Narrative Organizations: Making Companies Future Proof by Working With Stories [1st ed.] 9783662614204, 9783662614211

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction: Storytelling, Storylistening, and the Stories About Your Boss (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 1-8
Front Matter ....Pages 9-9
Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 11-30
The Cartography of Narrative Organizations (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 31-59
Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 61-67
Intermezzo: Clearings in the Jungle of Narrative Terms (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 69-73
Front Matter ....Pages 75-75
Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 77-86
Narrative Interviews: The Big Stories (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 87-93
The Storylistening Workshop: Sharing Experiences (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 95-102
Event Curve: Identifying Central Experiences (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 103-107
Learning Histories: Learning from Multiple Perspectives (Karin Thier)....Pages 109-120
Core Story: Finding a Common Denominator (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 121-125
Case Study: Storytelling in the Press and Public Relations at Porsche AG (Karin Thier)....Pages 127-130
Narrative System Map: Analyzing the Culture of Organizations (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 131-139
Transfer Stories: Retrieving Hidden Knowledge (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 141-145
Case Study: Narrative Knowledge Transfer with Leaving Experts (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 147-152
Hero’s Journey: Imbuing Projects and Processes with Life (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 153-161
Actants: Establishing the Field of Relational Forces (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 163-165
Springboard Story: Using Stories to Win Over People (Karin Thier)....Pages 167-172
90-Second Backstory: Saying a Lot in a Short Time (Karin Thier)....Pages 173-178
Working with Metaphors: Building Parallel Worlds (Karin Thier)....Pages 179-186
Case Study: Storytelling for Urban Development in Bad Bergzabern (Karin Thier)....Pages 187-191
Narrative Change Architecture: Making Change Accessible (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 193-198
Narrative Strategy Development: Narrating the Path Toward the Future (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 199-207
Case Study on Future Stories: A Narrative Change Process at the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf (Christine Erlach, Michael Müller)....Pages 209-216
Back Matter ....Pages 217-223

Citation preview

Management for Professionals

Christine Erlach Michael Müller

Narrative Organizations Making Companies Future Proof by Working With Stories

Management for Professionals

The Springer series Management for Professionals comprises high-level business and management books for executives. The authors are experienced business professionals and renowned professors who combine scientific background, best practice, and entrepreneurial vision to provide powerful insights into how to achieve business excellence.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10101

Christine Erlach • Michael Müller

Narrative Organizations Making Companies Future Proof by Working With Stories

With contributions by Dr. Karin Thier

Christine Erlach NARRATA Consult Burscheid, Germany

Michael Müller Stuttgart Media University Stuttgart, Germany

ISSN 2192-8096 ISSN 2192-810X (electronic) Management for Professionals ISBN 978-3-662-61420-4 ISBN 978-3-662-61421-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany

Preface

“Storytelling” has been turning heads in organizations of all types for several years now. It seems as if the corporate world has realized at long last just how much easier it is to get through to employees, customers, and colleagues with stories instead of dry facts. Amazon searches yield a plethora of results, though skeptics still fail to see what all the fuss is about. Yet, storytelling in organizations is much more than just a passing fad or punchy buzzword, nor is it enough to reduce the potential of narrative approaches to mellifluous marketing messages. Indeed, in this book we will argue that most organizations have not even fully unleashed the true potential of stories yet. Right now, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift that is shaping a brand-new perspective on the nature of corporate life—a narrative perspective. To truly understand this, we will first need take a few steps back in time and then look ahead toward the future. Independently of one another, the two authors of this book began roughly twenty years ago to work with narrative methods in organizations. And even though from today’s perspective the first signs of the “narrative turn” to come were undoubtedly already there, working with stories was virtually unknown to organizations at the time, and reactions often disdainful: There is no use for your fairy tales here! Still, we never faltered in our commitment to this work: Christine Erlach has used narrative methods primarily for knowledge management with her consulting network NARRATA Consult alongside Karin Thier (who was a contributor to this book), and Michael Müller developed narrative change methods together with his colleagues. In 1998, we were the first to bring storytelling and other narrative approaches to German companies. From early on we were convinced that the power of stories extends far beyond their usefulness in marketing. And as the years went by, we consulted countless companies, ranging from start-ups and small organizations to heavyweights such as Siemens, Lufthansa, Deutsche Post, Thyssenkrupp, Bosch, and BMW. As a result, we grew increasingly fascinated by the wide-ranging possibilities narrative methods have to offer. Over the course of these twenty years, it became clearer and clearer to us just how impactful stories and narratives can be at all levels and in all parts of organizations: Stories retain old knowledge and generate new ideas; the stories employees share with one another provide insights into the tacit aspects of organizational culture; v

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narrative structures are indispensable to creating a feeling of shared values and meaning among employees; and companies can only remain successful in the long run if they manage to tell themselves and others believable stories about their own future. All of these and many other ways in which stories impact the life in organizations will be covered in this book. And as authors, we have refined all of them in consulting projects, experimented with their combinations and permutations, and developed concrete methods and interventions to make them more accessible and their benefits lasting. The authors first met at a congress in 2006. Initially, we were somewhat hesitant to work together—after all, we were competitors in the same field! Since 2014, however, we have taught the vocational training course “Narrative Management” at the Hochschule der Medien, a tertiary institution dedicated to media studies in Stuttgart, Germany. Five years later, in 2019, we also launched a Europe-wide training in “Narrative Organizational Development.” That fact that we are indeed undergoing a paradigm shift in our understanding of organizations and moving closer toward the stronger inclusion of narrative approaches is further exemplified by the growing interest among consultants, organizational development experts, and communicators to learn about and actively apply narrative methods that go much farther than pure storytelling. The network Beyond Storytelling whose members include both authors of this book has become a lively nexus of this shift thanks to its many conferences and publications (www.beyondstorytelling.com). This book is the culmination of twenty years of professional experiences with narrative approaches in organizations. Our goal was to develop a dependable guidebook with concrete instructions on how to employ narratives in different contexts while also shedding light on the ideal conditions under which a narrative perspective can be cultivated, under which it is allowed to grow. It is our sincere hope that it will be a meaningful contribution to the ongoing paradigm shift toward narrative organizations that will support companies in becoming more agile and sustainable for the future. Finally, we also want to use this opportunity to thank Karin Thier who provided excellent explanations for some of the narrative methods featured in this book. She also conducted interviews for two cases studies we included. Thank you, Karin. Cologne, Germany Stuttgart, Germany Spring 2020

Christine Erlach Michael Müller

Contents

Introduction: Storytelling, Storylistening, and the Stories About Your Boss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Part I

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The Narrative Side of Organizations

Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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The Cartography of Narrative Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Intermezzo: Clearings in the Jungle of Narrative Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Part II

Change, Transformation, and Renewal

Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Narrative Interviews: The Big Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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The Storylistening Workshop: Sharing Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Event Curve: Identifying Central Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Learning Histories: Learning from Multiple Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Karin Thier Core Story: Finding a Common Denominator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

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Case Study: Storytelling in the Press and Public Relations at Porsche AG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Karin Thier Narrative System Map: Analyzing the Culture of Organizations . . . . . . 131 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Transfer Stories: Retrieving Hidden Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Case Study: Narrative Knowledge Transfer with Leaving Experts . . . . . 147 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Hero’s Journey: Imbuing Projects and Processes with Life . . . . . . . . . . 153 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Actants: Establishing the Field of Relational Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Springboard Story: Using Stories to Win Over People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Karin Thier 90-Second Backstory: Saying a Lot in a Short Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Karin Thier Working with Metaphors: Building Parallel Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Karin Thier Case Study: Storytelling for Urban Development in Bad Bergzabern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Karin Thier Narrative Change Architecture: Making Change Accessible . . . . . . . . . . 193 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Narrative Strategy Development: Narrating the Path Toward the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Case Study on Future Stories: A Narrative Change Process at the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller Epilogue: Five First Steps to Become a Narrative Organization . . . . . . . 217 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller The Elixir: Seven Classics on the Narrative Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

About the Authors

Christine Erlach is one of the pioneers of narrative work in companies in German-speaking countries. As a founder of the consulting firm NARRATA Consult, she used narrative methods already in the 1990s in organizations, in order to lift hidden knowledge treasures, values, and attitudes and to make them usable. She is an expert on knowledge transfer with retiring experts, an experienced consultant and a coach in transformation processes in companies, and a trainer for narrative method competence and storytelling. With numerous publications, she has contributed to storytelling’s popularity in Germany since its inception and passes on her experience in seminars and teaching assignments to organizations and students. Together with Michael Müller she leads the first European advanced training with university certificate for “Narrative Organizational Consulting” (www.narrata.de). Michael Müller has been one of the leading experts for narrative methods in the management field for years, with both theoretical and practical know-how. With his expertise, he helps companies and workshop participants to discover their own company histories and thus to optimize change processes and holistically integrated communication. He is a Professor at the Stuttgart Media University (Germany) and heads the Institute for Applied Narration Research (IANA). His books on the narrative approach to organizations have become fundamental works in the ever-growing community of narrative consultants (www.muellerundkurfer.de).

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About the Authors

Karin Thier (The guest author) is a pioneer of storytelling in enterprises—a pioneer of the first hour. With NARRATA Consult, she co-created a consulting network that specializes in the employment of storytelling and the development of narrative management methods.

Introduction: Storytelling, Storylistening, and the Stories About Your Boss Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

“He would just cut me off all the time when I was trying to explain to him what had caused the problem or which solutions we had already tried. ‘Three sentences,’ he said, so I could only really repeat what was wrong. And then of course he had no idea what else to say and simply told us to fix the problem, ASAP.” Does this sound familiar? This story was shared almost verbatim by an employee of a major company during a narrative interview. Or how about this one? “And then our department head decided that we should only ever share success stories during our team meetings. He must have just read one of those pop psych books. Motivation and what not. No more problems! At first, everybody was super pumped. But after a few weeks nobody was really sharing any stories anymore. Looks like we didn’t have all that many successes after all.” And another example: “When the production line was still not working, that’s when our division manager and head engineer came to us. And we had to explain the entire process, each single step, and answer all of the questions the division manager asked: what does this do? What is wrong with it? And what caused the problem? And so on. The head engineer always wanted to reply, but the division manager would interrupt him each time. ‘Let them explain it,’ he would say. This went on for a full hour. At some point the head engineer got really impatient and asked: ‘Could you please give us more details?’ Later we realized that this was exactly the problem. There was a wrong switch part somewhere in the line, but of course we had no idea. But the head engineer realized it immediately when he listened to us. Without him we never would have figured it out.”

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_1

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Between Facts and Stories Three stories about how different companies deal with stories. In the first anecdote, stories are neither told nor heard. Leadership is purely based on facts, a style commonly found in the field of engineering. Talk is cheap, or so the saying goes. There is no space to share stories and nobody who might be willing to listen to them. In both senses of the word, a company like this is at risk of staying dumb. There is a place for stories in the second anecdote. Yet, they come with a caveat: Only success stories are allowed! This is a common misconception whenever the buzzword “storytelling” finds its way into a new organization. It is initially often misunderstood as nothing more than an excuse for self-praise—in advertisement, internal communication, employee motivation, pitches, or personnel talks. Sometimes this type of storytelling does yield positive results for a while, though they usually do not last too long. After all, who enjoys the company of people who always only talk about how great they think they are? The third anecdote features storylistening. Here, the employees are encouraged to go into great detail when talking with their attentive superior. The complete story is told and heard; premature diagnoses by an “expert” are brushed aside. And this is what ultimately leads to a solution. At first glance, this process might appear slow or even tedious. After all, the division manager needs to dedicate a considerable amount of time to listening to the employees’ story in its entirety. In most companies, time is of the essence, everything moves at a fast pace, and solutions need to be found as quickly as possible. In hindsight, however, these quick fixes often come at a high price! Time-consuming and frequent adjustments might become necessary at a later point and whatever time was initially saved is easily lost in the long run. Here is a blunt assertion: We are convinced that the infamously beleaguered construction of the new Berlin airport (which was still not finished at the time of writing) would have gone much more smoothly if only those who would eventually do the work would have been consulted from the get-go. Instead, all decision-making was put in the hands of clueless executives alone and the plans they eventually concocted had to be discarded and redone over and over again. This might sound a little arrogant, sure. But thinking back to our more than 20 years of experience in organizations, this hypothesis feels more and more plausible. We have encountered countless cases in which things went from bad to worse (while eating up a lot of money) because there was nobody who would have been able or willing to share their personal stories about their work, about relevant processes, or about crucial backgrounds. Here is a concrete example from a plant construction company we consulted several years ago. The company had just replaced steel with aluminum in some of its products. This transition, however, had led to several technical problems due to the shortcomings in aluminum welding technology at the time when compared to the more refined steel processes. Management was loath to go back to the old material; meanwhile, the foremen and welders on-site realized quickly that the use of aluminum had no chance of matching the quality of their previous work with steel. Even when we presented the welders’ stories to the managers, what we told them fell on deaf ears. And months later all of the concerns

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were confirmed: Newspaper articles reported how the company’s latest products were plagued by technical difficulties. If only they had listened to the welders. . . Yet, there have also been many cases in which the mere fact that stories were exchanged suddenly brought about great solutions, new products, or even completely new prospects for a company. In the words of one manager with whom we worked: “It’s as if the stories pulled a veil from my eyes!” We heard this during a special type of vocational training session: a storylistening workshop (for more on this method, see chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”). During the event employees talked openly about their daily experiences. The more stories they shared, the clearer it became that many of the company’s customers had expressed an interest in coaching and consulting services as opposed to more traditional trainings—and the employees had been quick and competent in meeting their customers’ demands. This was all news to the manager quoted above! The official company strategy at the time only included training after all. Based on the shared experiences of the attending employees, the company later developed a new strategy, introduced a new product line, and even changed its name. The Narrative Organization These are bold claims of course and some readers might already roll their eyes. Oh, it’s one of those management books that promise a one-size-fits-all solution to all of our problems, huh? But this could not be further from our true intentions! "

It is not enough to simply do a little storytelling here and there and then expect that suddenly everything will get better, particularly not if this responsibility is delegated to the communication department as nothing more than a half-hearted afterthought. Rather, becoming a narrative organization requires hard work and a completely changed mindset! It requires the understanding that organizations and companies are narrative systems because their central structures and processes are determined by stories.

This has always been the case, but for the longest time it seemingly went unnoticed. Even today, economics and its various subdisciplines continue to prioritize causal input–output schemas. These simplistic models, however, cannot suffice to explain the inner workings of complex and increasingly agile organizations in multilayered, globalized, and progressively digitalized societies. More than 25 years ago, researchers, theorists, and practitioners hailing from vastly different fields already began to rediscover the importance of stories for individuals, society in general, and organizations in particular. This led to the emergence of narrative psychology which revealed the significance of stories to how people form their identities and self-images. Meanwhile, brain researchers discovered a region in the brain entirely dedicated to the retention of stories, the so-called episodic memory. And social scientists and historians have shown that it is the human ability to create and share stories which allowed societies to grow beyond the boundaries of clans, as is still plainly visible in myths and religions today. These and many more examples

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made the realization inescapable that markets and organizations are of course also replete with stories at every level. And at long last, economics seems to be catching on! Robert Shiller who received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013 for example published a book with the title Narrative Economics in 2019 (Shiller 2019). Our biggest goal with this book is to introduce you to this new way of thinking and also demonstrate concrete ways in which your organization or business can directly benefit from it. This knowledge is the result of over 20 years of narrative consulting—and both authors have experienced a fundamental shift in the corporate world firsthand. At the end of the 1990s, when we first started to work with stories in organizations, reactions tended to be skeptical at best: Why would we need stories here? How much everything has changed since then! Today most companies are eager to learn more about how to work with stories even though many still think of them as a marketing tool first and foremost. Nevertheless, it is an important step in the right direction! We have already worked with several companies that are now developing a brand-new, narrative self-concept and are thus actively evolving into agile and transformative organizations. We hope that this book will allow even more companies to go through with this change and receive the help they need to do so, from internal change agents and external consultants. All of this necessitates a completely different take on what drives an organization or what exactly an organization even is in the first place. When we reduce organizations to functional systems, which are run by interdependent processes the way machines are, we look at them from a very traditional perspective. Once we discover, however, just how vital stories and narratives are to organizational operations, our perspective begins to change. And this is a significant shift—one which is perhaps akin to the change in perspective that allowed Christopher Columbus to sail from Europe to the Americas. From a viewpoint that perceives the earth as flat, such a voyage had necessarily been a pointless, even foolish endeavor. After all, India, which was the final destination, is located to the east of Europe and not to the west! When this perspective is fundamentally changed, however, and the earth thought of as a sphere, it suddenly makes a lot of sense to travel westward to eventually arrive in the east. Of course, we know that Columbus did not reach India in the end; this was the prerogative of Magellan’s expedition in 1519. He did, however, make it to a continent entirely unknown to Europeans at the time. "

This is the key argument here: Changing one’s perspective suddenly makes entirely new things thinkable and doable! Turning a disk into a sphere allows for never-before-seen kinds of journeys. Similarly, when we think of organizations as narrative systems, completely new change projects become possible to make organizations more agile and future-oriented. This is precisely the type of change in perspective we hope to inspire in the readers of our book.

Becoming a Narrative Organization Let us now return to the three anecdotes from the beginning of this chapter. Here, a narrative perspective allows us to identify three distinct types of organizations (see Fig. 1):

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Fig. 1 The evolution of the narrative organization (# authors)

• In a traditional fact-based organization, no time or consideration is given to stories. They are not part of the “official” culture as laid out by management. Of course, employees might still exchange stories with one another, but these are disregarded by or even completely unknown to their superiors. • In a storytelling organization, stories are actively used in communications or for the purpose of motivating employees. Storytelling has begun to have a place in such an organization. • A storylistening organization goes one step further: Stories are no longer only told but met with an open ear. The story contents are used to identify problems within the organization and dynamically search for solutions. • We could add a fourth type of organization here for which we have not yet encountered a full-fledged example in the real world. Some of the companies with which we have worked in the past, however, and others which undoubtedly have the brightest prospects for the future are gradually evolving into it: the narrative organization. "

In a narrative organization, both managers and employees fully understand that narrative structures, i.e., the basic patterns that make up all stories, lie at the center of almost all meaningful processes.

But what exactly does this mean? The following brief illustration of what we have found in many different companies should help clarify it.

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Example

All too often, when we ask employees during narrative interviews (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”) about the strategy or “mission” of their company, we hear something like this: “I don’t know if we have a strategy, and if we do, I have no idea what it is. I also don’t know whom I would even ask to find out.” Whenever their managers hear about these responses, their reactions are usually indignant: “Of course we have a strategy! And we have communicated it thousands of times! Through the intranet, in meetings, publications. There really is no excuse for not knowing it!” A closer inspection of the thus touted strategy then quickly reveals that it is nothing more than a bland list of goals, a simple rundown of what needs to be done and by when (how many sales, customers, innovations, etc.). It is easy to see why employees struggle to identify such a shopping list as a cohesive strategy. Nothing is being said about how to concretely accomplish any of the goals or why they were formed in the first place! Why is this the best path? What is the connection with the history of the company? And how does it relate to the employees’ everyday experiences? A strategy like this only becomes meaningful to employees if they feel like they are part of a collective journey toward these goals. Or in other words: if they are told a story about a possible future in which the goals in question have already been achieved. These are after all the basic buildings blocks of any story: a set of necessary steps, with a clear beginning and end, that need to be taken to arrive at a final destination and thus undergo relevant change. If these elements are missing or poorly communicated, we have often observed how employee motivation plunges and entire projects fail as a consequence—because employees are unable to see the meaning behind their actions or how they are related to the aspired goals. ◄ A Meaningful Journey Toward a Sustainable Company What we have in mind when we talk about “meaning” or meaning-making always happens in narrative structures. Our brains developed stories as a means to understand relationships, form identity, and plan our future. In recent years, several studies have found that narrative meaning-making determines central aspects of organizational life, even though those involved might not always be aware of it. Robert J. Shiller, whom we already mentioned earlier, explored the impact of narratives on markets in his 2017 essay Narrative Economics (Shiller 2017). Similarly, Jens Beckert, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, showed how the value of a company is strongly affected by its ability to design and communicate believable narratives about its future (Beckert 2016). The rediscovery of storytelling has already led to a new perspective on economic systems. Another area in which narrative thinking has grown in relevance is recruitment. After all, newspaper articles about so-called millennials (those born between 1985 and 2000), who are now entering the workforce and beginning their careers, have

