In his book “Storytelling Organizations” the author David M. Boje claims that everything from individuals to every type of organizations imaginable has a narrative and/or a story that they tell the world and that has consequences in how we view them and what happens to them.
“Every workplace, school, government office or local religious group is a storytelling organization. Every organization from a simple office supply company or your local choral group, your local McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, to the more glamourous organizations such as Disney or Nike and the most scandalus such as Enron or Arthur Anderson is a Storytelling Organization. Yet, very little is known about how storytelling organizations differ, or how they work, how they respond to their environment, how to change them, and how to survive in them. Even less is known about the insider’s view of the Storytelling Organizations, its theatre of everyday life. Where you work you become known by your story, become promoted and fired for your story. It is not always the story you want told, and there are ways to change and restory that story.” (Boje, p. 4)
In the book the author explain 8 ways of narrative and story sensemaking:
- BME Retrospective Narrative: Beginning, Middle and End organized in a linear narrative. In Aristotle’s Poetics he points out six important elements for this type of narrtive from most to least important plot, characters, dialogue, theme, rhythm and spectacle.
- Fragmented Retrospective Narratives: interrupted narrative told by different characters unfolding in an animated conversation.
- Antenarratives: “prospective (forward-looking) bets (antes) that an ante-story (before-story) can transform organization relationships.” (p.13) “Antenarratives seem to bring about a future that would not otherwise be. the key attribute of antenarratives is they are travelers; moving from context to context, shifting in content and refraction as they jump-start the future. (…) they morph the content as they travel.” (p.14)
- Tamara: when different and sometimes contradictory stories are simultaneously enacted across differnt rooms or sites within an organization.
- Emotive-ethical: how we emotionally react to ethically complex situations, the way they make us feel and which way we want to lean into.
- Horsesense:
- Dialectics:
- Dialogisms
Most of the book is centered around business organizations but I found a few interesting concepts that I think can be analyzed and applied to my project. One of them is “Strategy Narrative Forensics” which the author defines as “detection of clues to solve a storytelling mystery. Clues are followed where they lead.” (p.102) In short, this means analyzing the text and trying to discover who are the voices that wrote this, is there more than one voice in the text? Who was the originator of this idea?
Part III of the book focuses on how to correctly do Storytelling consulting, it encourages you to look at different aspects of the corporation, not only the oral storytelling but the written one in the webpage, in their social media, how documents are written and what is written in them, photographs, videos. Boje mentions White and Epston’s 1990 narrative therapy which is “the process of constructing a new narrative, renarrating one that is fashioned out of marginalized or peripheral episodes in an individual’s life history. The new story becomes an alternative interpretation of the individual narrative possibility.”
The author keeps mentioning the concept restorying which is the re telling of an already told story. He explains that restorying has an important role to play in the making of collective memory, he describes it as “a process of multi-story, multi-plot deconstruction that is antecedent to sensemaking retrospection of experience.” This way of talking about this concepto of “restorying” I think is quite relevant to my project looking at a creative individual in today’s digitally oriented world. A lot of “traditional stories” or traditional ways to tell stories have to be updated to be able to become interesting in different type of platforms. This perspective of restorying is in a way what I want to use in my process of helping creatives tell their unique stories.
Boje, D.M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. London ; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.