By
David M. Boje, Jan 9 2007; Revised Dec 14 2007
"David
Boje taught me the value of stories in an organization. Stories are the “oil”
that makes the gears work." - Stew Leonard Jr.
"How do you get your message heard in an organization with thousands of
people? David Boje taught me the value of telling stories at Stew
Leonard’s!" http://www.stewleonards.com/stewleonardjr/bio.cfm
Let me introduce myself. I am
David Michael Boje. My story: I have been teaching and studying storytelling
for 30 years. My dad's side of the family his roots back to Denmark, my
mother's side, back to Scotland. There are Native roots, by marriage, on my
mother's and dad's side. So there are Boje's raised on reservations. Over the
years, I have come to see the importance of story in organization change and
practice. My early work, such as the 1991 Administrative Science Qurertly
article was about how storytelling is part of the practice of leadership and
change. In that piece I developed the theory of Storytelling Organization.
Stories are the preferred sensemaking modality in those organizations (1991:
106). Over the years, and especially in the last few years, I have come to
realize that story is in either a subordinate relation to narrative, in a
dialectic relation of interpenetration, or in a dialogic relationship. Before
getting into story theory, let me introduce you to story practice of Stew
Leonard Jr.
Stew Leonard Jr. (of Stew
Leonard's Dairy) took two Ph.D. seminars on storytellling when I was at UCLA,
and he was in the MBA program. Here are few more of Stew Jr.'s ideas on
stories. "Here’s a few ideas" (Stew Jr. told me) Pick anyone you like
or mix and match."
“If there’s no story, it’s too complicated to explain to over 2,000 team
members”
"If you hear a story being told in the company cafeteria by a front line
worker, promote the manager that initiated that story!"
“Our company is made up of lots of stories. We’ve found that “stories” get told
and retold and become the fabric of an organization. “Policies” lay unread in
the company handbook or training manual”
STORY CONSULTING - Once
upon a time, storytelling communities did not need story consultants to
point train them in story competencies. The community of storytellers was quite
competent at storytelling and storylistening. They knew elucidation of
elaborating narration was quite unnecessary. Everyone had been socialized in
organizations to attend to basic story competencies.
During the last decade hundreds
of story consultants have entered the marketplace. Indeed, storytelling has
become one of the preferred methodology of organizational change consulting.
The list of top-seller books on Amazon in Organization Change contains more and
more entries each year that are all about story change consulting methods. I
want to develop a different model of story change, one I call Living Story
Change. Living Story is something my colleagues (Jo Tyler, Grace Ann Rosile,
Ken Baskin, Carolyn Gardner, and Theodore Taptiklis) have been writing about.
We mean our theory of and practice of Living Story to be different from what is
currently highly popular and readily available in the marketplace, that turns
Living Story into Dead Story (more accurately into Dead Narrative). There are
three dominant approaches, John Kotter's N-step, David Cooperrider's
Appricaitve Inquiry, and Steve Denning's Sp;ringboard. They each turn what
could be Living Story into Deadening Narrative. They each promise Large Scale
Organization Change based upon 'new paradigm' of either open systems or
complexity, and deliver closed, mechanistic, functional reinventions of
top-down, managerialist bureaucracy. That is why they are so very popular: They
say the same thing, "Get you quick-fix, top-down, way to turn dyanmic
change into a linear model of change that you the CEO can control and
administrer." Let me introduce you to the ways Living Story is not the
same as Dead Narrative, by looking at Kotter, Cooperrider, and Denning's story
change consulting.
N-STEPPING - Take
for example story change consulting of John Kotter. Kotter's (1996) book Leading
Change, is an 8-step linear model of organization change. It is what David
Collins (1998) calls an n-step model (where n is the number of steps).
N-step models of change are a linear and functionalist narrative, with
beginning steps, middle steps, and end steps. The steps are followed in a
linear sequence, as in lock-stepping an organization through change. The change
narrative fits a very managerialist mindset.
Managerialism
is the view from the top, the manager's (owners & executive's) view. It is
a top-down logic, a one logic that becomes the logic of change.
Collin’s (1998: 83) critique
would still apply to contemporary best-selling Story Change Consulting books:
“A failure to analyze social
factors in any real depth, treating problems of organization and change as if
they involved the combination of molecules or cookery ingredients rather than
skilled interactions of humans” (p. 83).
The story change n-step
recipe guides include (Collins, 1998: 85):
1. A rational analysis of organizational change
2. A sequential approach to planning and managing change
3. A prescription that is up-beat
The rhetoric of the n-step
organization change model, promises that bureaucracy will end, that a new more
complexity from of organization will get implemented. It promises that a
closed, mechanistic system will become an open, organic system. But, it does
not work, and if n-step did work, the landscape of capitalist
economies would not be overpopulated with bureaucracy, with top-down, monologic
systems thinking. What does happen is one mechanistic bureaucratic, closed
system framework is relabeled, but its still just as bureaucratic, just as
closed, just as mechanistic as it was, and probably more so.
From the critique developed so
far it should be apparent that the n-step guides for change should be
regarded as inadequate accounts of change since they are completely ignorant or
dismissive of many crucial features of organizations and organizational change
(Collins, 1998: 86).
Kotter's new books with Cohen
(see Organization Change top-selling book list) use the same n-step
model. What Kotter is most dismissive of is any kind of Living Story. Last time
I looked, Kotter and Cohen, has three of the top 20 books on organization
change. The only thing that changed is the n-step narrative,
is now supported by so-called 'stories' of how hundreds of
organizations are successful implementors of the steps. But these are not
liberating stories, they are deadly control narratives.
Kotter’s second book (with
Deloitte’s consultant Dan Cohen), The Heart of Change ( 2002) uses the
1996 8-step approach to change that now is said to work in 130 organizations.
The book is based on 400 interviews conducted by Deloitte Consulting. Stories
lead people to see and feel the change, and to push them through the change (p.
