The Emerald Handbook of Quantum Storytelling Consulting

David M. Boje, Mabel Sanchez, David M. Boje, Mabel Sanchez

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786356727
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149052
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

There is a paradigm shift happening in storytelling consulting. The old one-story-fits-all consulting paradigm—helping companies to brand their founding story, do elevator pitches, and deliver stump speeches—is giving way to quantum storytelling consulting. The quantum age has moved away from a mechanist, Newtonian, simple-cause-and-effect understanding of reality and life, and storytelling consulting is now about an ensemble of stories rather than a single pitch. It's about developing the spaces for storytelling processes; it's about the times when storytelling is emerging; and it's about the kinds of 'mattering' or material agency that the storytelling has. In the quantum age, space, time, and mattering have no separation; instead, spacetimemattering storytelling emerges, self-organizes, and creates change management. It is no longer the case that one narrative fits all. Rather, it is the interplay of many living stories that create the complex forces of change within organizations.

The Emerald Handbook of Quantum Storytelling Consulting collects the findings of quantum storytelling researchers and consultants to develop a practical understanding of quantum storytelling consulting by sharing case examples, describing how to enact specific practices, and outlining how to conduct research into the impact and consequences of quantum thinking.

SECTION II
APPLICATIONS TO FIELDS OF
STUDY

TOLERANCE FOR CRITICAL THINKING VIA ENTREPRENEURIAL STORYTELLING

Rohny Saylors

ABSTRACT

I write about an entrepreneurial teaching experiment that created tolerance for critical thinking. I find that the entrepreneurial storytelling method of teaching made more money for the clients of a small business consulting class. The entrepreneurial-storytelling method leads students into a three-step conversation. During each step, they talk to each other in small groups, taking notes from each other. During the first step, the students talk about what they learned from the reading. During the second step, the students criticize the ideas that they read. During the final step, the students find a way to use what they learned despite their criticisms. During this time, the professor works between steps to help the groups talk to each other between steps. The professor also helps small groups while they are talking to each other. This makes it normal to disagree while learning, creates moments where students feel like they control what they know, and leads to tolerance for critical thinking. I discuss the implications this may have for group innovation and stoking social entrepreneurial intentions.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; storytelling; entrepreneurial storytelling; tolerance; critical thinking; teaching

Do we live to create stories
or do they live to make us?
Do we give in to allegories
or live free but make a fuss?
reflect reflect reflect reflect

Can we take our eyes from our heads
and if we don’t can we learn?
Can we make a change in our beds
with heart of care or concern?
defect defect defect defect

– Rohny Saylors

The gap between entrepreneurs and researchers is bridged in our teaching. Our teaching must be critical of material costs and embedded in a dialectical community that is always already part of embedment and dismemberment (Boje, 2016). If entrepreneurs do not think critically, it is because we did not teach them to think critically. If entrepreneurs create unsustainably, it is because we teach them unsustainability (Boje & Saylors, 2015). And if entrepreneurs deface, harass, and destroy local economies, it is because we teach them to deface, harass, and destroy local economies (Hockerts, 2017). This can end (Walter & Block, 2015), this must end by teaching tolerance for critical thinking (Kyrö, 2015), which I provide a guide to here via entrepreneurial storytelling. We can end our intolerance together (Boje & Saylors, 2014).

If we want to end the systematic negativity that we perpetrate, we must start by reflecting on whether our teaching of entrepreneurship enables exploratory perseverance (Muehlfeld, Urbig, & Weitzel, 2015). Rarely, and with great distance from the source, do we rely on research; more often, and expediently, we rely on textbooks of received wisdom and PowerPoint slides of received pedagogy. The most authentic of us draw on a wellspring of un-reflecting assumptions (Boje & Saylors, 2013). Even those who have internalized the awesome responsibility that goes with the privilege of teaching are subject to this problem. Assumptions about how the social world is constructed often override our reflective attempts to overcome our own rhetorically and historically limited thinking (Suddaby & Foster, 2017).

