By David M. Boje, Jan 9 2007
Perhaps a majority of people in the world need a manner of storytelling that has BME, and bestow sensemaking authority to a few characters on high.
Just as the New Testament canot be understood without reference to the Old, a new story does not make sense except in reference to the old story.
Its ironic but managerilst story consulting (MSC) "think[s] unhistorically" (Nietzsche, 1st essay, Geneaology of Morals, p. 159). To me, this is most impractical! MSC historical methods are amaterish. They do not do ethnographic, any kind of anthropological, or any sociological method. MSC pays very selective attention to method. They prefer focus group (or for Snoden, the peer group) in some offsite event to find examples of sense emergence story that fit tightly into archetype cartoon constellations, or into tired metaphors. Or, they prefer to send in the knowledge reengineers to interrogate workers, and relieve them of their tacit knowledge stories, the Holy Grail of these knowledge extractors, and knowledge transferers.
Now it is obvious to me that MSC looks for the genesis of story with the wrong methods, looking in the wrong place, and looking at the wrong time. MSC uses weak methodology, to produce what they think mananagement wants, to study simplistic stories in contrived interviews or focus groups, rather than in-the-moment of work life situations of travail.
MSC caters to the corporatalization of storytelling. Corporatalized storytelling is defined as an overly interpreted, BME linear story of the escapades of CEO making it seem the leader founded and accomplished everything in just the what way, at just the right time, in just the right place. Their stories are something divorced from collective reality of storytelling, what could be discovered by any rigorous anthroplogical, sociological, or even historical method. The MSC stories set up a ghastly romantic heroic figure, one no mortal being could possibly live up to.
Over time the Storytelling Organization moves away form all substantive stories, and must rely upon more MSC to produce story spin, story aplogetics, and story legitimation. They move away from substantive story because the substance of reality of their own processes and the shifts in states of their environment, is something they never made sense of. Since a majority of people are disposed to accept the insubstantive stories, the organziaiton moves further away from any understanding of its substantive environment.
Of course there is an eminiently practical cure. Make stories told substantive, restory to keep stories told tuned to shifting organizaitonal capabilities and environmental emergence. However, the majority of organizations, and certainly the majority of CEOs, and the majority of the people would rather spend money on MSC.
MSC does more damage than good, brands and petrifies stories of the founding as if any discovery of beginning was straightforword, unproblematic, and something to be told in two minutes. The environment shifts course, the branded story remains on the wrong course, there is damage and loss everywhere. So what does management, that is highly practical do? They call in more MSC to fix it, to solve the problem by more branding, more BME founding stories, more story stratigic based on monophonic and monologic appraisal, and do more focus groups to show that that is the spin story that consumers want to hear to accomplish the greenwashing, the whitewashing, and all it is spin. And that is why MSC is a multi-billion dollar industry, a global industry, that is in such high demand, because the majority of CEOs, MBAs, and working saps want something so very practical.
What to they want that is practical? A two minute stump speech story told by their CEOS, a BME progress story, a Springboard Story that will make the CEO appear so very heroic an adventurer. They want a half day offsite seminar where knowledge reingineers can interrogate the secret knowledge workers have been holding back, so that sanding (the new term for downsizing) can recur. They want a two minute Springboard Story they can tell in the elevator to subordinates who believe that their CEO empowers them, that power is delegated and not to be grown autonomously. Mary Parker Follett knew you canot delegate power, you grow it yourself or you don't have any power. I have heard of knowledge management reengineers fitting helmets on the 'primatives' (yes, they call workers that word) and interrogate them until they extract the tacit story (when will they learn that tacit story is a non sequitor. If knowledge is so tacit, how can the worker story it so eloquently when wearing that helmet?
MBAs are taught in Business School by their professors to solve problems with tools. They are taught too often, that story is just another tool to solve problems. MBAs and the majority of people in organizations want to make things better. So MSC sounds like the solution, story is the tool to solve problems.
What could be more practical than the collective imagination to tell stories befitting the shifts taking place in the organizaiton and its environment? Why does it not occur. It would spell the extinction of MSC, the CEO would have to engage with collective storategy formation and implementation.