True Storytelling

Seven Principles For An Ethical and Sustainable Change-Management Strategy

Jens Larsen, David M. Boje, Lena Bruun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190946
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

True Storytelling is a new method of studying, planning, facilitating, ensuring, implementing and evaluating ethical and sustainable changes in companies, organizations and societies. True Storytelling is both a method with seven principles and a mindset to help managers and researchers to work with change. True Storytelling stresses that we need to balance the resources of the Earth, our wellbeing and the economy when we are dealing with change.

It is not only a book about how to prevent climate change, it is also a book about how we can navigate through crisis, create less stress and achieve better life in organizations and in society as a whole. You will learn how to create innovative start-ups with a purpose and fund money for sustainable projects and good ideas.

The book combines practical cases, interviews with managers and CEOs, theory and philosophy to define the method and to teach the Seven True Storytelling Principles:

1 You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future

2 True storytelling makes spaces that respect the stories already there

3 You must create stories with a clear plot, creating direction and helping people prioritize

4 You must have timing

5 You must be able to help stories on their way and be open to experiment

6 You must consider staging, including scenography and artefacts

7 You must reflect on the stories and how they create value

This book is a guide to implementing these core principles to boost leadership practices, create a storytelling culture and staff buy-in. The method is also useful as an analytical tool for organizations, managers and consultants in order to prepare, plan and execute the implementation of strategies. It is valuable reading for researchers and students at master level as well as leaders and consultants in charge of ethical and sustainable changes.

1 Principle 1

You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future

This chapter is about working with UN goals and climate change and about how the singer and songwriter Johnny Cash found his true story, together with the hip hop producer Rick Rubin, and how they recorded the best album in his career. It’s about how organizations and society can find out what is true and sustainable and powerful.

In a world with so much information, so many answers, ideas and so much going on, how is it possible to find out what is true for you and the people and strategies you are working with? And how can you find the right way to prepare the energy for a sustainable future?

The first principle is the foundation of True Storytelling. The principle says: “You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future.” The principle stresses the importance of finding a strategy for your life or for your organization, company or country which is true, which means it is sustainable in a human, and a multi-species planetary-context, and not just in an economic sense – you and the people you are working with believe in it and are energized for the long haul.

Figure 1.1

In this chapter we will try to define the principle, but also the concept, of ‘true’ as an ethical and sustainable way of life. Furthermore, will we define the concepts of antenarrative-forecaring, as important concepts which help you in your life and work, with implementing sustainable changes.¹ True has many grains; there are many sides to true. And, finally, we will give some advice and tools for working with Principle 1 in praxis, for example, in a private or public organization, municipality, in fundraising or in coaching. The self-correcting method of storytelling science means making mistakes and finding better ways, through trial-and-error.

To warm you up, we start with some questions. For Principle 1, please begin your together-telling with these five questions:

1. What is a true and sustainable strategy when it comes to nature (biosphere), human (and non-human) and economy?
2. Did you check it out?
3. Do you believe in it?
4. Do you have the knowledge to do it?
5. Can you sustain it (get energized and not burn out) in the long term?

Ok we are ready …

We must be true together and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future. How do we do this? For us, it is about being in dialogue and doing together-telling. In the next paragraph we want to show how the different concepts of the model come into play and how it can help you to get new perspectives on Principle 1 and the challenges you are struggling with.