8). They provide 34 story change examples. Their advice is “never underestimate
the power of a good story.” The 34 stories are organized to present the 8-stage
model of change. The stories are said to win employee’s hearts, which is said
to be the biggest problem in changing their behavior. Their method is
summarized by the phase, “see-feel-change ”instead of the traditional
“analysis-think-change” as a way for the organization to overcome any
resistance to change in their midst, until in the end, we see-we feel-we
change. The see-feel-change story tactic leads to an emotional-“afterglow”
where the same story is told again and again (p. 12), until others tell similar
stories (p. 52). The advice is to make stories vivid, unambiguous, and
memorable demonstration of the values or norms (p. 80, 122, 129, 174).
What
is BME Narrative?
The upstart profession of story
consulting began to specialize in something I call BME (beginning, middle,
& end) narrative coherence. BME stands for beginning, middle, and end. Not
a new invention, well known since Aristotle (350 BCE) in his renditions of the Poetics
of BME, how each proper story must have narrative sequence of beginning,
middle, and end, and thereby be a whole narrative with a plot sequence of
events, characters, themes, dialogue, rhythm, and spectacle.
The field of narrative studies
emerged from Aristotle’s (350 BCE: section 1450b: lines 1-20: pp. 232-233)
conception that narratives must be coherently plotted, with beginning,
middle, and end (hereafter, BME). "We have laid it down that a tragedy
is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some
magnitude... Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end"
(1450b: 25-30: p. 233).
As Aristotle's mimetic of BME of
linear, whole, representation becomes adopted by Russian Formalism, and other
traditional narratologies, a double-move occurs. Story becomes relegated in the
first move to a mere chronology of event. In the second move, narrative
self-deconstructs its initial duality (the hierarchy of narrative over story),
in order to double back to efface supposed underlying order of event (Culler,
1981: 171).
What
is the Difference Between Narrative and Story?
Many authors see no difference
whatsoever. They accept Aristotle, or reinvent him, and see no difference. I
prefer to follow Bakhtin, Derrida, Calvino and my own Nartive storytelling
roots, and theorize a very important difference between narrative and story.
And in that difference is a very important lesson about change. Linear change
is a systems thinking that needs to wake up! There are non-linear change
approaches that are dialectic and dialogical. The dialectic I have in mind is
between narrative order (control) and living story differences (disorder). The
dialogic I have in mind is a multiplicity of types of narratives and types of
stories that consummate the essence of self-organization, emergence, and
complexity. To see the dialectic and dialogic, you need to move out systems
thinking into complexity thinking, and notice the dance of narrative
and story.
The Dance of Narrative
Noticing and Story Noticing - For Mikhail Bakhtin (1973: 12),
“narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological
framework.” Narrative dances with a more dialogic manner of story. Story, for
Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical than narrative, for example in the
“polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60). And the two (narrative
& story) are dialogical with each other. Jacque Derrida also treats story
and narrative as quite different.
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).
Derrida is more radical than
Bakhtin, viewing narrative as an instrument of torture, and the way it is used
in story consulting (particularly in Reengineering Knowledge Management work),
it is the torture of the Inquisition:
… The question-of-narrative
covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent
putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring the narrative
out of one as if it were a terrible secret in ways that can go from the most
archaic police methods to refinements for making (and even letting) one talk
that are unsurpassed in neutrality and politeness, that are most respectfully
medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic. (Derrida, 1979: 94).
Story Consulting, that passes
for Knowledge Management is a wringing of Living Story out of the Knowledge
Workers, so it can be passed about as a tortured until death, Narrative Text.
Finally, Italo Calvino (1979: 109) imagines stories in relation to a space full
of stories:
I’m producing too many stories
at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation
of other stories that I could tell… A space full of stories that perhaps is
simply my lifetime where you can move in all directions, as in space, always
finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first.
For Calvino, story necessarily
opposes itself in a web of stories.
My main thesis, in this book, is
that none of these approaches to narrative and story differences appear in the
‘story change consulting’ work. We think that it is because of the way the
managerialist writers shun any kind of dialectic relationship of narrative and
story as agencies of change. Let's look next at Appreciative Inquiry.
Depreciative Inquiry - "Depreciative
Inquiry" is a term, my friend and colleague, Cliff Oswick, came up
with, while we were being indoctrinated in "Appreciative Inquiry" at
conference on narrative hosted by Jeffery Ford (May, 1999, Ohio State), where I
delivered a paper titled, "Narratology and the Death of Stories."
Cliff turned to me, and said, "instead of Appreciative Inquiry, we need to
start a method called Depreciative Inquiry!" Take a look at the
contemporary list of top 100 best-selling books on Organization Change and you
will find several that are on Appreciative Inquiry. For example the book by
David Cooperrider and Diane Whittney (2005), promises a 'Positive Revolution'
will occur from doing 'Appreicative Inquiry.' And the basis of this 'Positive
Revolution' is the 'appreciative story' (actually a narrative), that is
attained in the 'appreicative interview,' and retold at the 'appreciative
summit' workshop in order to build a 'positive core.'
In Cooperrider and Whitney’s
(2005) Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, what
does ‘positive revolution mean? The words ‘resist’ or ‘resistance’ does not
appear anywhere in the book. Instead the reader is asked a series of
questions:
“Are you ready for a positive
approach to change? Are you tired of the same old discussions of what’s not
working, how hard it is to overcome, and who’s to blame? Do you have hopes and
dreams for your organization? Would you like to see engagement, commitment, and
enthusiasm rise along with revenues and profits? Are you searching for a
process to open communication, unleash human potential, and create a truly
learning organization? If your answer to any of these questions is yeas, you
are ready to accept the invitation to the positive revolution, to embrace
Appreciative Inquiry, and to benefit form a positive approach to change
management” (Cooperrider & Whitney, p. 6).
One of the principles for a
positive revolution, “what we discover (the data) becomes the linguistic
material, the stories, out of which the future is conceived…” (Cooperrider
& Whitney, p. 51). Another principle of the positive revolution is
accelerating learning means “analysis of the importance positive inner dialogue
to personal and relational well-being” (p. 53). The positive revolution
is something AI seeks to spread around the world (p. 39)
The book has six references to
‘negative’ (pp. 4, 5, 22, 35, 41, 59). For example “a goal of creating a
narrative-rich culture with a ration of five stories of positive performance
and success to every negative one…” (p. 4), and to ask open-ended questions in
company salary surveys that have the ration of positive to negative comments
tracked (p. 5), and “people constructively appropriate the power of the
positive core and simply let go of negative accounts” (p. 35). The
characterization of resistance is couched, for example, a “long-term employee
of an organization mired in deficit discourse shared the following with dismay:
‘I have ulcers because of this negative thinking and talking…” (p. 59).
The word “positive” occurs in 60
sentences in their book (10 positives to each occurrence of the word
‘negative). The revolution is positive (pp. 1, 3, 5), change is positive
(pp. 2, 6), positive revolutionaries are said to create organizations full of
voice (p. 4). Postive social science vision of Maslow (p. 7), “AI
involves the art and practice of asking unconditionally positive questions that
strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive
potential” (p. 8). Enhancing the “positive core” of the organization is said to
“liberate the human spirit” and it “enhances its collective wisdom” (p. 10). AI
begins with a rigorous, organization-wide discovery and analysis of the
positive core (p. 12), of what works well (p. 14), then magnifying the positive
core in newly expressed dream and destiny (p. 16), which is done in systemwide
dialogue and learning through appreciative interviewing (pp. 25, 39).
In terms of story, the future is
said to “emerge out of grounded examples from an organization’s positive past”
as “good news stares are used to craft possibility propositions” (p. 29). In a
self-deconstruction, the authors “call it a path of positive protest or a strategy
of positive subversion” (p. 35).
Is AI top-down, unitary systems change model? At the AI Summit is a meeting process for “discovering and developing the organization’s positive core and designing it into strategic business processes” (p. 38). The organization does not have to “deal with the negative anymore” since AI has a “positive foundation of strength to build on in addressing those problems” (p.41). “Leadership must be present throughout the process, asking powerful, positive, value-based questions, expecting the best” (p. 46). The leaders become “servant leader and the role this positive effect plays” is “creating healthy organizations” (p. 52). “Freedom to Be Positive [that] AI opens the way for people to be free to be positive” (p. 59).
From a dialectic viewpoint,
Appreciative Inquiry confuses ‘negation’ and ‘negative thinking.’
Critical negation of a narrative, to replace it with another narrative, to
deconstruct a dominant narrative hegemony à is not the same thing as ‘negative
thinking.’ Herbert Marcuse (1969) in One-Dimensional Man was
critical of the limitation on dialectic imposed by the positive thinking
movement (e.g. Dale Carnegie). There is a link, according to Marcuse (1969: 96)
“between the grammatical, logical and ontological ‘subject’ … the contents [of’
which are suppressed in the functional language, barred from expression and
communication.”
When critical consciousness is
suspended, it becomes a closed universe of systems thinking, and its “petrified
structure” is realized (Marcuse, 1969: 100 cites narrative structuralist,
Roland Barthes, the inspiration for Czarniawska’s 2004 book, where petrified
narrative is seen as the path to strong organization
cultures). Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005)
invokes the same petrified structure of hypnotic nouns “affirmative
topics,” “appreciative organizations,” “appreciative inquiry,” “cooperation
circles,” “positive revolution,” “positive core” and so forth.
Appreciative Inquiry is an
authoritarian attack on dialectic as a productive apparatus of change.
Appreciative Inquiry reduces freedom of speech and thought in the administered
world (Marcuse, 1969: 253).
Living story is repulsion to
Appreciative Inquiry’s narrative positivity. In counterstory after
counterstory, the self-reflexive consciousness distinguishes itself in Living
Story as having being apart from the Narrative sense-certainty and
perception control of Appreciative Inquiry. The differences in story are
vanished by narrative positivity, but are nevertheless still present as differences,
as negative story flux.
As Appreciative Inquiry does its
acts of narrative control over negative thinking, the sensuous world and the
perceptual world are preserved in retrospective filters where the appearance
of being positive becomes the thesis to the antithesis of Living Story
differences in the flux of being. Alienation occurs as the individual becomes
what Hegel (1807/1977: 105) calls “double object.” The ‘I’ of
self-consciousness can notice the difference of positivity-appearance, and
critical story of what is behind sense-certainty and perception. A negative is
behind the Positivity Narrative, a negative that is alienated from Living
Story, a negative object of self, opposed to the role played by the first
object of self.
Springboard Narratives -
Steve Denning's (2000, 2005, 2007) books on story change consulting
have yet to be as popular as those of Kotter (& Cohen) or Cooperrider
(& Whitney). Denning's books do not appear in the top 100 top-selling
Organization Change books. Yet, Denning has a clear following, of over 5,000
story consulting applying his story change methodology.
