David Boje (June, 2001; Revised Jan 18, 2009)
Basic overview for Boje Students
One hears all kinds of advice on how to tell a story. Like some kind of elevator pitch, told in 90 seconds, in the time it takes to get from third to ground floor. Or tell it with a beginning, middle, and end. Ridiculous advice! Living stories can take a lifetime, and most have no beginning and the ending is not in sight. Where does such bad advice some from? A series of high school english courses, where we learn to write every story as a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end (BME). A bunch of investment bankers who never invented anything make entrepreneurs tell elevator pitch narratives because all they know is simplistic checklists and linear thinking. Anyone who has ever studied storytelling in organizations knows that people tell stories in bits and pieces, in fragments, with one fragment leading into another. "Let me tell you this story, in order for you to understand the one I just told. Wait, there is this other story that is happening to a friend of mine." Its like some kind of endless web of stories leading to more stories.
"Storytelling is a powerful vehicle for sensemaking in the midst of change. Sharing our stories supports transformative learning and conscious co-evolution" Source, Wolrd Cafe, 2008: p. 16.
To tell a living story, understand its relation to organization storytelling. Storytelling has three elements in dynamic interplay: narrative, living story, and antenarrative. The three elements of storytelling conceive time differently. See Wikipedia Organization Story.
How to tell a story in a skit. Get together and swap stories related to the topic. If you can relate to some bit of story you put on in a skit, as coming out of your experience, with an emotion, or a phrase, or you being a character, then the skit comes alive on stage. Tell your living story, in the now, and then make it happen on stage, in your skit. Include some emotion, some drama, to make the living story come alive. Don't get trapped by narrative into telling about the past as if its a straight line. Improv, don't use notes. Get a general theme composed of some fragments of living stories happening to you, perhaps some dead narratives that happened, and some antenarratives yet to happen. Rehearse! Improv different ways ot acting out the skit scenes. When you are not in a scene, be the audience, then the director, overing scene ideas.
To tell a story is to tell it in ways that defy narrative orders of the past, and promote "antenarratives" (Boje, 2001) to break free of the scripts of the past. An antenarrative is defined as future-looking, prospective sensemaking (Boje, 2001, 2007, 2008). Antenarratives travel in packs, move and morph as they go, picking up and shedding context and content to shape the future.
Antenarratives can be linear, cyclic, or rhizomatic (Boje, 2007). A rhizome is a complex assemblage, with rosonances instead of structures, and everything but linear. You see rhizomes everywhere in nature: trumpet vines, potato patches, strawberries, and crab grass; vines and roots extend every which way forming tubers;; try as you might you cannot get rid of them. In social, rhizomes are above ground runners and below ground roots that extend in all directions forming strange buds. They just sort of emerge suddenly. You chop off the tuber, and low and behold, the rhizome pops up over there, or behind you, or just ahead.
The problem for leadership is to recultivate lost storytelling competencies. Walter Benjamin (1936) believes that storytelling skills are being forgotten because our ways of organizing work do not provide time to practice storytelling and story listening. "Be quiet, and get back to work." The information society has turned living story into dead narrative.
There is lots of bad advice about leadership. One hears that a leader ought to tell a simple narrative, as an elevator pitch, with beginning, middle, and end, or to recite some memorized fairy tale. And that this simple act, leaders are told, will transform an enterprise, get hundreds or thousands of workers to tow the line, and lead to more profit. Ridiculous advice! Anyone who has ever studied storytelling in organizations knows that to tell a good story, a leader has to listen, to notice and observe the web of living stories unfolding in the now, that is moving things away from the way things were, in all that narrative fairytale history.
The thing about leadership is telling narratives of values fossilized in the past can be a way to inculcate values that had worked well way back when. Living story noticing is an entirely different leadership skill. You cannot look through the lenses of the past and find any. Leaders take us into the future, breaking free to shape antenarratives that take us there.