In together-telling, I listen to what is true for you, preparing our co-energies, and our joint-efforts for a sustainable future, together. This is multi-species storytelling (Haraway, 2016). We begin the process of checking it out, together, self-correcting and together-correcting to find our way forward. This futuring means working together, caring in advance, for a particular future, out of the many potential futures, that we believe in doing. We each have our own webwork of unfolding living stories, and, by listening to one another, we gain the knowledge to do the changes together. Together-telling means we are sustaining one another so we don’t get burned out, and can do something that has value for many generations beyond our own. As we do the futuring we are rehistoricizing, claiming some past out of the many entangling pasts. Some are here-and-now apparent, highlighted because of the future we are manifesting and what we are here-and-now attending to. Doing our ‘living story webwork’ here-and-now is how one living story begs for another to be told, and you interrupt my telling to tell one of your own, and then another one. This is what it means to be together-telling. This is managing our change management together, and grounding it in community relations, in organizational relations, in customer and supplier relations. But we are far from done with grounding. The entire supply chain, the customer ways of using what we are producing and distributing, has its own ‘will’ which is greater than us together, a wholeness unfolding with its own agency, its own consequence, its own hidden costs. Every supply chain, and the distribution chain to the customers, is using planetary natural resources, is appropriating them for better or for worse. By grounding we are zooming-in, then zooming-out again to understand our complicity. We zoom-in to the quantum field level, the waveform of energy at subatomic context. We zoom-out to multi-species storytelling, and to the cosmos. In moving our conscious awareness from abstracting and reflection in a meeting room, to getting embodied (our 37.2 trillion living cells), to being in our sensemaking of the world-making, how our change management strategies as Human-world are already inseparable and undeniable apart of ‘Nature-world’ in the way our ways of living story life and work, are complicit and morally answerable to what ways ‘Living World’ is unfolding has to be First Principle, ‘True’ in the sense of being about the ‘Whole Story’ of our existence. We are not just logical, we are spiritual beings, and artistically living a life that has ethical coordinates.

The story of Johnny Cash and how he found his true story and made a comeback

To illustrate the together-telling and self-correcting method and model, we will start with a story about the singer and songwriter Johnny Cash and his work with the producer Rick Rubin. In the late 80s and early 90s Johnny Cash lost faith in himself. Somehow, he lost the true story which he had created up through the 50s, 60s and 70s with a certain signature, style and attitude. In 1992, Johnny Cash was out of business. The radios didn’t play his songs, he was too old and he could not find a company for his new records. At that time, he was playing at places like cheap low-rent Las Vegas residencies around the country.² On February 27, 1993 he was playing a concert at The Rhythm Cafe, Santa Ana, Los Angeles. A few days earlier the hip hop producer Rick Rubin had phoned his manager and asked for a meeting. “He shouldn’t be playing at that place. He was a legend. I went to see him after the concert.”

Rubin is famous for producing The Beastie Boys, Metallica, Slayer and other heavy metal bands. Rick Rubin continues: “I don’t like a certain kind of music, I simply like great music. My job is to help people to find their own voice and set them free.”

Johnny Cash recalled the meeting:

I said: “What’re you gonna do with me, that nobody else has done, to sell records for me?” Rick said: “Well, I don’t know that we will sell records. I would like you to sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart’s content, everything you ever wanted to record.” I said: “That sounds good to me.”

Johnny Cash visited Rubin in his home at Sunset Strip in LA. He had some recording gear in his living room. It was an ADAT tape recorder and two microphones. “Just play something,” Rubin said. Cash took his guitar and played. Rubin explains:

Much of the job is about creating an environment in which the artist feels safe, so that they can allow themselves to be more vulnerable. There’s something very beautiful in seeing someone allowing themselves to be vulnerable. I think that, more than anything, is my job.

Rubin is a big man with a big beard who walks around barefoot. While Cash were playing, Rubin lay on a couch and listened with his whole body, not only with his ears. He is inspired by Zen, an aspect of Buddhism which stresses the important of awareness and being in the now.

Rubin explains: “Even if you had heard a particular song your whole life, when he sang it, all of a sudden you understood it, or thought about the words in a different way, or took the song more seriously.”

You can say Rubin used his body as a tuning fork and every time he had a feeling in his body due the music he reacted. We can also say he used his body as a truth-awareness, to find something which is important or true – the body never lies. Principle 1 is this kind of embodiment, grasping form beyond the future arriving in the here and now. It is a manifestation of a conscious capitalism in the theatre of capitalism.³ If we analyze it and use our model and the four approaches on each principle, Rubin’s listening with his body and Cash’s playing is the grounding of the true but Rubin and Cash also draw upon their history: Rubin of working with different bands and Cash’s whole career. Rubin put in a vision or concept on an abstract level working with Cash and both of them worked out how to bring his music, or the music they created together, into the future. As they get along and do their together-telling, they are doing the process of self-correcting. And when Walter Benjamin (1936) in his famous essay stresses there is no storytelling anymore, this is a way to come back to a truer storytelling.

