Narrative and Story

Several weeks ago I facilitated a full day meeting of a policy/strategy division of a larger organisation. While this meeting was “named” as a planning day in fact, as we discussed what we would do and what people wanted out of the meeting, it became much more of a day of “thinking out loud”. Most of the time was spent exploring aspects of what I call the “landscape” within which the work of this group of people takes place. Others might call this the context or operating environment. I like the term landscape and have been using it more and more because of the way it introduces notions of physicality and allows me to use the metaphor of fogginess and the idea that part of the task is simply “finding your way about”.

“In all directions small mountains, hiding the view, while being the view”

Edith Shiffert

During the morning of this meeting the General Manager came along to talk to the group. She shared in a relaxed and informal way, some of how she saw the landscape and made some educated predictions (guesses) about what might be going to happen in relation to particular issues and projects.

What dominated this part of the day though was a “story” about the meeting that she would be attending that afternoon with the CEO. In that story (hopefully you will see below why I have called it a story and why I have used inverted commas) she talked, in a somewhat coded or “terse” way about most of the aspects that are generally taken as constituting a narrative: plot, characters, themes, a frame or setting, timeframes (rhythms), dialogues and defining events.

What struck me particularly and resonated with some of what I’ve been exploring in response to hearing more and more people referring to “organisational narratives” was how this conversation influenced what was talked about for the rest of the day (both helpfully and unhelpfully) and the fact that it was very much a prospective, future-oriented story in which certain “bets” were being placed, albeit tentatively, about what narrative might dominate or control the landscape over the next little while.

Over the last ten years or so there has been a great deal of work done on the roles of narrative and story in organisational life and their usefulness as a leadership “tools” . Much of that work has focused on the narratives that most powerfully influence organisational direction and culture.

One of the more colourful and interesting characters in this work is David Boje, Professor of Management at New Mexico State University. David’s early work was a detailed ethnographic study of the way narrative and story worked to enable and constrain what happened within an office supplies company as it was going through a period of turbulent change. Since then he has gone on to publish detailed analyses of the role of story and narrative at Disney and in other big corporations such as Nike, McDonalds and Enron. He publishes prolifically and makes much of his ideas and material available on the web. Currently I am wading my way through his latest book, Storytelling Organizations.

What I have found most useful so far is the subtle and detailed distinction he makes between narrative and story and their unique roles in the organisational landscape. He says that:

“Treating narrative and story as the same serves to erase any understanding of their interplay, the ways their dance creates transformative dynamics that work to change organisations.”

He argues that most of the attention in this area has been focused on “narratives of control” – retrospective accounts of what has happened that have a beginning, a middle and and end like all good narratives, but therefore make it seem as if the way things have come to be as they are is more logical and less messy than it was at the time. They have the function ,when we use them in organisations, of enabling retrospective sense-making. What we often do, though, is assume that a similar form of sense-making will help us move in a particular direction or create a particular future.

As an alternative, Boje describes what he calls “ante-narrative”; that is, prospective, forward-looking bets (antes – as in “up the ante”) that are also ante (before) stories. Boje calls this “prospective sense-making”. In this way story telling can be about the future, but it has a different form to the traditional restrospective narratives we are used to. This is how I understand what the General Manager who came to talk at the planning session I facilitated was doing. Not trying to control the future but placing some pretty heavy bets on what it might turn out to be like and in so doing influencing that process. Both this retrospective and prospective sense-making, Boje argues, takes the form we would generally associate with narrative (particularly having a beginning-middle-end structure, even it if it is assumed rather than explicit).

Of great interest though, I think, is the bit in between – the everyday storying that is equally about sense or meaning making but rather than being about centering or controlling is much more likely to be emergent and dispersive by disturbing coherence and asserting differences. Boje particularly points out three aspects of this emergent storying that occurs in what Ralph Stacey calls the living present.

• It consists of simultaneous storytelling across many places and in many rooms. One person is only a party to one small part of this but hears retellings and rumours of the other stories told in the other places and rooms, or misses them completely!
• The storying in the now is much more connected to and influenced by contested and contestable emotive and ethical issues and responses.
• Much of our knowing in the now, in the midst of this emergent storying, is in the form of an embodied kind of “sixth sense”.

John Shotter, who has written extensively on this, calls it thinking and talking WITH, rather than thinking and talking ABOUT. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to also talk about storying WITH the now in contrast to narrating ABOUT the past or the future.

What might be the benefit of focusing a different kind of awareness and attention on this emergent storying in the living present? 

I’ll be writing more about this over the coming month or so. But to get a clue, have a look at this video from the 2009 TED (Technology Education Design) Conference as Evan Williams talks about the emergent story of Twitter, the social media tool he co-founded. He says:

“I’ve learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it goes.”

Evan Williams