This next bit is from my reviw
of Denning's (2000) book, Springboard Story, for Academy of Management
Review (Boje, 2006). The coaching advice is to have CEOs (actually their
staff members), construct “springboard” stories, “a story that enables a leap
in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an organization or
community or complex system may change” (2000: xviii). The characteristics: (1)
story from perspective of single protagonist in prototypical business
predicament; (2) explicit story familiar to the audience; (3) stimulates their
imagination; (4) must have a positive or happy ending (xix, 124, 126,
&198). Springboard story model is quite up front about exploiting tacit
knowledge, so for example, listeners will reinvent the knowledge in their own
local contexts (Denning, 2002: x). The book contains six main stories he used
with consulting to the World Bank, about Zambia, Yemen, something from fellow
consultant John Kotter, Central Africa Republic, a prayer by Seth Weaver Kahan,
and the Pakistan government. There are some inconsistencies in the advice. For
example, one criteria Denning (p. xvi, footnote 5) chooses is ironic, given
that he invokes Bakhtin (1973) Problems with Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in
particular the idea of polyphony. What is ironic is the list is monological,
mono phonic, & happy ending features in Denning are ones that neither
Bakhtin nor Dostoevsky endorsed. Two more ironies: first, Springboard stories
do not posses such fuzzy qualitative relationships; second, Descartes'
Cartesian philosophy dualizes not only mind/body, but the ideal inner world of
storyteller from the outer world of storytelling organization. Besides a
strange reading of Bakhtin, the book gets its main inspiration from Descartes
(see pp. 3, 109-113); i.e. resulting in the rather curious idea of plotting
narratives into multi-dimensional non-linear spatiality equations (Denning,
2000: pp. 112-113). Yet, Denning ends with a testable research idea: “The fact
that narratives are not mathematically precise, and in fact are full of fuzzy
qualitative relationships, seems to be a key to their success in enabling us to
cope with complexity” (p. 113). What has happened since I did that review?
Denning’s latest book (2007, The
Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative)
is a follow-up to the 2005 (The Leader’s Guide to storytelling: Mastering the
Art and Discipline of Business Narrative). Denning’s topic is
change on 124 pages of the 2005 book. Once again ‘springboard story’ is the
vehicle for change: “If the company is facing a major change, springboard
stories will be need to spark the change” (p. 111). It is a decidedly managerialist
orientation to narrative: “leaders using narrative to inculcate a positive set
of corporate values and beliefs in the hearts and minds of employees” (2005: p.
10) or “plugging into an archetypal narrative patter-the hero’s journey” (p.
57) or using “narrative archetype-the story of David and Goliath” (p. 80) or
getting people to work together, using “narrative to Get Things Done
Collaboratively [since] Stories are the language of communities…” (p. 149) or
using “narrative tools that would help me deal with, control, and tame the
grapevine” (p. 203). The book includes 24 references to narrative tool,
including: “The leader who has mastered the narrative tool kit helps
high-performance teams or communities establish compelling objectives and actively
shape the expectations of those who use the group’s…” (P. 156).
Denning’s (2005) book (The
Leader’s Guide to storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business
Narrative) tells his story of leaving World Bank to pursue a career in
story consulting.
“On my return from
Jonesborough, I educated myself on the principles of traditional storytelling.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle, in his Poetics, said
stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should include
complex characters as well as a plot that incorporates a reversal of fortune
and a lesson learned ... (Denning, 2005: 7).
My assessment is that Denning
has not moved beyond Aristotle Poetics, in applying Springboard
Narratives as a model of change recipes.
Denning (2005) derives his
insight to change from “Noel Tichy [who] writes about the importance of
preparing an organization for change … by taking them there first in their
imagination” (as cited, Denning, p. 11). Denning says, “Here is a place where
storytelling, perhaps the most powerful route to people’s imagination, could
prove indispensable” (p. 11). Such a change story, for Denning, “must conjure
up a direction for getting there---without being too precise” (p. 11).
The second feature is for the stories to counteract more negative stories that
circulate “like viruses within an organization and threatened to infect the
entire body” (p. 11). Denning gives Dave Snowden of IBM credit for pointing out
how negative stories circulate like a virus. Third, Denning says
“eliciting knowledge stories can be difficult, particularly for stories that
involve intimate or pejorative details” (p.194), he therefore recommends
Snowden’s strategy of using story as a ‘stalking horse’ to help managers
indirectly understand their “counterproductive management practices” (p. 194).
Denning’s (2007) book cultivates
what he calls “Narrative Intelligence Stories” (p. 43, caps original), where
emotions have a narrative character (p. 44), are authentic truthfulness (p.
50), and narrative stands for different patterns of stories (p. 45).
There seems to be confusion of what is a story and what is a narrative:
“…Although no single story may encompass of the many narratives that any given
person can use to make sense of his or her life, some stories are larger and
more…” (p. 89). Understanding stories requires narrative intelligence (p.
91). Cultivating narrative intelligence includes ‘brand narrative’ linked
to wit and characters of founders such as Herb Kelleher (122).
In sum the best selling
Organization Change books, adn the Denning books on Story Change, turn Living
Story into a Dead Narrative tool, a reified object that replicates
managerialist and systems thinking, while promising to be complexity thinking.
The result is the dominant approachs in story change consulting are neither
dialectic or dialogic. What little narrative work there is is not even as
complex as Aristotle (who we saw above noted the difference of narrative
coherence and the plurality of story). There is a lot of nuanced narrative work
out there, but it is only given lip service (listed in the references, but not
in the main text). The upshot is to perpetuate the hegemony of Narrative
Deadness over Living Story.
How did the Hegemony of
Narrative over Story come about? Over time, since modernity, and
particular with the industrial revolution, the community that nurtured story
competencies died out. That is what Walter Benjamin's (1936) fantastic essay on
storytelling is about. There reason storytelling competencies died out, and
became just narrative order. It is because of the division of labor, the
hierarchy of managerial surveillence, and the norm that management did not want
people spending work time telling stories. Then came the narrative novel, the
TV, and computer-information age, and all of a sudden, as if out of nowhere,
story consulting began to train organizations in story competencies. Some were
marketers, others swore allegiance to MIS, and hardly any were folklorist or
anthropologists. Many were knowledge reengineers or consultants seeing
story as a new fad, a new bandwagon, a way to recontemporalize their consulting
practice.
The main point to make is BME
linear, sequential, whole narrative became the basis for Story Consulting (more
accurate would be to call it Narrative Consulting, finding a BME narrative to
fashion the change after). Even Aristotle, however, treated narrative
coherence, as unlike epic-story, which is "made up of a plurality
of actions" including simultaneous episodes of diverse kinds of stories
(Aristotle, 1462b, # 7: p. 265).