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revealed repeatedly how, even though money has never entirely ceased to be an important concern, traditional career aspirations have lost much of their weight for many younger applicants and prospective employees. Much more central appears to be a feeling of purpose or of being part of something meaningful. This kind of meaning-making can only happen when employees feel like they are playing a role in a good story. A third area in which meaning and narrative structures have become more and more important is digital transformation. In this case, society as a whole will need to develop new narratives and stories: What is the foundation of societal life when work stops to be the central determinant of belonging and value? Companies will need to address this question to create their own purpose for a digital future. Right now, there appears to be an unspoken acceptance in many organizations that digital transformation is inevitable. This fairly negative view, however, can hardly sound reassuring or motivating to employees, particularly those who are afraid of losing their jobs in the process. The need to remain agile in organizational contexts will also only continue to grow in importance. As many predefined processes and structures disappear, a formal sense of purpose and meaning based on hierarchies and quantifiable objectives will peter out more and more. Stories will replace them in agile teams to encourage cooperation and define common goals. Lastly, the transformation into a narrative organization through meaning-making, purpose, identity, transparent values, and open communication creates resonance. This construct, spearheaded by sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2016), pertains to the relationship between individuals and their environment. Stronger degrees of resonance allow individuals to develop a finer “intuition” for their social surroundings and thus react adequately to change. We have found the same to be true for companies and other organizations. Resonance helps them hone their intuition for themselves, their employees, society at large, and its markets. As we will show in the final chapter of Part I, the most promising road to stronger resonance is to become a narrative organization. Welcome to the World of Stories With this book we would like to support your organization on its journey toward greater agility and resonance, its evolution into a narrative organization. This change will be a defining characteristic of the future—and the earlier you start cultivating a new perspective, the more competitive you will be in the long run. Part I will elaborate on the backgrounds and foundations of narrative organizations. This knowledge is crucial because leading a narrative organization at any hierarchical level demands an openness for stories and the awareness that storylistening is just as important as storytelling. Part II will then move on to the delineation of various “narrative rabbit holes.” These are potential starting points for the work with narrative methods that we and other practitioners have used in organizations. These rabbit holes might remind many readers of Alice’s journey to Wonderland, which is why we chose this name

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for them. When Alice fell into the rabbit hole, she left behind a familiar world and stepped into a new one—one that felt strange at first but was equally real. Resonance changes the perception, way of thinking, self-image, identity, and purpose of an organization. A narrative organization is thus completely transformed! We will outline many of the rabbit holes that have allowed organizations to strengthen their resonance. Whether you prefer to peruse this book in its entirety or first take a closer look at some of the concrete examples, our intention was for you to choose your personal itinerary. The same is true for narrative methods: Your journey toward creating a narrative organization can start at any point—ideally wherever it is easiest for your organization to initiate its own transformation. You may for example want to first increase the use of stories in your internal communication, then conduct a narrative analysis of your culture, and finally develop a strategic story for the future. Or maybe you prefer to begin with narrative knowledge management and move on from there. Whatever your individual path might look like, you will without a doubt make your own experiences with narrative thinking, change your perspectives, and perhaps even develop your very own approaches in the end. We wish you all the best for your adventures in the world of stories!

Literature Beckert, J. (2016). Imagined futures. Fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Shiller, R. (2017). Narrative economics. Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 2069. New Haven: Yale University. Shiller, R. (2019). Narrative economics. How stories go viral and drive major economic events. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Part I The Narrative Side of Organizations

Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

A Storytelling Animal One of the most captivating stories of all is without a doubt the story of humankind itself, particularly when it is told as cogently as Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari did. His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari 2011) turns back the clock 70,000 years to the time when homo sapiens left their home of East Africa to conquer the planet. What is especially noteworthy here is one specific detail Harari chose to highlight. To him, one of the reasons for the success of our species is the ability to build fictions and tell meaningful stories: Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. (. . .) We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. (. . .) Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. (. . .) Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. (. . .) But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. (Harari 2011, pp. 27–30)

Many findings of modern narrative psychology corroborate Harari’s sentiment (e.g., Sarbin 1986; Crossley 2000; Haven 2007; Bruner 1986): Shared stories that allow us to form shared identities are the foundation on which larger social systems # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_2

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are built, and this includes companies and other types of organizations. It should not come as a surprise then that the word “myth” is derived from the Greek work for “story.”

Our Brain Thinks in Stories It is because of our brains that our species has developed this unique ability. Simply put, our brains love stories. One of the reasons for this lies in the structure of our memory. Brain researchers have discovered that our memory is comprised of at least two distinct parts: one storing our knowledge about facts and a second known as episodic memory (see Fig. 1). Our memory for facts stores isolated, independent pieces of information such as dates or numbers without placing them into larger contexts. Examples are the digits of pi, historical dates, postal codes, PINs, the periodic table, or definitions of technical terms. This is information we may need to recall under certain circumstances but also forget easily. It may moreover be difficult to remember in the first place. The episodic memory, on the other hand, stores relationships, memories, or episodes (hence the name) from our past. In short: The episodic memory retains narrative structures, i.e., stories. Our brain even has a designated area for this “story memory.” No wonder it loves narratives! Identity is also shaped to a large extent by what we have stored in our episodic memories. Psychological research on identity has long pointed to the importance of stories in the identity formation of individuals (as well as organizations and businesses) (cf. Bruner 1986). Imagine sitting at a hotel bar after a long day during a business trip and starting a conversation with another patron. After some initial small talk about the weather and your jobs, the two of you seem to be getting along and decide to get to know each other a little better. What would this conversation

Fig. 1 Two types of memory (# authors)

A Storytelling Animal

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Fig. 2 Our brain thinks in stories (# authors)

look like? You probably would not simply rattle down various numbers, dates, and facts about your life, like your date of birth, height, your first day of school, graduation, wedding day, or when you started working for your current employer. Instead, you would probably tell a story about yourself, regale them with a few personal experiences, or summarize your career so far. If we want others to know who we are, we need to tell them about ourselves. Anything else would be dry, lifeless, and impersonal. The episodic memory receives stories, stores them, and transforms our experiences into narratives. This is not only the case for our personal experiences, however, but also works with stories we are told, e.g., in the books we read or the movies we watch. Our brain treats them in a very similar way. And this is great news for everybody with and interest in interpersonal communication! If we tell others our stories, we thus do not only provide them with mere facts (packed into a narrative); we deliver something akin to real experiences (see Fig. 2). Brain research can also explain why this is the case and why stories can have strong emotional effects on us. Why do we feel sad or even cry when we see broken hearts on the big screen; why do our palms get sweaty and our bodies tense during spectacular action scenes; and why do we feel the urge to laugh when reading a funny novel? All of these reactions appear to be caused by a specific type of brain cells known as mirror neurons. These cells are active whenever we are reenacting complex events or situations in our minds. As such, they are sometimes also called “empathy neurons” as they seem to be the reason for our ability to feel empathy for others and understand their emotions, whether they are sad, happy, or afraid (cf. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008). Mirror neurons are even active when we are hearing, watching, and reading stories. This means that our brains do not only use the

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same areas to process stories and experiences (namely our episodic memory). Stories also have (almost) the same emotional impact on us as real events. And as a consequence, the characters of a story can feel to us like “real” people (the presentation of brain research here is based on Müller 2014). "

Whenever we tell stories, we do not only provide our listeners, watchers, or readers with facts, but also share experiences with them and involve them emotionally.

Humans Are “Storytelling Animals” Homo sapiens is clearly deserving of the title “storytelling animal” which author Jonathan Gottschall (2012) picked to describe our species. The ability to not only tell stories but also come up with them in the first place is one of the key differences between humans and other animals, alongside our larger brains and opposable thumbs. Gottschall’s moniker has a double meaning: Humans can not only revisit past events through stories and fill them with meaning; they are also capable of creating completely new, fictional stories. Let us picture a (somewhat clichéd) campfire scene back in the Stone Age with a small group of people sitting together to tell one another about the hunting and gathering of the day. Let us assume Boarrg is currently telling the others about how he successfully slew a stag with a single spear throw. It is possible that this final successful hit was preceded by ten misses; but perhaps his vanity keeps him from sharing this part of the story. Or maybe he is not quite that proud and mentions the misses at least briefly. Maybe the eleventh throw only landed because the stag got stuck in some undergrowth and was thus unable to dodge. Will he mention this part or not? But even if Boarrg has no interest in glossing over any parts of his story, he may unknowingly leave out certain details. Being an experienced hunter, he naturally checked from which direction the wind was blowing before aiming his throw— after all, each throw requires him to adjust for these conditions and maybe give the spear a little spin in a certain direction. All of this is so elementary to him that he never includes it in his hunting stories. Yet, to his 10-year old son Boarrg Jr. who hopes to one day follow in his father’s footsteps, all of this would be vital new information and explain why his own throws keep missing all the time. Because the clan does not allow him to accompany his father on the hunt until the boy starts growing a beard, however, he might not learn about the importance of checking the wind direction for many more years. An alternative for Boarrg Jr. would be to ask his father for a much more detailed version of his story that delineates the stag hunt step by step. This might result in the following addition: “And then I lick my finger and put it above my head to feel from where the wind is blowing.” By the way, what Boarrg Jr. is doing here is a key component to narrative knowledge management: asking experts to describe exactly what they are doing. Because just like Boarrg, modern experts also take many things for granted that may be completely unexpected to novices (see chapter “When We Share Our Experiences”).

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Our little Stone Age vignette exposes how telling a story is never about creating an identical duplicate of the original events; it is always an act of reconstruction in hindsight. What do we include, and what do we leave out? Which parts are particularly relevant and interesting, which parts unnecessary or boring? Which parts do we still remember, which did we forget, and which might we even recall incorrectly? In this regard, stories are not unlike photographs: By choosing what they depict (and what not) they construct a specific image of reality. A picture might show us a beautiful beach scene—while cutting off the large-scale construction site right next to it. This reconstruction rule does not only apply to single stories; it also shapes the complete catalogue of narratives with which we make sense of our experiences and form our identity (see chapter “We Are the Sum of Our Stories”). Let us go back to the Stone Age one more time and assume that Boarrg Jr. keeps practicing his spear throwing like a madman, but also keeps missing because, unlike us now, he is still unaware of his father’s wind checking technique. His brain stores each single miss as a story of failure: “I practiced spear throwing again. But I kept missing as usual. When I went back home, I felt really sad.” His many stories about missed spear throws cause Boarrg Jr. to form the belief that he is a loser who is too bad at spear throwing to ever become a celebrated hunter like his father. This process epitomizes the formation of what Michael White, a pioneer of narrative therapy, called a “landscape of identity” (White 2007). Once Boarrg Jr. begins to grow a beard and joins the hunt, it is likely that he will still be full of self-doubt and convinced that he is a poor hunter, which in turn will cause him to continue missing his spear throws. And each new miss solidifies his pessimistic, identity-shaping belief. But maybe Boarrg Jr. recalls a particular throw on a day when a strong wind kept blowing his long hair in his eyes, so he decided to face the wind and throw his spear with full force. And lo and behold: It was exhausting, but he did hit his target! Later, Boarrg Jr. thought back to this amazing throw and tried to figure out why it had worked that time. Had the wind been the reason? So he decided to only ever throw his spear upwind anymore, and doing so, his success rate soon began to go up while his throwing arm got stronger and stronger. When he later joined the hunt with the others, he would always approach his target from the direction toward which the wind was blowing, making him much harder to scent for his unassuming quarry. Eventually, Boarrg Jr. became one of the most respected hunters of his village. And his continuing success changed his identity as earlier stories of failure faded away. Instinctually, Boarrg Jr. did precisely what narrative single and team coaching sessions aim to do: finding exceptional stories and integrating them into the “landscape of identity” (cf. White 2007; Müller 2017). Learning from the past and changing our landscapes of identity, however, are not the only domains in which stories affect us. They also enable us to think about what might still happen in the future. Humans seem to be the only animals capable of this, at least with regard to distant events. A hunting lion might have a concept of the next hour or so, an idea of what it might be like to hunt down an antelope and devour it. But stories about events that lie years, decades, or even centuries in the future seem to be the prerogative of homo sapiens. All of us can fantasize about our lives