The same approach has been taken by the Danish music producer Lars Skaerbaek:

“It about creating an atmosphere with no pressure or ambitions. Very often the best takes are the first takes. The artist come into the studio and I ask them to do a sound check or rehearsal. I introduced it like a kind of warm up exercise but very often we decide to use the first takes on the final track.”

Skaerbaek’s approach is almost the same as Rubin’s – it’s a way to find something which is true for the artist. To create a room of no-performance. It is more to catch the right moment while it drives or moves by. Another Danish musician, Lars Top Galia,⁴ from the Danish legendary punk band Sort Sol, stresses the importance of finding the true in the sound. “If you push the artist in a certain way to please a market or an audience it always ends up as a failure.” The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1958) writes about how to push the past and the future to leave room for the present where something new can emerge. Perhaps it could be a metaphor for what these producers are doing?

We must add that it is not always the producers and artists who have success, which means the concept of truth in the sense of art is hard to grasp. To quote a great artist, the American writer Jonathan Franzen: “The novel is often complex cause it is trying to grasp the truth and the true is complex”.⁵ The great German painter Anselm Giefer put it this way: “The truth is always grey or has different nuances of grey. It’s never clear” (Hustvedt, 2012).

Antenarrative theory

We can unpack the shades of grey and the truth by using antenarrative questions as a way of getting closer to the truth:

1. What was Forehaveing BEFORE? This is the antenarrative process of rehistoricizing, by preparing in advance for what one is about to be having. An example is how parents prepare in advance before having (forehaving) a baby. The mother watches her diet, and quits smoking. The father takes classes in parenting.
2. What is Foreconcepting BENEATH? Beneath the narrating and storying is all that is preconstitutive, the language, symbols, and gestures understood in the context of a society or company in order to make sense enough to create a story or narrative of a newborn (the baby language, names of baby furniture, language, and so on).
3. What is Forestructuring BETWEEN? Parents have to cope with a whole different context of infrastructure that supports or interferes with having a newborn: the insurance agents (not in Denmark, the healthcare is free), the medical establishment, the grandparents, the religious institutions everyone belongs to or avoids.

   

   Figure 1.2 Six antenarrative questions for True Storytelling strategies

4. What is Foregrasping BEYOND? Beyond is the body, the new to arrive body of the newborn, the changing body of the mother, the body of the father, and so on. Each body can grasp the beyond, in advance, ahead of being able to articulate a story or a narrative with any coherence. The body never lies, and it speaks truth but sometimes the mind does not listen or denies what the body is telling, antecedent to the mouth being able to speak, to tell.
5. What is Forecaring, the BECOMING? The foetus has not taken its first breath, has not arrived to breathe the same air as the parents and doctors, and so many more people, animals, and plants. The Becoming of the child in birth, maturing, and eventual death is all about the primordial aspect of coming into the world, becoming human, learning to Be-in-the-world, and to Be-of-the-world, inseparable from Nature.
6. What is Foresight, the ‘Bets on the Future’? The parents, in advance of the birth begin to whisper to the foetus, “be a doctor’ or “be an engineer.” Everyone is trying to influence the future, to bake their own bets on the future. Each bet on the future is an antenarrative process, a preparing both the teller...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: What is True Storytelling?
• 1. Principle 1: You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future
• 2. Principle 2: True storytelling, making room by respecting the stories already there
• 3. Principle 3: You must create stories with a clear plot creating direction and helping people prioritize
• 4. Principle 4: You must have timing
• 5. Principle 5: You must be able to help stories on their way and be open to experiment
• 6. Principle 6: You must consider staging including scenography and artefacts
• 7. Principle 7: You must reflect on the stories and how they create value
• 8. Anti tools for working with the True Storytelling principles
• Appendix I: About the authors
• Appendix II: Full interview/together-telling from Chapter 1, Principle 1
• References
• Index