Recall that in Aristotle's Poetics,
there are six elements: plot, character, dialogue, theme, rhythm, and
spectacle. And, in that order of importance, and no other. Over the last two
millennia, this ordering is reversed, and now spectacle, and
complexity of rhythm are more important in real life than plot and
character, but you would never know that by looking at contemporary story
consulting, at the BME narrative tool resurrected from Aristotle’s grave, and
sold like it was brand spanking new.
Let me restart this introduction
and make five assumptions based on the work of Abbott (1988) who has assessed
the full extent to which linear thinking dominates social science. I will
translate his assumptions into the language of story and narrative.
· Stories are not always or usually fixed BME entities. Stories never end, have no beginning, take off in the middle, refer to other stories.
· Stories are not always or usually monotonic causal BME depictions, because the complexity patterns of storytelling are anything but linear.
· Stories are not always or usually univocal and are more likely to be polyphonic in meaning
· Story sequence effects are not always or usually BME, but as in the play called Tamara a networking of fragmented storylisteners (audience turned from passive spectator to active participant in Being) in search of many Bs, many Ms, and many Es.
· Storytellers are not always, or usually independent, and do answer other storytellers with competencies surviving in storytelling community.
Tamara, is a play
written by John Kriznac, one where there are no seats for the audience, and on
about 10 stages (rooms), the actors gather, split off, go to other rooms, and
are chased by a fragmenting, networking audience, trying to sense-make what is
going on. It is to me the absolutely epitome of what is wrong with story
consulting. It is the basis of how my theory of Storytelling Organization
in 1995 (See Boje Academy of Management Journal article).
In the most recent work I am
doing (the 2008 Sage book, Storytelling Organizaiton), I look at a
dialectic and a dialogic interplay of story and narrative. This allows me to
theorize multiple ways of sensemaking that interact. Here is a list of eight
ways of story sensemaking:
Table
1: Key Types of Sensemaking Stories and Narratives (adapted Boje,
2008, introduction)
1. Ante = Antenarrative is bet and a pre-story, and is about dynamics of change; antenarratives can be clustering of fragments or transformation of one sensemaking into another
2. BME = Beginning, Middle and End progressive sequencing of retrospective five-senses wholeness imposed coherency
§ Yin and Yang of Tao = idea that managerial control does not exist without the uncontrollable, which tends to be narrative hegemonic control over story
3. Emotive-Ethical = embodied memory that provokes present ethical inquiry, and answerability
4. Fragmentation = narrative fragments that are terse, interrupted, nonlinear and moving, rearranging
5. Horsesense = The embodied telling and listening in the social moment of answering
6. Polypi = dialogism of four types of dialogisms:
1. P = Polyphonic dialogism of multiple voices in interactive moment of the event horizon
2. S = Stylistic dialogism of types of telling (orality, textuality & visuality) that juxtapose
3. C = Chronotopic dialogism of varied ways of narrating temporality and spatiality that interplay
4. A = Architectonic dialogism, the interanimation vibrations of cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical social or societal discourses
7. Tamara = landscape of spacetime distribution of rooms or hallways in which storytelling and narrating is moving; Narrative meaning depends upon what rooms you have been to, or not, & what was enacted therein, and where your experience is in the present.
8. Dialectics = Diversity of transcendental of a priori conceptions of spatiality and temporality (see chronotope) to retrospective sensory (see BME), and/or I-we, even Hegelian dialectics (thesis, antithesis, synthesis); can be debate among fragment tellers, but is always about tracing transformations across the social field of Being
Story consulting, most of it, to
be specific, does not understand complexity and its fundamental relation to
storytelling. BME is evidence of that. The story consulting methods assume such
narrative coherence, and an ease of story control by executive elites, and
there is no real appreciation of story sensemaking or story complexity.
ABOUT THE DIALECTIC
APPROACH TO CHANGE
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
develops a dialectic approach that was modified by Karl Marx to form the basis
of Critical Theory. Why Hegel
Hegel’s work, for us, is a mix
of existentialism, of nothingness and sense-certainty in a historical project.
Essential to Hegel’s existential project are two negations. First, a negation
that negates the former, changing independent elements into a moment. Second, a
negation that is the reversal of direction, making the vanished negation
possible.
Hegel makes a yet unnoticed
contribution to Weickian sensemaking. Hegel’s ongoing dialectic is
between three varieties of sensemaking in several Notional shadows:
1. Sense-certainty – where representation is dialectically flawed unless it addresses the inadequacy of appearance. For Hegel, sense-certainty is a kind of knowledge that proves to be the “most abstract and poorest truth” (p. 58). One begins to notice the negation of sense-certainty in instances of countless difference, that there is this ‘Now’ and other ‘Nows’, this ‘Here, and other ‘Heres’ (p. 60). A Now and Here proves to be what something contrary to its sensuous content. “In the dialectic of sense-certainty, Seeing and Hearing have been lost to consciousness” (p. 79, caps, original).
2. Perception – also dialectically-flawed when properties are distinguished, without discerning their mysterious integration by conscious mind (gestalt). Perception does not just happen; there is an “Act of perceiving” (p. 67, cap & italics, original). Perception is a constant negation, between Act of perceiving, and act of Negation. Some properties are positive and others negative, and these interpenetrate (p. 68). We fill in the blanks, such as, a grain of salt having color, taste, form, and gravity (any element missing, gets filled in, as a missing property in a community of properties (perceived self-identity of elements we accept responsibility to assemble).
3. Understanding – also dialectically-flawed when patters are not assessed to discern underlying laws. But instead of one universal, for Hegel there is a “plurality of the diverse universals” of the kind of being-for-self and being-for-another (p. 80, italics, original). The unity of a universal is opposed by another moment in which there is a plurality of universals. “Understanding, looks through this mediating play of forces into the true background of Things” (p. 86, italics, caps, original).
