The Organizational Storytelling Workbook

How to Harness this Powerful Communication and Management Tool

David Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000071924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comunicación empresarial

This workbook is an interactive guide for leaders and managers to help you tell compelling stories at work. The Organizational Storytelling Workbook offers:

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• a critical engagement with academic debates on organizational storytelling; and

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• a series of exercises designed to allow users to improve their capability as organizational storytellers.

The text begins with a chapter which locates organizational storytelling within a critical account of organizational cultures. This book argues that managerial accounts of organizational culture offer a limited appreciation of the ways in which people think, feel and act and suggests storytelling as a means of redeeming our understanding of all matters cultural. Having secured this new appreciation of culture and storytelling the workbook develops a series of maxims and exercises designed to allow users: (a) to improve their storytelling practice; and (b) to reassess the cultural assumptions and priorities revealed through their practice.

Enriched with interactive features to walk managers practically through the process of improving their storytelling skills, including practical exercises, contemplative questions, and space to respond creatively to the ideas in the book, this workbook is the perfect companion to any executive or postgraduate course in storytelling as well as a useful and enjoyable companion to any individual manager that wishes to improve their skills.

1 Organizational culture; organized storytelling

Introduction

In this chapter I will develop an account of organizational storytelling that is rooted within an appreciation of (a) culture and (b) the nature of management. I have chosen this approach for two reasons.

First, this approach contrasts and yet complements the account developed in Stories for Management Success. It will, therefore, advance the analysis I have developed elsewhere rather than simply repeating this.

Second, this means of structuring the analysis will allow us to understand the potential of stories in an organized context while rescuing ‘culture’ from the clutches of ‘popular management’.

We begin with reflections on what is sometimes termed ‘the cultural turn’ in management studies (Collins, 2000).

* * * *

It is now commonplace to speak of organizations in cultural terms. Indeed whenever a large issue, or seemingly intractable problem, arises, managers, academics, business analysts, police officers, politicians and sometimes even football players (see Collins, 2000) are wont to announce that the matter at hand is, at root, ‘cultural’ and will consequently require (perhaps) a ten-year programme of transformation.

Following this sort of announcement two things tend to happen:

First, management consultants begin to flick through catalogues, which sell yachts and private jet planes.¹

Second, the managers, politicians, policy-makers and police officers (I could go on) who have witnessed this cultural revelation all nod, sagely, in agreement.

Yet such superficial agreement as to the need for ‘cultural change’ and, indeed, the utility of those mechanisms invoked to secure change in the thoughts and actions that constitute our organizations tend to cloak the presence of persistent debates concerning (a) the nature and origins of culture and (b) the processes of cultural reproduction that mark and sustain our organized lives.

Indeed the fact that all concerned tend to agree that the big organizational issues we now face are cultural, at root, signals only that you may secure agreement among wise and foolish alike just so long as you trouble the conscience of neither.

In this chapter I aim to challenge this false consensus on ‘culture’ so that, together, we might come to understand the complex realities that intrude whenever we seek to intervene in the lives of others. Yet while our interest, here, is critical, conceptual and challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions, our focus remains practical insofar as it is designed to reveal and to explore the contests that shape our organizations and the dilemmas that characterize managerial action.

Do I have sure-fire remedies to offer you? Of course I do not.

And, if you are honest you know that such recipes as are currently available – How to build great teams; How to deliver useful change; How to manage culture – simply do not deliver upon their promises.

Noam Chomsky (2003) has a number of rather neat tools designed to test rhetorical statements such as those that commonly circulate in political discourse. Chomsky advises that whenever we encounter a broad, rhetorical claim – ‘this is all about freedom’; ‘Brexit is the will of the people’ – we should make an effort to relocate the claim in a separate, parallel, context. If the rhetorical projection fails in the new setting, this failure may be taken as an indication that the claim is, in the context of its original articulation, empty and/or reflective of interests that are narrowly partisan.

Following Chomsky’s advice we may now ask ourselves: how would claims made in relation to effective strategies for ‘change management’ and/or ‘cultural transformation’ function in an extra-organizational context?

You might like to ask yourselves, therefore, would you spend your own money on a book that promised untold riches, risk-free?

Would you use your own money to purchase tickets for a seminar which promised to reveal the sure-fire secrets of a happy family life?

Would you purchase a book that promised to teach you sure-fire tactics for dating success?

If your answer to questions such as these is, ‘No, of course not’, then please read on.

If your answer is, ‘Yes please share your sure-fire, success secrets with me!’, then I have a catalogue of wares that may be of interest. Please log on to: www.please_take_all_my_cash.com so that you and your money may be parted.

I am joking of course. I don’t (presently) own this domain-name. But my humour, however weakly expressed, has a serious intent, for I want you to understand:

1. that so much of what practitioners (whether they be managers, politicians or footballers) think they know of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural change’ is limited, distorted and skewed in ways that seriously limits its practical relevance;
2. that a critical appreciation of organizational storytelling will help you to develop a richer and more faithful appreciation of the dynamic processes that shape our organized worlds; and
3. that this knowledge of how the world (actually) works will help you to pursue purposeful intervention in your organization.

Take a few moments now to record the rhetorical projections that circulate commonly within your organization.

Upon what claims do these rhetorical projections depend?

Could these projections survive Chomsky’s relocation exercise?

Am I suggesting, then, that stories have the capacity to shape our understanding of social organization in ways that will have a bearing upon the practice of (cultural) management? Yes!

