Organisational storytelling

You know that old story about a vacuum: that if we create a vacuum something will rush in to fill it? Well, the same applies to organisations. If there is radio silence on something, we tend to fill that silence with our own soundtrack. Our organisations need to realise the risk they run by not providing a story to plug the gap... even using an interim one. In organisations, cultural tales will bend to fit, with "part of the collective processing involv[ing] telling different versions of stories to different audiences" (Boje, 2007, p. 211), and - if there is not a prepared truth - we will speculate, creating potentially problematic narratives:

"Only the chief executive officer (CEO) and a few executives may be told that the sales manager was fired for drunken indiscretions with a saleswoman on the CEO's couch; vendors only hear that the manager did not get on with the CEO; customers learn that Fred resigned; middle management suspects an affair with Mildred. Each performance is never the completed story; it is an unraveling process of confirming new data and new interpretations as these become part of an unfolding story line" (p. 211).

If we don't have a prepared narrative to bring the team together, the organisation runs the risk of seeding multiple tales which undermine whatever initiative is being delivered before it is even underway.

But it doesn't stop there. Our "organizational stories [...have] the capacity to constitute the organization from the bottom-up", and "to reconfigure our appreciation of organization[s]-as-cultures" (Collins, 2021, p. 54). What is even more interesting is that we tend to tell our stories in roughly four ways: as our own opinion; as incomplete or evolving fragments; as factual reportage; or as fully-formed tales... once we have had enough time to polish and embed them (Collins, 2021). 

When we have had that time to process, we become storytellers in our organisations: 

Our "stories are performed [...] to make sense of an equivocal situation" (Boje, 2007, p. 211), with our storytelling being a conversation with our audience, involving our "listeners in various ways" (p. 212), with the story "not [...] in concise sequences of storytellers recounting full texts to passive listeners" (p. 217), but, our listeners being "co-producers with [us as] the teller of the story [as a] performance" (p. 212).

It is easy to see how this can go right, and wrong in an organisation. Do we want to be custodians of truth, or spreaders of muck?

We need to be careful what we repeat, and how we tell our stories. 

Sam

References:

Boje, D. M. (2007). Chapter 10 The storytelling organization: A study of story performance in an office-supply firm. In S. Minahan, J. W. Cox (Eds.), The Aesthetic Turn in Management (pp. 211-231). Routledge. Collins, D. (2021). Rethinking Organizational Culture: Redeeming Culture through Stories. Routledge.

Collins, D. (2021). Rethinking Organizational Culture: Redeeming Culture through Stories. Routledge.