For Hegel sense-certainty,
perception, and understanding are different, and each can be deceptive. In the
distinction Hegel makes of form and content, one emerges as the limits of the
other. The unity of form unfolds into its diversity. The diversity of content
reduces itself to unity. These may be looked upon as force and counterforce of
change, as two moments of understanding. These are not considered by Hegel to
be independent forces, but forces that interpenetrate, and their result is a
process of movement, i.e. the inner being of change (p. 84). The succession of
expression of narrative and story, is not just epistemology, their dance
establishes something quite ontological. Differences of story (sides) come into
being and vanish, sometimes leaving few traces. Narratives are
intertextual, answering and posing questions (that other narrative answer).
There is for Hegel a diremption (a tearing apart or violent
separation) of the forces of form and content, through a process of movement
and change. It is the Notions of Force that interpenetration in the
opposition of for-self, and for-another, as well as Understanding as a unity
becoming diversity and diversity becoming unity, in the moment by moment of
unfoldment. And, these can be at the same time, with the two Forces present.
Instead of the antithesis
remaining entirely and essentially only a moment, it seems, by its
self-diremption into two wholly independent forces, to have withdrawn
from the controlling unity (p. 84).
I shall assert that highly popular,
even best-selling models of organization change are vanishing the story flux of
difference in order to implement linear sequential step-by-step models of
change, or models of change which simply banish the flux of story differences
(the many sides to story in relation to other stories), while promoting
managerialist narratives of positivity (defined as positive thinking), or
narratives of extreme order. Our theory of flux, sameness and difference,
comes from Hegel.
It is this very flux, as a
self-identical independence which is itself an enduring existence, in
which, therefore, they are present as distinct members and parts existing on
their own account. Being no longer has the significance of abstract
being, nor has their pure essentiality the significance of abstract
universality; on the contrary, there being is precisely that simple fluid
substance of pure movement within itself (Hegel, 1807/1977: 107).
Indeed, in all three, despite
guru-genuflections to complexity, social construction, and even ‘positive’
revolution, there is something quite linear, monological, and one-sided about
these ‘story change consulting’ approaches. In n-step change
methodologies such as John Kotter’s, the narrative account of change is a
sequence of linear steps. David Cooperrider’s Appreciative Inquiry is a
Positivity Narrative brought into being by acts of appreciative interviewing,
and appreciative summits, where all negative (& critical) thinking is
vanished. Steven Denning’s brands a Springboard Narrative abstraction as
the thesis of change method, to which, in our view, the flux of Living Story
differences and movement becomes the antithesis.
For Hegel these can be in
alternating moments, or interpenetrate at one time, in the dialectic interplay
of being-for-self and being-for-another.
And this view of change is quite
existential, almost a prelude to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. When
story becomes narrative, it not longer is, since story has become the other:
“what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it is the other”
(Hegel, p. 86). Story and narrative, then, are each only a moment of the
expression of change.
A Now and Here is not
superceded. We are aware, somewhat, of the plurality of Nows and Heres.
The expelled content of story in narrative forms of abstraction, are
noticeable. A previous re-presentation of a narrative in the now and here, owes
its way of know to a vanishing of the disappeared narrative. As Hegel puts it,
“we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say” in sense-certainty
(p. 60). It is just not possible for us to every say, or express in narrative
or story, the sensuous being that we mean.
Change from a dialectic view is
nothing more than a history of the plurality of Nows and Heres. Narrative
expresses the most abstract generalities of the sameness of our experience of
this plurality, where as story sees distinctions of this Here versus other
Heres, and this Now and other Nows. In both narrative and story, some
things are not narratable, not yet storyable. “The sensuous This that is meant
cannot be reach by language” (p. 66, caps in original).
Applied to narrative and story,
narrative negates and opposes story, and story negates and opposes narrative.
Narrative and story grow out of one another. Further stories are not
indifferent to other stories, and narrative is not indifferent to other narratives,
to counterstories and to counternarratives. Narrative scripts sameness, and
story pursues difference, and as such are opposite change movements.
Narrative is in a life and death
struggle with story. Narrativists seek to reduce story, to strip it of
differences and sides, to become a limited narrative repertoire. Story
struggles to expand narrative, to include more differences, more sides. The
clash between the contingent immediacy in Being of story and the abstraction
universal aim of narrative is a self-organizing dialectic dynamic of change,
all but ignored by the ‘story change consulting’ gurus. As such, guru
consulting decreases the depth of intimacy, while increasing estrangement or
alienation from the flux of change.
BEYOND
LINEAR THINKING IN ORGANIZATION CHANGE
It is time for story-consulting
practice to transcend what Abbott (1988) calls GLR (General Linear Reality)
models, which I prefer to call BME. GLR is defined as a “set of
assumptions about how and why social events occurs” and these assumptions
prevent seeing anything but BME everywhere (Abbott, 1988: 169). Story
consultants (most of the ones that are published in the popular book press)
treat organizations as if they obeyed the rules and assumptions of GLR/BME:
· Stories are fixed BME entities (I disagree). Stories never end, never begin.
· Stories have one BME causal meaning at a time (I disagree)
· Stories are univocal BME meaning (I disagree). Stories are polyvocal meaning
· Stories to BME is chronology (I disagree). Story does not depend upon past sequence of story history. Story can jump out of time and into the above and below, the transcendental and the reflexivity of why we are here, why we are who we are.
· BME stories are collectable, addable, sortable, and totalizable because storytellers are independent of one another (I disagree). We live in a web of stories, without end. To collect one like a dead butterfly, is to kill story, to destroy the fabric of inter-story relationships, and destroy their dynamic complexity quality.
Having made this introduction
let me give you Abbott (1988) original version of GLR assumptions:
· Fixed entities with attributes
· Monotonic causal flows
· Univocal meaning
· Absence of sequence effects
· Casewise independence
Story consulting, by my
estimation, is a strange rendition, pretending to be about story complexity of Storytelling
Organization reality, but achieving tired old systems thinking that is
unitary, monological, linear, and dangerous. BME narrative, be it from
Aristotle or contemporary story consultant, has no warrant to be a model of
social complexity or social causality which is far from linear, not whole story
to be found, and where story sequence history really does matter. GLR
combines with BME to be a powerful managerialist tool to ignore, and deny the
realities of complexity.