And why should we believe our thinking is limited? We are professors. We know. We know what? We know that what we think must be true, our very honest peers agreed to let us publish it. We know what? We know that we control the academic fate of about 150 18–25 year olds. We know what? We know that we got where we are by working hard. We are smart enough to disagree with anything. We know how to prestidigitate linguistic patterns capable of toppling an intellectually honest opponent. Yet we know that something is wrong with the earth this day, and all of us are unaware of what that thing is.

Entrepreneurial storytelling is storytelling that leads to some invention, change, or innovation (Saylors, Boje, & Mueller, 2014). What our character, our ethical foundation means to us is something we learn from those that we tell stories about being our people (Pittaway, Gazzard, Shore, & Williamson, 2015). However, we reject those who are against our people and define the struggle of our self-narrative against these “others” (Berglund, Gaddefors, & Lindgren, 2015). Under it all, the engine of care that drives our raison d’être is that we tell a story about how much less evil we are than “hey” are (Boje, Helmuth, & Saylors, 2013). However, this ethical definition is so wide that anything can fit into it.

The most Machiavellian and the most Kantian; the most authentic and the most inauthentic; those who are last and those who are first: We all think inside our tribes. Then we create greater conflict with those who think critically when they are within our tribe (Breugst & Shepherd, 2015). Secular humanistic assumptions have created Communism and Libertarianism. Something is wrong with the earth this day, and all of us are unaware of what that thing is. Something’s wrong with our eyes.

We are seeing things in a different way. We recognize that the local, not the global; the caring, not the concerning; the sustainable, not the cancerous growth are the directions that entrepreneurship can take, that entrepreneurship must take, and toward which we can direct it. However, when professors realize such novel roles, we tend toward hedonic and moral cognitive dissonance (Meek & Wood, 2015). We are the perpetuators of self-creating matrices of systems whose design is perfect for the outcomes they get; we must not ignore this merely because it causes us pain to believe. Instead we need to tell new entrepreneurial stories, smart stories, stories integrated into our web of work–life stories, told from an ethnographic perspective (Humle & Boje, 2016).

Science is a big idea that we need to get behind. This should not be a radical sentence; what it requires of us is a sacrifice of the meaning that we create for ourselves. Our socially imbedded meaning exists because we are capable of telling a story of self as the hero (Bryant & Frahm, 2011; Gergen, 1991; Taylor, 1989). We do not want to believe those things which would make our heroics meaningless. However, science demands that if the evidentiary manner by which we have obtained our heroics is found to be flawed, we’ve lose our status as a hero. If the evidentiary manner by which we have obtained our heroics shows our conclusions are flawed, we lose our status. If the pragmatic concern of our evidentiary manner is shown to be flawed, then we lose our status. Look at the insinuation of the capitalistic cancer-growth mindset into entrepreneurship; everyone gets to keep her or his dream of being his or her own boss as long as the deeper culture of a perpetual capital-growth mindset is maintained. Even to the point that where creativity should shine the brightest, it is often eschewed (Sarooghi, Libaers, & Burkemper, 2015). We need to accept, and create acceptance of, critical thinking via our entrepreneurial storytelling.

The biggest problem with critical thinking is intolerance of critical thinking (del-Corte-Lora, Vallet-Bellmunt, & Molina-Morales, 2015). Those teaching critical thinking are often intolerant of the very thing that they teach. While we seek to allow creativity to shine, we block its light with objectivity. While we seek to feed diverse thought, we deliver deep-fried consumerism. While we seek to make critical thinking fecund, we sterilize it with intolerance for the confusing. We cannot make progress unless we consider how we reflect on our thinking about entrepreneurship.