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10 years from now, about where we might live and with whom, where we might work, and whether we will have children. And we are equally able to imagine the steps we will need to take to make this possible future more (or less) likely, what we will need to do, learn, etc. Stories about the future, however, are not limited to our own lives. They can go far beyond that, as religious narratives (“Last Judgment”) or science fiction novels clearly prove. Whether or not our stories about the future actually come true is not all that important—we might have to give up on our dreams from time to time. But this will hardly cause us to stop making up stories about the future altogether.

A Story Is a Form of Change Stories are also perfect vehicles for imagining change. After all, when everything stays the same, we can do nothing but describe the given situation. However, as soon as something changes, there is a story to be told! Let us illustrate this with a basic love story: At the beginning Mary feels lonely and sad; then she falls in love with Tony (and he falls in love with her); and finally, Mary gets over her initial loneliness and sadness. Our love story follows this change. If Mary had not found love, she would have been just as lonely and sad at the end as she was at the beginning; nothing would have changed. Anything we might say about Mary in this situation would be purely descriptive—and there would be no story at all! Change is what defines stories. Think about your favorite movies, shows, or books: They all have some kind of change at their center. This is the rudimentary structure of any story: beginning, change, and end (for a more in-depth definition, see chapter “Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations”). At the same time, narratives are also at the core of every personal and societal change in our own lives: Stories chronicle change, and change has a narrative structure. Perhaps it is then no coincidence that storytelling is having a comeback in society and organizations right now—at a time when change has become routine. There is even more to this: As humans, we often actively search for narrative connections between our experiences and perceptions! Let us assume we are shown two photographs of the same person back to back. If we see the person smile in the first shot and cry in the second, we almost automatically try to come up with an explanation as to what might have happened in between. Some bad experience must have led to their mood shift. But the exact opposite happens when the order is reversed: We will assume that something good happened to the person between the photographs. Psychological studies have shown repeatedly that our brains like to think in stories because narrative structures allow us to make sense of the world we live in. This appears to be true from the moment we are born. Even infants seem to apply so-called proto-narratives to stories and prefer those with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Filtering the events that surround us at any given moment is irremissible; otherwise, we would simply drown in an incessant flood of information. Our brains manage to avoid this by prioritizing meaningful material and molding it

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into cohesive narratives (cf. Stern 2007, p. 137; Dornes 2010, p. 31; Roth and Klett 2015, p. 218). Stories and narrative structures thus serve many important functions: understanding our world, learning, knowing who we are, making sense of change, and finding meaning in life. Still, it was not until the 1980s that narrative psychology discovered the relevance of stories to our lives and began to describe it in more detail. This shift is now known as the “narrative turn.” Since the 1990s, organizations and companies have also discovered the potential of stories—because narrative structures do not only affect us as individuals; they also shape the social systems in which we live and work with others as the history of homo sapiens itself has proven. Narrative structures and stories serve many important functions: • They let us learn from past experiences. • They enable us to form our own identities (who are we, how do we see ourselves, and how can we change by inserting new stories into our landscapes of identity?). • They allow us to make plans and form goals for the future. • Narrative structures are also the way we think about change: All stories are about change (how we fall in love, how we lose our partner, how a criminal is caught or a treasure found) and all change becomes a story in our minds (“At first, I didn’t know what to do, but then I found a solution and now I’m successful.”). • Stories are thus our means of imbuing all aspects of our lives with meaning—by creating causality.

Organizations Are the Sum of Their Stories Considering how vital narrative forms are to our thinking, and especially meaningmaking, it can hardly surprise that they also play a cardinal role in all kinds of different organizations, such as companies, agencies, clubs, or political parties. Yet, economic and organizational theories have ignored this role for the longest time. Some companies have taken their first steps toward acknowledging the power of stories in the past 5–10 years, but the focus has mostly been on storytelling alone without equal attention to storylistening. Narrative structures are not yet understood as the general framework of human thought and they are too often disregarded in change management, leadership, and communication. An analogous blind spot exists for the even more active pursuit of “storydoing,” i.e., the creation of new experiences through narratively structured projects. Organizations and management training are still dominated by simplistic input–output schemas based on a mechanistic understanding of social systems. The idea is that organizations are essentially like machines: Pressing the right button will (somehow) lead to the desired outcome.

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While this might actually be the case for machines (even though our computers seemingly beg to differ sometimes), organizational contexts are much more complex. And still, the mechanistic model is strong in the heads of many managers and “storytelling” reduced to a handy tool within its context: Telling the right story will surely lead to the right results in employees, teams, customers, or partners; will it not? Change is on the horizon, though. Digital transformation and the need to speed up and become more agile have opened many organizations to the idea that an entirely new way of thinking will be required in the future—and with it, a paradigm shift toward a narrative organization.

Narrative Organizations We already presented a few examples of how different organizations handle stories and narrative structures in our prologue. This allowed us to distinguish between three different types of organizations: (1) those in which stories do not seem to play a role at all (fact-based organizations); (2) those that make use of storytelling, e.g., when it comes to internal communication; and (3) those that already do storylistening, i.e., pay attention to the stories told by employees as well as partners or customers. Our central claim here is that narrative structures truly play a critical role in organizations and that the latter should in fact be perceived as “narrative systems.” This means concretely that core components without which organizations could not function at all possess a narrative structure, regardless of whether or not those involved are aware of it. Many challenges and problems in organizations thus result from the failure to acknowledge the importance of stories. However, sometimes things also might work out just fine because employees already intuitively work with them. Disregarding the role and impact of narrative structures is akin to sailing through shallow waters without acknowledging the dangers—logs, sandbanks, rocks—that might lurk beneath the hull. This ignorance, however, does not only result in negative outcomes; there are also great opportunities organizations might miss out on! We might row our boat warily to avoid unseen rocks in the shallows—when the ocean beneath us is in fact deep and would allow for much swifter movement toward our destination. Failing to actively make use of the narrative level of organizations creates an enormous blind spot with regard to its inner workings.

Characteristics of Organizations Here, we will not delve too deeply into systemic organizational theory. Interested readers can find a great introduction in Fritz Simon’s book on the topic (Simon 2007). For the purpose of our discussion, we will focus on the key aspects that distinguish organizations from other social systems:

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1. Organizations have a clear purpose (cf. Simon 2007, p. 30). They are a means to an end. This end can be to make profit, allow employees to make a living, or introduce new products to the world. Different members of the same organization may pursue different goals, and coming together as an organization enables them to achieve their respective goals. Other social systems do not share this strong focus on purpose. In our culture, families for example are not primarily purposedriven (a different model is imaginable, e.g., a family that is solely created as a retirement plan). The same goes for circles of friends: Even though they might keep their members from boredom, this is not their only function. 2. Ideally, organizations work independently of the individuals who assume specific roles. Regardless of whether Mr. X or Mrs. Y is head of a given department, the responsibilities and tasks of the department remain the same. Consultants, however, know that reality is often quite different from this ideal, particularly in newly founded organizations. The success of a company might depend on a charismatic founder or a sadistic boss may quash the efforts made by everybody else. Example

We once worked with a small IT company in which many organizational proceedings had remained closely linked to the personality of a charismatic founder who had left the company a few years earlier. We called him the “White Knight.” Even though he had been sales director, many employees had seen him as the embodiment of their company’s culture and identity. He had been extremely invested in the internal communication and his charisma had become tantamount to the “meaning” of the organization. When he had left, the company failed repeatedly to find a suitable replacement. All subsequent sales directors were no good fit, left after a while, or had to be moved to other positions. A narrative culture analysis (see chapter “Narrative System Map”) revealed that the organization had not actually tried to find a new sales director; instead, the goal had always been to find a new “White Knight” with all of the unique characteristics of the original. No newcomer could possibly hope to sufficiently fill these oversized shoes! The organization had to first truly let go of the Knight before it was possible to successfully hire a new sales director. ◄ 3. Organizations can only survive over extended periods of time if their various goals can be harmonized or at least do not clash. When important members no longer perceive the organization as living up to its purpose, it is dissolved. For companies, there are clear legal proceedings for the most obvious case: If a company fails to make profit for several years, it is forced to file bankruptcy and might even be liquidated. Similarly, when too many employees do no longer feel like the company allows them to make a living (e.g., when they are not paid enough), it might not last. A lack of qualified applicants and employees due to a perceived lack of meaning in what the company does might also cause a crisis. In general, today’s employees tend to have much higher expectations of their

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employers when compared to their predecessors from a few decades or even years ago. Putting out products and services is no longer enough if their work feels “meaningless” (for more on this, see chapter “Stories Reveal What Matters to Us”). For our purpose here, this basic understanding of organizations shall suffice. It will help us differentiate between the various perspectives on the importance of stories and narrative structures found across different organizations and companies.