Recursive
Story Problematization
Recursive Story - processes
which can be indefinitely repeatedly applied to their own output, as in BME.
Two instances of the same entity, as in "recursive design of BME
narrative. A recursive story is one that defines temporality partitions as a
BME, which while administratively useful, is something quite horrific. Why? It
leads to a linear reduction of all reality into the BME template. A recursive
BME narrative inducts all manner of story sensemaking into the one definition
of properly told tale. The recursive narrative BME pattern is thought to repeat
itself, like a copy on a copy machine.
The modeling of social processes
into BME narrative coherence has a certain story-sellability to the executive
seeking control, especially story control. Story control into a linear,
singular, and totalized whole BME is quite an attractive option to many
different Bs (B1, B2, Bn), many different Ms (M1, M2, Mn), or many Es (E1, E2,
En) or the horrific (B0, M0, E0). GLR can handle few substitutions for the
singular, whole BME, and resists to the death that there is any polyphony (Bn,
Mn, En), or the nothingness of (B0, M0, E0). I mean the factorial effect of
just a few storytellers in many simultaneous Tamara rooms is quite astronomical
to calculate!
Let us take the problematic
assumptions of BME/GLR recursivity one by one.
BME denotes on way of thinking
about what storytelling complexity is, and how it works in real life
organizations. It’s all linear, done in storied wholes. GLR is modeled
empirically or if your prefer, quantitatively by this equation
y
= Xb + u
Where y, b and u are vectors and
‘X’ is a matrix of now dimensions in which the rows in SPSS or SAS are usually
cases, and the columns either independent or dependent variables (attributes).
In BME antecedent B variables
are moderated by M variables to produce results in E variables. The dream of
quantiods (a species who loves to quantify) is to render every social
phenomenon as a linear equation. The passion of every BME narrative consultant
is to teach executives two minute BME stories to story-control their social
milieu, be it strategy story to consumer, a story why workers are so darn lazy,
or a story of why executives deserve their pay. GLR makes assumptions
about causality that are quite unreasonable. X(t) = X(t+1) b + u.
Variables are embedded in BME time as unique entities report out on time. GLR
underlie most panel and focus group studies of BME story, most interview story
studies (with possible exception of life history, & phenomenological
interview). The construction of an X matrix of storytellers (rows) and stories
(columns) is what N-Vivo (formerly NUD*IST, before Google told them they are
being picked up as X-rated spam sites). BME story is being overlaid upon the
story complexity. The narrative as told by story consultant, or as Abbott
(1988: 170) puts it, the GLR modeler, envisions “the situation as a school of
fish (the cases) swimming in some regular pattern (the transformation) through
a multidimensional lake (the variable or attribute space).” The transformation
is imagined to be a simple BME linear one where stories are fixed entities
(where story or narrative is the unit of analysis). The fixed BME
narrative units are collected, categorized, and assembled in the X matrix for
theme analysis, and if you are a classic folklorist, for motif index
classification. Story units are said to have attributes (variables of Poetic
form). Story units are said to interact in causal time allow for control of the
organization and its environment in story strategy. Story units are said to
mean the same thing (to the horror of anthropologists) as they migrate from
group to group in an organization, or from organization to environment (or vice
versa). The causal meaning (always linear) of a story entity is said to depend
on the location in the X matrix of attribute space (its variable content),
since without it linear transformation would not make any sense at all.
The meaning of this is quite
startling. It means that a story does not change in transmission. It can be
tersely told, but the whole story is in the mind of the teller and listener. It
means there can be no narrative history to a story entity, since the story is
not changing, rearranging, or morphing at all. Symbolic interactionists and
ethnomethodologists, anthropologists, and a good number of behavioral
folklorists and everyone, I hope from communication studies is now saying, it
cannot be so. I can only respond that to story consulting, BME is a very
convincing narrative structure. When combined with this first assumption of GLR
it is quite irresistible.
Now this brings me to this book,
“LIVING Story Consulting.”
It is based upon critical
postmodern, a combination (intersection) of Critical Theory and postmodern
theory. Critical Theory (CT) is capitalized out of respect for the Frankfurt
School, and its pioneers Max Horkheimer, Thodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and some women they never seem to mention (See
intro to a new book I edited, coming out in 2008, Critical Theory Ethics
for Business and Public Administration). Yes, I skipped Habermas on
purpose.
BME is good for something!
Postmodern theory is never capitalized (Postmodern Theory) because it is in
such disrepute, so many different brands of it, including some that adore BME,
that well it’s just not done. Postmodern narrative, plays with form, disrupts
the traditional Arisotle BME form by juxtaposing many forms, many plot lines,
many cubic lines. My brand of postmodern theory thinks that temporality and
spatiality matter, and that stories are rarely linear, and when they are, put
your hand on your wallet, because some narrative consulting is about to steal
you blind.
CT reforms Marx and Weber, doing
something different with Marxian dialectic causality and Weberian hermeneutic
causality, especially when it comes to their “approach [to] social causality in
terms of stories” being an alternative to the X variable matrix (Abbott, 1988:
171). I think Abbott is right on when he demands more “complex stories in
which attributes interact in unique ways” (p. 171). Story consulting based upon
GLR philosophy is very rejecting of historical sociology, and in particular
rejects the complex story, and everything we know about complexity science
(which is not all that much).