1. Narrative is backward-looking (retrospective sensemaking) from now to then, and since Aristotle (350 BCE) continues to be ruled by a linear time fixation, a coherence-plot-line that is required to always have a monologic Beginning, Middle, and End ( that I call BME). Sjuzhet is a way of constructing plots. Narrative imposes other strict rules on living stories, that its time to break.
Narrative since Aristotle's (350 BCE) Poetics has six elements, in order of importance: plot, character, theme, dialogue, rhythm, and spectacle. Aristotle also wrote about the narrative's 'frame.' I call this the 'septet' of seven narrative elements. For Bakhtin (1973: 12) “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” The thing that distinguishes telling a living story from telling a static narrative, is breaking out of the monologic, BME way of telling. Being a critical postmodernist, I mess with the sacred poetic, by pluralizing the septet to get it out of its monologic. Instead of narrative monologic, the postmodern multiplicity rules with multiple plots, multiple characters each with their own logic, multiple dialogical interplays, multiple rhythms that we now view as patterns of complexity, and multiple spectacles everywhere from the recent Bailout, to Las Vegas strip, and the permanent global wars of Empire. Indeed spectacle which was to Aristotle was the least important element of narrative (just costuming & attention-getting), has become the most important in the postmodern age where the surface-fashion is more important than the substantive-content. In the age of spectacle, narratives pretend time is linear with their BME coherence (see Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle).
2. Living Stories is now-looking at a web of dialogical person-relationships to other living stories, all never knowing beginning or end, just emerging in in the middle, in what Bakhtin call in-the-moment of Beingness that is polylogical, never monological like narrative must be. Consider the eight types of critical thinking logics that occur in living stories, including the need to deconstruct. Story is never alone; it lives and breaths it’s meaning in a web of other stories.
Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story”, (of itself), each story in the story) is part of the other, makes the other part (of itself), is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1979: 99-100).e beauty of living story is they lead to other stories.
Living stories have dialogues, people talking to each other, improvisation at its finest.
3. Antenarrative is forward-looking (prospective sensemaking), a bet on the future, traversing time in a hoard, picking up and dropping context and content, as these travelers move about to reshape the future that is before narrative stuckness sets in (Boje, 2001, 2008). See Wikipedia antenarrative page.
"The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences" More ...
A story is more than a narrative of what happened (Press here for Humorous Example). The story relives a sequence of experiences that certain characters have undergone. The characters (better if you are one of the characters) encounter some situations that change and they react to that change. Through the telling, the teller reveals hidden aspects of the situation, characters, and each new predicament calls for thought and action. Each response to a new situation leaders the story to its conclusion, but not always a resolve (adapted from Ricoeur, 1984: 150).
388 - Story has three levels of memory, and the third one activates the first two:
Advice --> Tell a living story that has emotion memory, one that is your personal experience with oppression, injustice, etc. You will find that sensation memory (sense-making) and the cognitive memory levels (who, what, when, where, and why) will be activated. The reverse is not usually the case: starting with cognitive does not get you to the senses or to emotion memory. It is the emotion memory that we work to process and reprocess, as in a spiral, until we turn the emotion memory into poetic sense memory and into wisdom of the cognitive. It takes time to work our way free of a traumatic story, but if we do not, it continues to haunt us, to script us.
Personal experience narratives and living stories you tell, where you are one of the characters, and you let your audience relive the events through your eyes. Storytelling is as natural as breathing. We are "homo-narrens" storytelling animals. Telling stories is part of human nature. Yet, somehow in our modern world, we have stopped learning to tell stories. Perhaps that makes it easier for us to fit into the machine. Here are some ways to rediscover your storytelling talents.
To story, answer some basic questions I call the SEPTET:
One more time for effect, living stories have conflicts, disagreements, mysteries, and sometimes resolutions to them.
Tell the story through a character's eyes (e.g. through the eyes of someone who was downsized, fired, demoted, or hired, promoted). They to tell stories where you are a character.