The following pedagogical method can help us reflect on our own assumptions regarding entrepreneurship teaching methods. We must assume we are not in the class to speak but rather to get others to speak. We must assume that our students should not fully understand but instead grapple with making sense of their world. We must assume that our assumptions about grades and rewards and the like are faulty, that knowledge is never final, and that once we think we understand something, it is dead to us and thus worthless as an entrepreneurial storytelling device (Frank & Landström, 2015). What follows is the method I employ in my classes to enable tolerance for critical thinking; tolerance for the magic required to allow for rationality (Suddaby, Ganzin, & Minkus, 2017).

ENTREPRENEURIAL STORYTELLING METHOD

(1) Explain that the point of the course is to create a series of ideas that contextualize the learning objective. The final learning objective, however, is not always “accomplished” because they are life-long goals of self-growth, and by “giving out the right answer” the actual learning is replaced with memorization. Thus, this course is free of all kinds of rote-memory tests.

(2) Setup the course to reward reading. Setup the course to reward thinking.

(3) Prep the audience. Show up about 10 minutes before class, tell them about your life; some failure, some weird occurrence, something you heard, said, or did that does not comport with what one would expect to experience. This is the boilerplate of thinking; it enters into the “lecture” to follow, but in the background. It is a limited message that primes the thinking of those who show up early and want to listen; it is also a personal message that conveys, “I’m in the middle of a struggle to survive in this harried world, just as you are.”

(4) Setup the board in the time leading up to the beginning of the course; draw a few charts or graphs. Stick figures, circles, and diagrams are preferred. Make sure it can be read from the least preferable seats, make sure its meaning is something you can easily convey.

(5) Explain what was read during the week. Make sure you hit three to seven highly salient points of fact that were communicated through the text.

(6) Have the students form groups of three. Some will balk and will want to form groups of two or four. Remind them that they will not receive credit unless they follow through.

(7) Have these groups explain to each other what was learned and offer some sort of personal experience or other-course-based theoretical explanation, for the information that was shared.

• Walk around, listen to them, interject into a few of the conversations and help them follow through with some thoughts. This is not a time for criticism; in fact, your job in teaching critical thinking is to encourage free-flowing discussion: Do not throw your clogs into their gears. Ask a few groups to volunteer later.
• Bring the class back to order. Ask if anyone needs more time. If they say yes, allot a little more time. Draw their attention and close down discussion. If any group does not follow suit, they are the first to volunteer.
• Ask for volunteers; explain that since the conversation was captivating, it should be shared. Call on three groups to share what they have discussed. Focus on learning objectives. Draw from their experiences. Reinforce the ideas of the day: feel free to draw on your own personal experience, literature you have read for papers you have recently written, or your own sense of how things work from your research paradigm.
• If you become stumped, take it with grace and ask for the next group. Try to integrate the next group back into the last group. If that does not work, do not worry. If no one responds, then start calling on groups. Start with a group that you thought had a great idea while you were talking. Once you have fielded three or so statements in support of the arguments made, move on to the criticism phase.

(8) Transition into criticism by saying something like, “While these are all great ideas, and they do make sense in some ways, in others they don’t. There’s something inherently wrong with them based on your experience. There’s something lacking because of something you learned in another class. There’s something that just doesn’t hold together rationally when you think about it. Whatever that something is, discuss it with each other now!”

• As you walk around this time, you will need to help coach your students. Support anything critical or experiential they get at. If all they want to do is reiterate what happened during the last phase, help guide them away from simple support and into criticism. Praise the good criticisms and ask them to volunteer.
• Bring the class back to order as before.
• Do not punish someone for being smart by calling on that student if she or he is shy. Instead, as criticisms are lodged, integrate the good ideas of students that are shy and integrate what you know. Make a point of speaking directly to the social narratives in organizations that are doing evil. Where an idea is used to harm others, speak to it directly. Critical reflection is inherent in every class, every idea, and every concept that you are trying to share with your students. Draw in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Section I Quantum Storytelling Consulting
• Section II Applications to Fields of Study
• Section III Research Methods for Quantum Storytelling Consulting
• Index