Let me summarize our problems
with the GLR model of BME narrative. The central subject of BME narrative in
story consulting is the adventures of a few executives doing very few relevant
events. Story entities are not fixed, and their attributes do change over time,
so that BME is hardly an adequate caricature of social reality. Stories are not
stable units with fixed social boundaries of temporal demarcation of temporal
duration (what Bergson calls dureé). Organizing organization history into a BME
linear narrative about a few central subjects (usually executives) in a plot of
grand adventure, is only one sequence of events, one transformation, of many
much more likely (Bn, Mn, En), including some with (B0, M0, E0). It is what
Abbott (1988: 171) would call “colligation” the connection of isolated
elements/attributes/entities by some strange narrative hypothesis, of which BME
is all about linearity. This is a fundamental problem in historiography, and
why Nietzsche invented genealogy which Foucault and Adorno, and most of CT (not
Habermas) employs, and why I am a critical postmodernist story consultant.
Take as example in strategy that
invention of Alfred Chandler’s historiography, the multidivisional form
(MDF). At any given moment the MDF is an entity with clear boundaries, a
number of unambiguous attributes (size, rate of assets and their specificity,
domination by certain kinds of executives, business units centralized yet
having relative autonomy to adapt to different environments, etc.). Chandler’s
X matrix is how he assembles his cases as rows and his variables (attributes)
as columns to generalize MDF. MDF strategy comes and goes, shaped by
interfirm contagion and events like the factory for producing automobiles, the
mall, and new technologies of chemical production. In open system thinking “the
histories of individual firms will be seen to follow unique paths shaped by the
contingencies of their environments” (Abbott, 1988: 171). And there you are,
the BME strategy of MDF is one more contingency theory, and open system stuck
in the input, throughput, output model, unable to adapt itself to complexity
thinking. Just stuck! GLR of fixed entities has several flaws, errors of
thinking. MDF become historically exaggeration of events, involving Pierre
Dupont and William Crapo Durant, and other family tycoons, central subjects
doing transformation from divisional to MDF forms, in a linear model of BME
approach to narrative strategy.
MDF can emerge through merger
and acquisition, “yet merger removes entities from the sample and replaces them
with new one” with different names or different colligation with same name (p.
172). The X matrix (sample frame) falls apart, self-constructs Demography
does no better than MDF in trying to get outside GLR/BME. Look at the strategy
discipline of population ecology, its love affair with demography, at the
Stanford University. Population ecology models of have trouble knowing what to
do with entities such as MDF that do not stay the same, that arise out of
merger and acquisition, instead of birth and death in population domains.
Organization death is the usual dependent variable and “using a log-linear
group of independent variables to predict them” the deaths (Abbott, 1988: 172).
The problem is that people, entire processes, and units (divisions) are
migrating from one demographic domain to another. None of the organizations
stay the same, but the BME strategy narrative lives on. The entities become
radically different, in complexity terms, from the emergence of small changes.
The espoused story of MDF or population ecology (& demography) fails to
account for the enacted, living story (variability) of living participants,
moving from cohort to cohort, thoroughly messing up the X matrix.
BME as we shall explore in
subsequent chapters is collective memory, of particular group (executives &
their consultants) manufactured to ignore all collective memories of every
other group (Halbwachs, 1950/1980). A genealogical method (see subsequent
chapter) instead of historiography as some BME narrative concoction would get
at this.
The monotonic, monologic,
monovocal ‘causal flows’ is our second GLR/BME assumption. In GLR terms
it asserts, “causality flows either from big to small (from the contextual to
the specific) or between attributes of equivalent ‘size’” (Abbott, 1988: 173).
In complexity science, a cause
can flow from small to large, a minor attribute can prompt a major
transformation, and instead of linear transformation there is emergence of
pattern out of chaos (a pattern we may false interpret as noise). Open system
theory, unlike complexity theory, makes assumptions about the constant
relevance of variables at all times during a transformation of inputs into
outputs, according to some deviation-amplifying or deviation-counteracting
feedback loops (hopefully passing through some registration of the
environment).
For my mentor Mikhail Bakhtin
(1987, 1990, 1991) such a theory is pretty absurd. Historical BME writing is
one chronotope, and there are many others. Chronotope is relativity of
space and time in storytelling (particularly novels), in celebration of
Einstein physics. Complexity science as some genealogy (not historiography)
says “at ‘time t, x was important, while later, the conjuncture of things made
y more important” (Abbott, 1988: 178).
Story consulting too readily
turns all stroy experience into BME. This happens because often all story is
asusmed to be BME. It happens becasue when interviewing, researchers or
consultants, lead the subject into telling what happened at the origin, what
when on in the middle, and what is the ending. You get what you ask for. Causal
processes are not all that connected. We start in the middle. We do not often
know any origin, just a swirl of forces of emergence, that we render into
sense, impose some sense upon.
Polyvocal means many
storytellers are plying meaning to events.
History can be a distortion of
the events, making them seem like BME when they are not. The attributions of
general linear realtiy model is very strong in our culuture.
BME is easy to impose, easy to
collect, too easy to assume because they are so easy to totalize. Yet,
complexity science and more advanced story methods looks for patterns that just
do not fit BME.
BME can be useful. A simple
story does sell (there is storyselling as my colleagues Cheryl Lapp and Adrian
Carr, term it). We can become tools of a simple narrative, called story. We
become branded by narrative. Those of you who have been through the latest
consulting craze, 'branding' know what I mean. However, to get at the process
of complexity, a more complex understand of story process is needed.
WHY THIS BOOK WILL NEVER
BE A BEST-SELLER
The best-seller market caters to
simplistic theories of change. Kotter's (et al) appeal is that it is
anti-theory, anti-analysis, and anti-intellectual. Cooperrider (et al) is more
scholarly, but seeks to limit inquiry to the positive side of analysis. Denning
is charismatic, folding dead narratives into seductive tales of how to install
change linearity, using narrative to manipulate change, to deaden story. None
of these books draw upon narrative theory in any rigorous way. None of them
lead an organization from systems thinking, from closed thinking, to open
systems, and much less to complexity.
This book will never be a best
seller because it uses words like dialogic and dialectic, develops philosophy,
is all about complexity dynamics. That will never sell in a world bent on
linear thinking!