Types of Organizations Several classification systems have used metaphors to distinguish between different types of organizations or companies—the most comprehensive of which was proposed by Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization (Morgan 1998) and suggested nine different metaphors ranging from machine to instrument of domination. Here, we would like to introduce a simpler classification from a narrative perspective. Organization as Machine/as Technical System Image: Intermeshing gears. Form of communication: Inputs (orders) and reactions (actions). Form of cooperation: Hierarchical (“chain of command”). Relevance of narration: If acknowledged at all, narration is deemed irrelevant. Identity Narrative: “Our machine serves its purpose.” Employees’ narrative of meaning: “We are tiny cogs inside a large machine.” Future narrative: “Our leadership knows which way we are going.” Or: “We stay the same.” Picturing organizations as machines might be one of the oldest ways to think about organized cooperation. Unsurprisingly, it originated in the nineteenth century alongside the growing importance of machines in Western economies. Industrialization called for larger and larger companies and administrative organs. This view of organizations is built on the belief that all organizational processes will function exactly as intended as long as they are constructed like a finely tuned machine. Should a problem arise, it can easily be fixed by tinkering with whichever part of the machine caused the problem in the first place. A more contemporary version of this perspective equates organizations to computers. Here, problem-solving means changing the relevant software. When an organization is perceived as a machine, leadership becomes button-pressing—managers make an input and the machine spits out the desired results. Unsurprisingly, stories are almost always completely ignored in this type of organization. As long as everything gets done, they might be sidelined to break times when employees are free to tell stories if they so choose. During the first years of the new millennium, several companies began to realize the value of informal

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communication, particularly in the context of knowledge management. Companies like Xerox created designated areas on their hallways for informal exchanges during workhours. This does not usually change the treatment of all informal communications, however. Even companies that created such areas rarely acknowledged the importance of casual chats between employees for knowledge exchange, let alone the importance of stories. As long as employees accept their role as tiny cogs and think of their organization as primarily a source of income, this mechanistic view can work. However, such organizations also experience frequent disruptions for which their mechanistic selfunderstanding cannot provide adequate explanations. These disruptions are caused by covert constellations in their social system (conflicts, basic assumptions, beliefs, culture) which all lie in the blind spot of this perspective. Even though this view of organizations was at its height during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there are still more than enough managers who implicitly treat their companies like machines (although they might not openly admit to it when asked). In part, this is due to the form of economics-based training managers still usually receive, steeped in the classic ideal of describing all economic processes with the help of mathematical models and schemas. Within this framework, managers are expected to control their organizations and make efficient interventions to transform current states into desired target states. The very term “management” has a somewhat unwieldy quality to it as it suggests a degree of controllability of the organizational world that is utterly unrealistic. For example, the experiential knowledge of employees, one of the most valuable resources in any organization, cannot be managed in the same way that might be possible for a process chain from iron ore to casting to finished product. Individual manufacturing steps might be describable, measurable, controllable, and as such “manageable.” But there are other vital parts to life in an organization that are completely invisible and cannot be measured or controlled. Knowledge about past projects and cycles, the history of a company, and past successes and failures are kept hidden in the memories and stories of employees and are thus inaccessible to purely mathematical or schematic approaches. Traditional management misses out on this knowledge. It lies beyond numbers and computability. The same is true for many other resources (and potential risks): organizational culture, values, identity, routines, beliefs, and perspectives. The classic tools of management are unable to gauge or predict them. Completely different approaches are required to access this hidden potential. Experiential knowledge, employee views, and internal cultural standards are only knowable if the right questions are asked (or sometimes no questions at all). This requires the acknowledgment that all of these processes are shaped by an everchanging organizational identity which is preserved and communicated through stories. Since the end of the 1990s, there has been a gradual change in the everyday operations of organizations through which more and more attention has been given to this hidden knowledge. New positions such as knowledge managers, change managers, or organizational development managers have been created to make use

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of these invaluable resources. And still, the view of organizations as machines has survived beneath the surface; new positions are frequently nothing more than old roles with a new paintjob. Their role descriptions frequently betray a lasting commitment to a deep-rooted mechanistic thinking. Hierarchical structures are very dominant in the machine perspective: There are those who press the buttons, and those who ought to react to these presses. The mechanistic view has of course little in common with the perspective of the narrative organization. This does not mean, however, that stories are irrelevant here. As everywhere else in life, narratives are of vital importance to all organizations. The mechanistic view merely renders organizations imperceptive to them. Organization as Body/as Living System Image: Interplay between body parts/organs. Form of communication: Regulated exchange. Form of cooperation: Give and take. Relevance of narration: Storytelling and storylistening. Identity Narrative: “We can do this together.” Employees’ narrative of meaning: “Everybody has their place.” Future narrative: “If everyone does their part, all will be well in the end.” The view of organizations as living bodies dates back to an ancient anecdote found in the Roman history by Livy (Ab urbe condita 2,33). In 494 BCE, consul Agrippa Menenius Lanatus successfully appeased a public riot with a parable: While the various parts of the body tirelessly went out to gather food, the stomach was sitting lazily at their middle, doing nothing but consume the fare they had brought back. Deeply irritated by this, the other body parts organized a strike and the hands refused to move food to the mouth, the mouth to chew, and so on. Eventually, however, the body parts began to feel weaker and weaker, and they realized that in fact the stomach had been doing its part all along—and without its effort the others were unable to survive. The moral of this parable was that all parts of society, just like the parts of the body, work together for the common good. This perspective is already less mechanistic than the machine view discussed above even though each body part has a clear role and major changes are unwanted. There is greater appreciation for the individual parts of the organization compared to the cogs of a machine, but the overall understanding is still fairly traditional. Initiative is only acceptable as long as it does not interfere with the designated role of each member. Different departments do communicate and there is a place for storytelling—internally when experiences are shared (“tell me what’s going on in your department”) or externally for advertisement and PR—which is a departure from the mechanistic organizations in which stories for the purpose of marketing might be used solely because “everybody is doing it right now.”

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Organization as Group/as Social System Image: Group of people Form of communication: Varies; communication is recognized as relevant at each level (top-down, bottom-up, peer-to-peer) Form of cooperation: Egalitarian with hierarchical elements Relevance of narration: Storytelling and storylistening Identity narrative: “Our identity is shaped by our communication” Employees’ narrative of meaning: “My work is a contribution to something larger” Future narrative: “We shape our future together” The understanding that organizations are more than purely economic institutions that may be simplified as machines or physical bodies grew in the 1980s and 1990s. So-called systemic management consultation became more popular and was decidedly interdisciplinary with influences stemming from biology (e.g., Maturana and Varela 1990), the sociology of system theory (e.g., Luhmann 1987), and structural theory in ethnology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1971), cultural theory (e.g., Foucault 1973; Bateson 1972), and semiotics (e.g., Eco 1972; Titzmann 1977). One central insight was that people can only function to their fullest within economic systems if organizations are also able to be sensitive for their social interactions. Ignoring these “soft” factors means to close one’s eyes to the causes of many disruptions as well as countless opportunities. Too many problems remain inexplicable. Here is an example: Example

A mid-sized company observed that sick leaves were much more frequent in one of its departments than in all others. To solve this problem, a premium of 100 € was introduced for each month an employee finished without a single day of absence. As a result, however, sick leaves became even more common because employees who had already missed one day told themselves that the premium was already gone, so staying home longer would not do any more harm anyway. What had seemed like a decent solution at first had actually made the problem worse. ◄ In this example, the company applied the machine logic to its sick leave problem. Just put on some lubricant and everything will be running smoothly again! But nobody thought about trying to uncover the reason for why the employees in this particular department were calling in sick so frequently. Perhaps there had been some form of social and procedural wear—bad mood or inefficient processes. The machine view (and to some extent the body view) of organizations disregards certain solutions as irrelevant without even really considering them because they only pertain to so-called soft factors. Calling them soft, as opposed to hard, already betrays overt condescension: Hard facts and numbers are handled by engineers

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and economists; soft facts might be considered later, once the hard ones are sorted out. Since the 1990s, things have gradually changed in management theory (see chapter “Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations”). On paper, so-called soft factors are given the same attention as their “hard” counterparts and organizations are understood to be social systems. Concrete actions, however, often prove just how resistant managerial thinking has been to change as the mechanistic view is still very much alive in today’s economic ideology. “Quick fixes” still tend to be preferred, even though managers theoretically know better, and quantifiable results are favored over qualitative ones. Let us illustrate this with a consulting example: Example

Some time ago we were hired by a steel mill to find out why the work climate and productivity had fallen so significantly in industrial workers from five particular production line shifts when compared to the rest of the workforce. Our job was to build communication bridges to middle and senior management and develop concrete steps to improve the climate and productivity. ◄ We set out to conduct narrative interviews with many of the industrial workers, and we saw their eyes light up whenever they were talking about the friendship with their coworkers. The employees told us about the bright sides and challenges each day at the complex production line brings, about “solidarity” and their “we stick together” mentality. And we heard many times why most of the workers genuinely enjoyed coming to work each day: “My shift is a like a family to me.” Middle and senior managers, however, had a very different image of their employees and their impression was much less benevolent: “They are only here to make money.”—“They are like children who are testing the limits.”—“They shouldn’t complain, they have it a lot better than workers elsewhere.”—“Each man is lazy at heart.” Even though we had asked workers and management about the same exact workplace, there was no overlap whatsoever in their viewpoints, no room for a dialogue between both sides. And the workers also noticed the disdain management felt for them. Still, the managers were completely oblivious to how their behavior perpetuated the problems. Undeterred in their negative attitude toward the employees, they insisted on implementing various monetary motivation tools such as point systems and bonuses or exerting a high level of control through warnings, instructions, safety procedures, and documentations. In their own eyes, their sole duty was to increase productivity and closely monitor the workers—demonstrating very clearly the underlying machine view of the organization in which employees were merely cogs in a larger gear drive that sometimes needed a little fixing. Unsurprisingly, the plant manager in charge of the problematic production lines requested a “quantifiable and swift solution” for the bullying and negative work climate. Our biggest challenge in this project was therefore not to find out what had caused the problems. Instead, it was to find a way to communicate these causes to

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management and encourage them to start a productive conversation with their employees to reestablish a sense of shared identity and meaning. Organization as Narrative System Image: People sitting around a campfire. Form of communication: Varies; communication is recognized as relevant at each level (top-down, bottom-up, peer-to-peer). Form of cooperation: Egalitarian, agile, flexible responsibilities; flat hierarchy. Relevance of narration: Storytelling, storylistening, storydoing, storyexperiencing. Identity narrative: “The stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us shape our identity.” Employees’ narrative of meaning: “We live our story together.” Future narrative: “We develop new stories together.” All social systems are essentially narrative systems because a large part of all communication that defines them takes place in story form. Each family, couple, or community tells stories, and narrative structures are fundamental to constituting these systems and defining the reason they exist in the first place. For couples, stories about how they first met and fell in love are elemental to their “couple-ness”; for families, these stories are also important (think “How I Met Your Mother”) and accompanied by new shared experiences as well as stories about ancestry and family traditions. This has always been true, but psychology has only really acknowledged it since the “narrative turn” of the 1980s. Similarly, the social sciences have only truly discovered the role of narrative communication throughout society in recent years. For organizations, however, narration has on top of that a very unique purpose which we already broached in chapter “The Storytelling Animal” when we quoted Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. To him, human collectives with more than 150 members can only stay together because of their meaning-making stories (Harari 2011, pp. 40–47). As such, organizations with at least 150 members could not even exist at all without them. The same applies to smaller organizations when we do not think of them as isolated units, but groups that are actively interacting with other groups, i.e., other organizations and parts of society. Even the tiniest start-up needs to organize a much larger “meta-system” of customers, partners, investors, etc. Although the total number might at first not yet reach the critical 150, all of these people need to get a feeling for the “meaning” of the start-up. And for this, stories and narrative communication are indispensable. "

More than any other social system, organizations are thus narrative social systems. Of course, this does not mean that all other images and perspectives of organizations become invalid once their narrative dimension is acknowledged. The most fundamental assumption is that organizations are social systems. What we propose here is that organizations ought to pay much more attention to their narrative level (i.e., narrative communication in the social systems known as organizations) than most have so far.