Visualize your characters, including yourself, moving and speaking, as the storytelling unfolds. Set the scene visually, dramatically.
Imagine your audience. Stories are told differently to each audience.
Start in the middle if you want a living story. start at the beginning if you want a narrative. Start in the future if you want to lead. Write in the same spirit that you would tell a good story. Some people are better at telling their story to a tape recorder, then playing it back. Others just write .... A good story begins with something out of balance, some tension to be resolved or explained. Storytellers are not detached from the action; they have emotion and bias. A good storyteller does more than connect the facts.
Be an eye witness to the events, telling the story like you lived it.
Be dramatic, and develop the story through to its climax.
Once upon a time I had students do storyboards to learn storytelling. They learned to draw cartoon figures, dialog balloons, and lay the story out from one scene to the next.
Practice -- each time you tell the story, you and your story will
improve.
"Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts" - Salman Rushdie
To change your life, change your living story. To restory, find elements of the past left out of the official narrative, that tired script you keep reliving. To restory put the forgotten times you defied the dominant narrative into a new story, a living story, that moves you into an antenarrative restorying your future. You may be living out someone else's dominant narrative (your parents, your boss, your mate). Your living story may be a nightmare of meeting everyone else's expectations. Finding out how your living story violates narrative script is the first step in restorying. To restory is to author you as a new character, in a new antenarrative plot, hopefully with a healthy and happy never-ending. See Advanced Study Guide to Restorying). See Rosile's Steps in Restorying.
After telling your story, narrative, or antenarrative, or along the way, connect up to readings and course web pages and study guides. Each week is rich in possible web links, where you can find connections. See Leadership is Theatre course book
This is not about your personal opinion. Everyone has one. It is about CRITICAL THINKING. When you analyze your story, note the DUALITIES, get beyond that to SYSTEM THINKING, DIALECTICS, and even DECONSTRUCTION. For more on this see STORYTELLING AND CRITICAL THINKING http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/514stoguide.html
At end of your answer note the references you used.
Allen, Cliff (2000) Tell a Story to Engage Your Audience. Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://www.clickz.com/article/cz.2522.html
Anonymous (2001) How to tell a humorous story Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/how2tell.html
Benjamin, Walter. 1936/1955/1968. The Storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov, Pp. 883-110. In Illuminations, Edited with introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1955 in German, 1968 in English. 1936 was original publication of ?The Storyteller?: Orient und Oksident, 1936, Mieke bal72). ?The Storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov.? Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds. New York: Athneneum, 1972.
Benun, Ilise (2001) How to tell your story to the media
Boje, D. M. (1995) Disney as Tamara-land. Academy of Management Journal. Vol. 38 (4): 997-103.Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/DisneyTamaraland.html
Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative Methods for Organization and Communication Research. London: Sage.
Boje, D. M. (2002). What is Situation? Feb 19.. Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/388/what_is_situation.htm#septet_table_1 Contains Septet table.
Boje, D. M. 2007. Chapter 17: Globalization Antenarratives. Pp. 505-549 in Albert Mills, Jeannie C. Helms-Mills & Carolyn Forshaw (Eds). Organizational Behavior in a Global Context. Toronto: Garamond Press. See pdf http://peaceaware.com/vita/paper_pdfs/Boje%20(2008)%20Globalization%20Antenarratives.pdf
Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling Organizations. London: Sage. http://storytellingorganization.com
Debord. Guy. (1968). The Society of the Spectacle
Digital Storytelling Festival (2002). Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://www.workz.com/content/2062.asp
LePla, Joe (2000) Tell Your Story, Build Your Brand Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://www.workz.com/content/2062.asp
McGrath, Kevin (2001) Good Writing: Tell the story through a character's eyes http://www.workz.com/content/2062.asp
Boje, D. (2000) Storytelling GameboardBoje, D. (2000). STORYTELLING AND CRITICAL THINKING. Accessed web text May 15, 2002 at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/514stoguide.html