Am I suggesting that stories are sure-fire success mechanisms that will allow you to take charge of what others, think, feel and do? Hardly!

My intention here is to demonstrate the manner in which an appreciation of organizational storytelling processes may be used to allow you (a) to develop and (b) to articulate an approach to leadership and management which in recognizing history, context and plurality, works with rather than against the lived experience of social organization.

Accordingly, the remainder of Chapter 1 will proceed as follows:

We begin with reflections on the nature of organizational culture. Here, as we shall see, the ‘definitions’ of culture which circulate among managerial cadres are, in truth, nothing of the kind.

In an attempt to develop an account of organizations-as-cultures that can sustain critical inquiry, and in so doing support practical endeavour, we will consider a number of ‘exhibits’ (or, if you prefer, quotations) drawn from an eclectic range of sources. These exhibits we will array to explore, both, the historical complexity of cultural formations and their dynamism.

‘Culture’, as we shall see, is too often represented as a form of collective mental programming which imprints itself upon our thoughts and actions. Challenging this programming metaphor, we will demonstrate that the suggestion that culture is somehow the ‘software of the mind’ simply fails to concede the extent to which the software that supports our technological systems is prone to failure! Furthermore, and perhaps more pertinently, we will show that the culture-as-software metaphor acts to deny what our own experience of the social world has taught each of us: that cultural proscriptions are, in truth, fluid and negotiable.

Having secured an appreciation of ‘culture’, which is rooted in an appreciation of complexity and plurality, we will turn to consider the nature and processes of organizational storytelling. We will demonstrate that the assumptions which traduce culture as a metaphor of/for social life act similarly to diminish the practice of organizational storytelling.

Challenging the reduced account of organizational storytelling that has been placed before management practitioners we will re-view the organized world, warts and all, so that we might come to recognize our friends, our colleagues and our customers as actors with agency; as living, breathing, functioning, if flawed, adults within a managerial landscape, which, because it has been shaped by ‘popular management’, is prone to infantilization.

Getting to grips with culture

Deal and Kennedy (1982: 4) who were, together with the likes of Peters and Waterman (1982) and Pascale and Athos ([1981] 1986), pioneers in the field of ‘popular management’ (see Collins, 2013; 2020) offer, perhaps, the most concise account of organizational culture. They suggest that culture may be condensed to

Take a few moments to list the ‘popular management’ books that you currently own or have read.

How do these texts constitute the world of work?

In what way do these texts represent and account for the contemporary problems of management?

Can you recall any stories from these texts? If so please jot these down now?

Are there any aspects of your daily life or your work experience omitted or occluded by these texts?

a simple statement of fact. Culture is, they assert, simply ‘how we do things around here’.

This is, of course, rather a long way from ‘a definition of culture’ but this statement does at least demonstrate a useful intuition about what people do at work and why. Thus the shorthand of Deal and Kennedy suggests that culture is a pattern of action, which is to say that we can come to know cultural norms and organizational values through sustained reflection on what people say and do.

In addition, the analysis developed by Deal and Kennedy makes it plain that ‘culture’ is also to be regarded as a pattern for action insofar as behaviours and policies express interests, priorities and matters of concern that shape our conduct, whether or not we choose to acknowledge this fact.

In this regard the cultural norms visible, for example, in the manner in which people dress, and in the terms they use when they address one another, reflect values as to what is useful and proper. In turn these values reflect a core set of beliefs.

To offer a general example of the relationship between norms, values and beliefs: Belief in the God of the New Testament should lead you to hold values associated with ‘neighbourliness’ and ‘reciprocity’ such that your conduct will demonstrate that you meet friends and strangers on the same terms, offering to all others the courtesy you would, yourself, hope to receive.

Parker (1993: 4–5) captures both faces of culture rather well in his account of the speech patterns that shape conduct and interactions in the city of Belfast. Noting the religious and political divisions, more-or-less opaque to outsiders, which shape daily life in Belfast, Parker reminds us that the patterns of action we observe underpin patterns for action that shape how the people of this city think, feel, act and indeed interact:

If you are Protestant and ‘British’, you’ll always call the second biggest city in Northern Ireland ‘Londonderry’: if you’re Catholic and/ or Nationalist, you’ll only refer to it as ‘Derry’. Nationalists and Catholics speak of ‘the North’, Ireland or, intentionally aggressive, ‘the Six Counties’. ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Ulster’ are Protestant terminology: and to speak of ‘the Province’ in front of a Nationalist is provocative, even if it wasn’t intended … Catholics and particularly Republicans never talk about ‘the Troubles’ – they use the blunter ‘the war’ or ‘the struggles’. Even in the minutiae of pronunciation there are giveaways: the Department of Health and Social Security’s initials are pronounced DHSS by Protestants, but by Catholics ‘D Haitch SS’. So too with the IRA: more correctly ‘The Provisional IRA’, its members are only called the ‘Provos’ by Protestants: to Republicans, Nationalists and Catholics they’re ‘the Provies’; the slightly changed sound with its more moderating softness perhaps revealing something else as well. These are only some of the more obvious pointers. But in every conversation there’ll come the faintest of suppressed grimaces, or the slightest flicker in the eye is a ‘wrong’ word is used revealing you to be one of the ‘others’.

Who are the ‘cultural insiders’ within your workplace?

Are you an ‘insider’?

If you are an ‘insider’ who is on the outside?

Who is ‘the other’ within your workplace and why?

Why do such divisions arise and ...