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Fig. 3 Organization metaphor and agility (# authors)

Organizations and companies that are willing to actively explore the narrative level of official and unofficial communication in change processes, strategy development, and leadership are bound to be more efficient. They can avoid hidden pitfalls and offer their current and future employees a more hospitable and rewarding work environment. Narrative organizations are more creative and innovative than others; they know themselves and their customers and employees better. Those same employees are also much more motivated and driven because they feel that what they do at their job carries a personal meaning for themselves. And they have a clear, multidimensional vision of the future. "

And most importantly: Only narrative organizations can evolve into agile organizations (see Fig. 3) because agile work can only be guided in a meaningful way through the power of common narratives. We will talk more about this in chapter “Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations.”

How the View of Organizations Has Evolved The dominant self-image of an organization determines the style of leadership that is deemed adequate and successful. If this image is the machine view, a target state of smoothly turning gears and steady feedback loops informs all actions and decisions. If this image is a social system, a lot of attention is given to communication and actions are made with the acknowledgment that each intervention might result in

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Fig. 4 The views of organizations (# authors)

complex and not entirely predictable outcomes. And lastly, if the image is a narrative social system, narrative structures and stories become paramount: New or modified stories initiate change in the organization and the further development of these stories is monitored closely. These different views are by no means mutually exclusive! Each company has certain processes for which a mechanistic interpretation is the most precise and others for which the body perspective might be the most appropriate. A machine view might for example explain best what to do when a machine produces an excessive amount of waste or which safety regulations need to be followed; a body view can illustrate the advantages of smooth collaboration between production and administration, e.g., when “productive” workers accuse “unproductive” administrators of squandering the entire profit they have generated. Each organization incorporates elements of each of the four perspectives we introduced earlier. The key is never to reduce an organization to only one (or some) of them. Thinking of an organization in purely mechanistic terms severely limits the scope of what we can see. All four dimensions are crucial to perceiving the organization in its entirety (see Fig. 4).

The Narratives of an Organization Organizations are (social) systems that pursue certain goals through their actions and interactions. Production, sales, marketing, administration, support systems, and hiring and firing employees all support one larger purpose. Individual actions can be very different from one another. One employee might hand a component to a colleague, a third one sends an e-mail or fills out a sales form, all three have a chat over lunch together in the canteen before they continue to give and receive new instructions in the afternoon. It is important for the first employee to

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not randomly give just any component to their colleague, but the very one they just finished working on. Depending on the kind of company, not everyone might be allowed to have lunch whenever they want, but only once the production line stops. And the sales form needs to be filled out in a specific manner to make sure that nothing goes wrong when the product is shipped to the customer. Many of these examples involve communication: writing e-mails, following instructions, or filling out forms. Even actions that are not primarily communications might require communicative acts to be coordinated. After all, at some point somebody must have told the first employee when to hand which component to whom. And when something goes wrong, further communication is needed to get back on track. First and foremost, organizations are social systems after all. And as sociologist and system theoretician Niklas Luhmann (1987) observed, social systems are made of communications. Otherwise, these systems could not exist, be they couples, families, companies, or entire societies. Without delving too deeply into system theory here, the following example may illustrate its basic tenets: The social system “couple” is unthinkable if it does not involve two people who communicate with each other. Their communication is not necessarily verbal—couples in particular might communicate with glances, kisses, or touch. Without any communication, however, there would be no couple, only two individuals. Furthermore, the kind of communication that turns two people into a couple is of a specific nature. If they only ever talk about the stock market, they would hardly qualify as a couple, at least not a romantic one. The same goes for organizations and companies. They also need communication! Hiring and firing employees are acts of communication, as are instructions and orders, organigrams, or the explanation of a workflow. Then there are nonverbal communications like the ones revealing the general “mood” in a company. Finally, each individual organization also has its own idiosyncratic ways of communicating. A large chunk of all communication in organizations runs through “official” channels, and a lot of it has a narrative form. A business report might for example provide an outlook for the upcoming year while PR and marketing might tell stories or at least refer to them. Internal reports about projects and processes often do have a narrative structure even though it might not be immediately apparent as they often focus on relevant facts. Digging a little deeper, as we have done in many projects for the last two decades, often uncovers the narrative at the core, however, and its more deliberate use can vastly improve each presentation, strategic communication, and even visions for the future.

Organizations as Narrative Systems By their very nature, organizations are always already storytelling or narrative systems—regardless of whether their members openly acknowledge or even want this to be the case. Underlying narratives always shape the coordination, communication, and meaning-making of any organization. More and more organizations are

Literature

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unearthing this potential, and we are convinced that the corporate world is currently undergoing a paradigm shift toward narrative organizations. The first step in this direction is to second-guess and adjust “official” stories to optimize them, to find better stories for the future, strategic communication, reports, experiences, etc. At the same time, the potential of hidden, informal stories is being discovered. This can reveal the hidden facets of organizational culture and allow companies to better plan and execute their change and development projects, make use of knowledge that would otherwise be lost (“if only they knew what they know”), better motivate (and not demotivate) employees, and attract new, highly qualified employees with authentic stories and experiences. All of this can be accomplished with a potential that is already there: stories and narratives as well as the processes by which they are written and exchanged. And all that it takes is a change of perspective to perceive and cultivate the narrative level of organizations. How to do this and become a narrative organization is what this book is about.

Literature Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. In Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatrie, evolution and epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crossley, M. L. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology. Self, trauma and the construction of meaning. Buckingham, Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Dornes, M. (2010). Die Seele des Kindes. Entstehung und Entwicklung. 3. Auflage. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Eco, U. (1972). Einführung in die Semiotik. Fink, München (UTB105). Foucault, M. (1973). Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp (STW 356). Gottschall, J. (2012). The storytelling animal. How stories make us human. Boston, New York: Mariner Books. Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens. A brief history of humankind. London: Penguin Random House. Haven, K. (2007). Story proof. The science behind the startling power of story. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971). Mythologica I. Das Rohe und das Gekochte. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp (STW 167). Luhmann, N. (1987). Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp (STW 666). Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1990). Der Baum der Erkenntnis. Die biologischen Wurzeln des menschlichen Erkennens. München: Goldmann. Morgan, G. (1998). Images of organization. Oakland: Berret-Koeler. Müller, M. (2014). Storytelling. Die Kraft des Erzählens für die Unternehmenskommunikation nutzen. Berlin: SCM. Müller, M. (2017). Einführung in narrative Methoden der Organisationsberatung. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer. Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2008). Empathie und Spiegelneurone. Die biologische Basis des Mitgefühls. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Roth, G., & Klett, D. (2015). Wissensvermittlung und Wissenserwerb aus Sicht der Hirnforschung. In: H. Beier, U. Schmidt, D. Klett (Hrsg.) Wissensmanagement beflügelt. Wie Sie einen unbegrenzten Rohstoff aktivieren (S. 213—228). Berlin: AKA Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft.

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Sarbin, T. R. (1986). Narrative psychology. The storied nature of human conduct. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Simon, F. B. (2007). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer. Stern, D. N. (2007). Tagebuch eines Babys (17.Auflage). München: Piper. Titzmann, M. (1977). Strukturale Textanalyse. München: Fink (UTB 582). White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. New York: Norton & Company.

The Cartography of Narrative Organizations Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Cultural change is never easy. In two decades of consulting projects, we have come across many misconceptions about how to make it happen, particularly in large companies. But also smaller ones in technological areas often fall into the same traps. A widespread assumption goes like this: To change the culture of an organization, all that needs to be done is to clearly define this new culture and then announce it to the employees. If it makes for a nice story, even better! The results, however, are often fairly underwhelming. As soon as things do not seem to work out, sometimes repeatedly, the conclusion is that working with stories might simply be overrated after all, and the search for a different method to enforce the “predefined culture” continues. But it is not the approach that is flawed—it is the implementation. Trying to tighten a screw with a hammer is bound to fail. Whenever the work with stories is reduced to a handy tool with which to reach certain groups of people more efficiently, the inherent opportunities of narrative approaches and methods are squandered. This position also overlooks that stories are always everywhere! The mere fact that organizations have a shared story (that is, a “history”) that plays a substantial role in the creation of their self-image and identity and that contributes even more to the motivation, pride, and identification of their employees proves just how powerful narrative forms are—even when no story is being told! What we commonly know as “organizational culture” or “corporate culture” is largely structured around narratives. The Culture of Organizations Even in organizational theory itself, the term “organizational culture” is highly controversial. On the one hand, there is no single uncontested definition among theoreticians (and practitioners) of what exactly organizational culture is; on the other hand, some authors are skeptical if organizations or companies can even have something like a “culture” in the first place. These critics usually argue that all cooperation in organizations is entirely based on rules and processes, making the addition of a cultural component superfluous (cf. relevant discussions in Jost 2003, Grubendorfer 2016). What exactly we mean when we talk about the culture of an # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_3

