Storytelling in Organizations
Articulating a Pattern of Choice
ROGER'S CLOSE CALLa
Two managers at a mining company have a conversation while walking to a meeting:
"I take it you heard about Roger parking in the dumper truck's blind spot? It was a close call."
"I heard... I'm glad he's ok but, man, how many times do we have to hear stories like this?"
Sometimes we think about stories as following a classic arc in which there is a defined beginning, middle, and end.[3] It goes something like this: a main character is presented with a challenge, makes a choice in response to this challenge, and his or her actions yield an outcome.[4] For example, executives at Nike are known to tell the story of how, when faced with the challenge of building a better running shoe, founder Bill Bowerman chose to pour rubber into his wife's waffle iron, inspiring Nike's first shoe, the Waffle Trainer. This story is told often to point to the roots of the company's culture of innovation.[5]
However, most of the storytelling in organizations is not necessarily like this.[6] As in the example above about Roger, stories often surface in abrupt and incomplete fragments, in people's conversations.[7] On their own, these fragments may not make sense; however, they can be quite meaningful when situated within the context of organizational life.[8,9] The two managers in the example above know who Roger is, the history of safety incidents at the company, and why Roger may have parked in a dumper truck's blind spot. Together, the managers draw on this context as they make meaning of the incident.
Stories that surface like this become woven together with one another in their telling and retelling. As this happens, the underlying messages of these stories have the potential to come together into an organizational narrative. An organizational narrative tells you about the way things are and how things came be.[10] You can think of narratives like storylines that capture the essence of people's day-to-day experiences. Most people have a sense of the dominant narratives in their organization and these storylines tell them about the types of choices and actions that are valued.[11]
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IN PRACTICE: CORE NARRATIVE
Over time stories weave together to form an organizational narrative. Stories like the one about Roger, from above, have woven together to create a narrative about safety. In the past, the safety narrative led to the sense that incidents were inevitable, contributing to more near misses and accidents. Deliberate investments in storytelling at this company have helped it to shift the core safety narrative to one of accidents being preventable and worth preventing. These interventions have included formally capturing and surfacing near miss and "failure" stories like this one about Roger, and facilitating candid discussion about them in meetings and training sessions. These efforts to shift the narrative, combined with a number of other tactics, have led to dramatic improvement in the organization's safety performance.
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THE ROLE OF CHOICE
While often downplayed, the role of 'choice' in stories is a crucial aspect of organizational storytelling. Choices are important because we learn about what is acceptable in organizations through experiencing how others react to our choices. It is also likely that the most memorable messages we encounter in organizations are those that help us determine the types of choices we should make.[12]
Stories help us to learn from one another's experiences and in the process gain insight into how people come to their choices.[13] Stories are useful for sharing this type of "know how"[14] because they give us concrete, tangible examples to emulate and explore.[15]
PATTERNS OF CHOICE
People tend to make choices that are consistent with what they perceive the dominant narratives in their organization to be.[16] Change tends to happen in organizations when people begin to see a different set of choices available to them.[17] They start to see these choices as they surface in the stories that get told and retold in people's everyday conversations.[18] As this pattern of choices emerges, different narratives begin to take shape and lays the foundation for others to also make different choices.[19]
It's important that the people in your organization see how the choices they face on a day-to-day basis align with a narrative that captures your organization's vision for sustainability. In our conversations with practitioners, we've seen that those having success with embedding sustainability are investing in helping people in their organization to see an evolving pattern of choices. They have actively surfaced the choices made by senior leaders and fellow employees to connect sustainability to the existing organizational narrative or even to forge a new narrative around sustainability.
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a This is a fictional interaction based on this true story: