cultural specialists, professional storytellers and writers, filmmakers and others. Valuable resources in this area include McKee's inspirational script writing work Story (1997), Campbell's seminal work on archetypes The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1972), and Kransdorffs journalistic Corporate Amnesia (1998). Many story associations and festivals around the world celebrate traditional forms of story, often in a modem context. This broad base of expertise provides a hugely valuable resource base for work in organizational contexts. Indeed, some knowledgeable story professionals work in and with organizations. Some people in this group, however, believe that work in organizational storytelling involves a loss of purity in the storytelling arts. To some extent this may be true; however, the purpose of organizational storytelling is not to tell a good story, but to achieve a defined purpose. Purpose and form are compatible but not always contiguous.
All people in an organization constantly tell anecdotes, both about their organization and about their own personal lives and aspirations. These anecdotes are told around water coolers, across desks in an open plan office during a quiet period, over the lunch table, in internet chat rooms and in the countless opportunities (both physical and virtual) that are available in any organization. Unlike in a formal interview, we are off guard when we tell an anecdote. It reveals more than we may have intended, and taken collectively with the anecdotes of other individuals with whom we work it can reveal much of the culture of an organization. This culture can be revealed and more importantly represented by the emergent meanings present across a range of anecdotes and in the underlying value, rule and belief systems revealed by the messages, both explicit and implicit, that are revealed.
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