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organization definitely shapes which side we take in this debate. If “culture” is simply a stand-in for official rules of conduct (e.g., “our culture is customeroriented” ¼ “we act in a customer-oriented manner”), it might make little sense to search for an independent “organizational culture.” The example above in which “cultural change” meant a change in the top-down definition of the term is based on this “redundant” understanding. Whichever term you might prefer, our experience has shown us time and again that something like “organizational culture” is an important, perhaps the central, factor in facilitating efficient cooperation, a high level of motivation, successful change, a steady stream of new employees, and openness to future challenges— because what we can capture with the word “culture” includes the central patterns that may enable or hinder all of this. Of particular interest are those parts of organizational culture that are unknown or maybe “unconscious” but directly affect the actions of employees and thereby of the company as a whole. Edgar Schein was one of the first organizational theoreticians who actively investigated these unknown aspects of organizational culture (Schein 2018). His pyramid model of organizational culture distinguishes between more of less conscious elements. Concretely, he suggested the following three levels: 1. Artifacts: These are the visible and tangible structures and processes and the observable behavior of the members of an organization. This level may include seemingly mundane routines like greeting each other with a hearty “Hey, how’re you doing” each morning; it can also cover explicit rules in very hierarchical organizations, e.g., how many square feet of office space each employee has at their disposal based on their relative position in the company. 2. Espoused values: This level covers fundamental values of an organization (e.g., a particular predilection for thriftiness), be they implicit or explicit, ideological claims (e.g., leadership ought to be forceful), or rationalizations of irrational assumptions (e.g., “the market regulates itself ”). All of these beliefs and values may be conscious or unconscious. 3. Basic assumptions and values: This is the level of unconscious assumptions, values, and attitudes which are taken for granted and thus go unquestioned. In a long-running company with a very hierarchical leadership, this can be the assumption that leadership needs to exert force on employees. Even if this idea is never explicitly stated, let alone discussed, it is accepted as a “fact” about the company that everybody condones. The third level in Schein’s classification is what surveys and questionnaires usually fail to capture—the unconscious nature of these assumptions makes them inaccessible to most quantitative and structured instruments. When employees are encouraged to share stories about their everyday lives in the organization, an informed conjecture about them becomes possible. We will explain how exactly this can be done in Part II of this book. All values, assumptions, and ways of thinking crystallize in narrative structures, in the stories told by the members of an organization—stories about how the

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Fig. 1 The spheres of a narrative organization (# authors)

organization became the way it is and about how it might evolve in the future. Because these beliefs are formed by what is happening each day, they are always the result of concrete experiences turned into stories even when employees are unaware of this. And when employees are free to share their stories, these beliefs come to light. This is the level of the “organization inside the heads” of the employees (cf. Frenzel et al. 2005). A closer inspection of the beliefs in these narratives, i.e., the entirety of an organization’s culture, allows for the construction of five central spheres (Fig. 1). These spheres produce a narrative map and can be summarized with the following five questions: • • • •

Who are we? What is our identity? What is our purpose? And what meaning does my own work add to it? What are our lived values? What is our distinct knowledge, what are our abilities (some of which might even be unique)? • How do we communicate—internally and externally?

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In all five spheres, narratives and stories play a critical role, and whoever wishes to successfully develop or manage an organization needs to acknowledge, understand, and accept its stories. The following sections will explain this process in more detail.

We Are the Sum of Our Stories: Identity in Organizations The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about the “identity” of an organization might be its “corporate identity” (CI), a form of visually communicated image or guideline that determines how a company presents itself to the public, e.g., through logos or product designs. CI is of course one part of organizational identity, namely the official face shown to the outside world. But identity means so much more than this. Psychological research on identity often hinges on narrative construction guided by the following questions: “How did I become who I am now?”—“Who do I want to be?”—“What do I do?”—“How do others see me?” (Abels 2010, p. 16). These questions are just as important for organizations and companies. “How did we become who we are today” is of course the question about the roots of a company, about all the stories that chronicle significant milestones in its history. Particularly impactful are those stories that retell historic events which have left a huge mark on the identity of the organization such as “how we prevailed against a powerful competitor” or “how we first developed our signature product.” Yet, smaller stories, those told by the individual members of an organization about memorable personal experiences at work, are just as significant. “Who do I want to be” is a question more specifically about “corporate identity,” about mission, purpose, or brand. In more recent studies, stories have increasingly replaced “values” as the main determinant of what shapes a brand (cf. Dietrich and Schmidt-Bleeker 2013). The third question, “What do I do,” is about the business model, and the fourth, “How do others see me,” refers to a company’s relative position on the market. These are the stories told about the company on the outside, by customers or the general public. Ideally, these stories match the internal stories about the brand.

The Narrative Construction of Identity What is true for individuals also applies to organizations: Stories play a key role in shaping identity. This includes the stories we tell ourselves, the stories others tell about us, and stories into which we are born like family, national, or cultural stories. Our identity is continuously formed and reformed at the point where all these stories intersect (see Fig. 2). Self-narrations are all stories an organization tells about itself in marketing, PR, or in case studies, speeches by managers, interviews, newsletters, etc. Outside narrations are all stories others who are not members of the organization tell about its products, its actions, etc. Examples are newspaper reports, conversations with customers, online reviews, or even scandals. Outside narrations

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Fig. 2 The narrative construction of identity (# authors)

can have a huge impact on the identity of an organization as scandals show particularly well. Contextual narrations are all stories into which an organization is “born.” These can include widespread knowledge about the history of an organization (“what was its role during WWII?”) as well as stories that perpetuate a negative image of a particular industry (e.g., big oil companies) or heroic tales about certain vocational fields that are dominantly represented in an organization (e.g., the trailblazers of Silicon Valley). Wherever an organization interacts with the outside world, stories and experiences are exchanged. Thus, it is easy to see just how vital stories are to the formation of an organizational identity. Through advertisement for example, companies tout the advantages of their product over their competition. A detergent company might claim that their washing powder is the best on the market. This is a promise to its customers who might in turn expect that their laundry will be particularly clean if they use the company’s product. After all, the commercial is replete with (fictional) events and additional perks of the powder: I will feel better, my family will be happy, etc. At the same time, customers hold their own (more realistic) beliefs about what to expect when using the product. If things turn out well for the company, these customer beliefs overlap sufficiently well with their advertised promises. Should their experience with the product be negative, however, customers will be particularly inclined to share it with others in the form of a story, harming the company’s reputation and attacking its identity. The fact that the identity of an organization is based on stories has two major implications:

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1. Identity emerges where several systems are in contact. It is never a fixed component of the organization alone, but the product of its interactions with the outside world and its history. 2. As a consequence, organizations cannot freely change or adjust their own identity because the stories told among members of the organization are always only one part of what shapes this identity. At first, this might come as a little bit of a disillusion. If an organization cannot freely shape its identity, how could it ever hope to successfully go through meaningful change processes? Yet, this potentially sobering realization also offers a huge advantage. It can protect organizations from (possibly self-indulgent) navel-gazing that might cause it to lose touch with reality—a reality in which the organization is always interconnected with, and never detached from, its societal surroundings. Should an organization (i.e., its leadership and employees) for example have a very innovative self-image and communicate this image through internal stories, it would be a serious problem if most customers actually perceived it as inflexible and conservative. These customers would probably flock to a competitor for their more innovative projects. "

When it comes to identity formation, the stories told outside a company (by customers, the public, partners, etc.) are of the utmost importance. This awareness enables the company to get to know itself better and develop a much more informed idea about how it might need to change.

The potential damage a lack of congruence between self-narrations and outside narrations may inflict on organizational identity cannot be overstated! In extreme cases, such dissonance can completely jeopardize the future of an organization. In 2011, a newspaper report about sex tourism in a subsidiary of the German insurance group Ergo became a massive scandal (cf. Demirkan and Iversen 2016). The damage was so severe that many observers questioned if the Ergo brand could continue to be viable at all.

Working on the Identity of an Organization The formation of a desirable organizational identity is a delicate procedure—like balancing a baseball on top of a football. A steady hand and deft movements are required to keep the smaller ball from falling. Organizational identity is similarly unstable. Any moment, an unexpected or unforeseen outside narration can shake the very foundation of a painstakingly tended identity. Organizations can never be in full control over their identity or the narrative field that leads to its formation. There will always be stories on the outside that play a significant role. Therefore, working on an organizational identity means to develop the right kinds of self-narrations in marketing, PR, internal communication, or employer branding—stories that resonate positively with customers, partners, and the public and thus instigate the development of benign outside narrations.

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Storytelling is much more than merely a communication method to gain attention. It is always challenging identity work and needs to be taken seriously by those in charge. Each story, on the inside and outside, is a puzzle piece that contributes to the full picture of a company’s identity. And each single piece has the potential to derail all other efforts, regardless of how gloating some stories might be. The construction of appropriate self-narrations always requires utmost care. One of the biggest benefits of narrative work is thus a form of risk minimization. While outside narrations are always uncontrollable, taking the right measures and precautions when forming the image of an organization can severely lessen the impact of even the most deleterious of scandals. An organization that knows itself well will be much quicker to respond with its own stories. And this self-knowledge is built by listening to the stories of employees, customers, and partners. For example, a narrative culture analysis (see Chapter “Narrative System Map”) could have helped in the case of the aforementioned Ergo scandal. Collecting and analyzing the stories of employees might have revealed traces of sexism and toxic masculinity within the culture of the organization and thus allowed for the prevention of questionable “incentives” like sex tourism. And if it is true that the management of several German car makers that were involved in the so-called Diesel emissions scandal were completely unaware of the software manipulation by some of their engineers, they are still at fault for being this oblivious to the cultures of their own companies. An organization that is “narratively competent” because it is experienced in listening to internal and external stories is less prone to rude awakenings and more likely to succeed in shaping its own identity.

Stories Reveal What Matters to Us: The Purpose and Meaning of Organizations The terms “purpose,” “sense,” and “meaning” are occasionally used almost interchangeably and create a semantic field that refers to an important parameter for organizations in three different dimensions: • First of all, each organization needs a purpose to exist at all—its existence needs to serve a goal. The purpose can of course differ across organizations. It might be to maximize profit, to make the world a better place, to develop the best possible product in a specific area, or a mix of all three. This dimension can be understood as the “purpose proper” or as the organization being in part “a means to an end.” • Next, the processes, cycles, and structures in an organization need to “make sense” as well. They need to add to the purpose mentioned above and should not feel like mindless tasks that merely exist to keep the employees busy. All too often, however, these processes, cycles, and structures can hinder an organization (cf. Koziol 2013). • Lastly, employees need to be aware of the contribution their work makes to the overall purpose of their organization. This is the only way for them to find meaning in the workplace. This third dimension received particular attention in

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the wake of anthropologist David Graeber’s polemical book Bullshit Jobs (2018) whose starting point was a survey according to which almost 30% of all employees perceive their own jobs as more or less pointless, meaningless. According to Graeber, one reason for this devastating finding is the fact that many positions in larger companies are created with the sole intent to elevate the relative importance of their superiors. At the same time, “meaning” is seldom given explicit consideration. Implicitly, however, it is crucial: The fact that so many employees experience their own work as meaningless proves just how important “meaning” is. Whenever we talk about the “meaning” of an activity, a process, or even life in general, there seems to be an underlying assumption that this meaning is in fact a thing or entity that does exist somewhere in some concrete form. It is as if there were a definite “meaning” that we only need to discover! This might be because nouns often tempt as to think about them as tangible, perhaps even quantifiable objects. Ludwig Wittgenstein described this as “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (Wittgenstein and Anscombe 2001, p. 40e). Perhaps we should refrain from using the noun altogether and stick to the adjective “meaningful”: Things can be meaningful, or we perceive them as such. Here, we acknowledge the subjective nature of meaning. It is a quality that an individual might attribute to a certain process or experience. We “make meaning” so to speak. One more important distinction that we should clarify further is between “meaning” and “purpose” (the latter as in “a means to an end”). During a panel discussion at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, famous alpinist Reinhold Messner was asked by a journalist why he kept climbing the world’s highest mountains. In the eyes of the journalist, this excruciating endeavor clearly did not make any sense. Messner replied that although his actions might not serve an easily definable purpose, they still carry a deeper meaning to him. He put it like this: Mountain climbing does not accomplish any objective goal; it does not change the world; society does not even benefit from it in any way. To him personally, however, it does have a meaning: It is exactly what he wants to do, and this is what fills it with meaning for him. Messner’s words show very clearly that there can never be such a thing as a single objective or general meaning for everyone. It is first and foremost individual and subjective. However, it is not unlikely that others who have climbed Nanga Parbat like Messner found a very similar meaning in their actions. Why else would anybody go through such an ordeal. . .? We can extend this distinction between meaning and purpose to organizations. In the corporate world, the purpose is always (at least partially) to make a profit. If no profit is made for too long, companies are forced to file bankruptcy. As such, purpose is often closely linked to the products made or sold by a company, e.g., the “production and distribution of high-quality automobiles.” In some organizations, meaning and purpose are not far apart. This might be the case for organizations that produce something that society perceives as unambiguously useful, and thus meaningful. A bakery making fresh bread every day or a medical company producing leg braces for people who have been in an accident

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comes to mind. This does not usually work for companies whose products tend to be viewed less favorably, e.g., manufacturers of cigarettes or slot machines. A possible self-defined meaning for such companies could be the claim that they are filling particular niches to help some people fulfill their needs even though these needs might be frowned upon by the societal mainstream. Overt opposition and subversion of the mainstream can of course also shape meaning. And then it is possible to find no meaning at all in one’s work and also refrain from trying to make meaning. We will say more about these so-called narratives of meaninglessness below. But why do organizations need to provide “meaning” in the first place? The first major reason is to attract new employees. Two interdependent developments are important to understand this. On the one hand, a shortage of qualified labor gives those with the highest qualifications more freedom when looking for a job. Money is of course one central concern, but finding meaningful employment has become an equally important factor in recent years. This is the second development that gives organizations with a clear “meaning” an edge—because paying a decent wage is no longer enough to get the attention of the best employees. This is particularly true for millennials who were born between 1980 and 2000 and who tend to prefer meaningful jobs to those that merely pay the bills. Most importantly, larger organizations, i.e., those with more than 150 members, could not function at all without meaning-making narratives. As we explained in chapter “Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of,” homo sapiens only became able to form and sustain larger organizations because of our ability to create fictions and meaningful narratives. Companies that have been successful for a while might not always be fully aware of it, but they all have a narrative like this. In companies with a long history, employees might feel proud to become a part of this history, to play their own little role in an organization that has been a major economic player for decades. A foundation story can be equally powerful: from rags to riches; from tiny garage shop to international powerhouse. Sometimes the company’s contribution to society might be at the center: “Without our work, many people would die at a younger age or live in pain.” Or it can be the quality of a product: “Ours are the most accurate and durable clocks in the world because we’ve never cut any corners.” Or the focus may lie on how people work in a particular organization: “It’s so cool and laid back to work here without any hierarchy or power play.” It can also be a combination of any of these possible aspects—anything that makes it obvious beyond the shadow of a doubt, through a cohesive system of stories, why a given company is exactly the way it is, what exactly it is like, and why it is a good thing to be that way. Ideally, the stories that shape a company’s meaning are positive of course. Very often, however, there are several competing stories that all contribute somehow to its meaning. In an organization with a long tradition, there might for example be a contrast between a feeling of pride for its history and concern about its ossified bureaucracy that has become harder and harder to change as the years went by. When the negatives outweigh the positives, it becomes difficult to attract new employees. And if too many current employees enter a state of “internal emigration,” the quality of the company’s products and its potential for innovation are at risk.

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Considering the far-reaching consequences of meaning-making narratives, organizations benefit greatly from an active approach to their creation. They should not be left to chance. Most organizations try their hand at this by at least releasing a mission statement. However, their impact is often fairly underwhelming. While employees might know of their existence, these statements are usually nothing but yet another sheet of paper to be filed away somewhere. And if you happen to be a manager ready to object that this does not apply to your organization, ask yourself this: Did you actually make sure that this is the case? Can you actually say for certain that your employees know what the mission of your company is? In 20 years of experience we have not found a single organization with a purely descriptive mission statement in which “normal” employees actually took it seriously. Statements that truly speak to employees and make them identify with their organization have a narrative form.

How to Cultivate and Develop a Meaningful Narrative As we have seen, identities are never created on a drawing table; they always already exist somehow, whether or not employees and managers are aware of it. The same is true for the narrative an organization tells itself about its meaning. This narrative may of course paint a gloomy picture. Employees might for example be convinced that anything the organization ever does solely serves the interests of its shareholders—which might actually be the case for some companies in the financial sector. But even in organizations with such negative narratives, employees may construct their own positive meaning of their work: “I want to quickly earn as much money as possible, so I can have a better life!” In this case, things may even work out as long as employees are actually paid enough while the company is making large profits. And then there are of course also people who find meaning in handling money itself—in the same manner Reinhold Messner derived personal meaning from mountain climbing without the need of another (objective) goal. Most people, however, seek work that offers more than just financial security. And while everybody might of course be able to create their own personally meaningful narrative and derive motivation from it, the existence of a transparent, overarching narrative that helps individuals find this personal meaning strengthens a company’s ability to remain successful and attractive in the long run. After all, finding meaning without direction or guidance can be challenging, even exhausting. And as the bleak survey results by David Graeber from the beginning of this chapter suggest, too many employees seem to fail and experience their own work as completely meaningless. Shared meaning in an organization is furthermore important because it facilitates the coordination necessary for achieving shared goals. When everybody has a clear idea of “what we are doing” and “which goals we are pursuing,” there is no need for strict and detailed orders and instructions, and the nitty-gritty can be left to the employees themselves.

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A strong sense of meaning and fitting narratives to create and maintain this sense are indispensable for the successful operation of an agile organization.

There is an oft-quoted, almost clichéd, saying attributed to French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that goes like this: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Even though we might never know whether Saint-Exupéry actually said this or not, the dictum still illustrates what exactly meaning-making narratives do: They create a shared framework for cooperation in an organization. “Soon we will set sail and reach the shores of many far-off lands”—without such a narrative, shipbuilders would find little to no meaning in their work: “Why are we building these ships? No clue!”—or even less than that: “I plane wood? What for? I have no idea.” Many of the employees who did not see any meaning in their work when surveyed by Graeber might have felt similarly. Nobody ever explained to them the point of all those spreadsheets on which they work day by day. A clear idea of what the final product will be (e.g., building a ship or a car, making bread, consulting a company) can already make employees more motivated because they are able to perceive their own work as a little part of something bigger. Do they build cars because mobility is highly valued in our modern society? Do they make bread because they want to deliver delicious food to others? Do they use consulting methods whose effectiveness has convinced them? In all of these cases, employees have high intrinsic motivation. And creative employees will strive to further improve products and processes even when they are not explicitly told to do so. An organization that wishes to be truly innovative needs to provide a narrative that integrates its many employees. Such a narrative is an irreplaceable asset!

Narratives of Meaninglessness The central meaning-making narrative can, however, also be one of meaninglessness: “We build bad cars that nobody likes. The efforts to save money went out of hand and now we are only producing trash. And that’s no fun.” It is easy to imagine what a narrative like this might do to the motivation and overall mood of a company, and things can be expected to go from bad to worse. If nothing matters anyway, why bother? Narratives of meaninglessness are much more common than one might expect. We have encountered them several times in our work. Unsurprisingly, these narratives often go hand in hand with verbose mission statements and fervent praise for the company and its products—at least on paper. The important part, however, is the dominant narrative inside the heads of the employees. And a quick fix via an updated mission statement is never enough to address this issue.

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Fig. 3 Working on a meaning-making narrative (# authors)

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Turning a narrative of meaninglessness into its opposite is a complex change process that needs to take the current narrative and the reasons for its existence seriously while trying to make new experiences possible for the organization.

How exactly this can be accomplished will be covered in the methodological section on change management (see chapter “Narrative Change Architecture”). That something needs to change in these cases is obvious: Narratives of meaninglessness indicate a crisis at the core of an organization and an urgent need for intervention. Between the two extremes, there are also neutral narratives: “We build cars. Someone’s got to do it.” Employees do not experience their work as meaningless, but neither does it provide them with any genuine sense of meaning. A neutral narrative is often enough to ensure “business as usual,” but it rarely allows for innovation and independent thinking. The creation process of a meaning-making narrative can look like this (see Fig. 3): 1. The process should always begin with an analysis to identify what kind of meaning is currently dominant in the organization. We cannot stress enough that it is never sufficient to simply look at the official mission statement or documents outlining the company’s strategy to get a feeling for this. All organizations have these kinds of positive definitions, but they do not always translate into a positive sense of meaning. The most important parts take place in the heads of the employees, and they are revealed in their stories, e.g., in narrative

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interviews (storylistening) and their evaluation as part of a culture analysis (see chapter “Narrative System Map”). 2. Scenario 1: The organization has a narrative of meaninglessness. The analysis of the narrative interviews with the employees often already reveals how this narrative came to be. These revelations should inform a subsequent change project (see chapter “Narrative Change Architecture”). 3. Scenario 2: The dominant narrative of the organization provides a neutral meaning. The stories shared in the storylistening project should be trawled for possible gateways to more positive interpretations which can then be further developed and communicated throughout the organization. Employees should also be enabled to make new experiences which might become a springboard to a more positive narrative. 4. Scenario 3: The dominant narrative of the organization is one that fills employees with a sense of meaning. If this matches the views of management, there is no further need for action. Should there be a discrepancy, the meaning-making narrative might benefit from a little fine-tuning. Any additional steps should be taken with care, however, lest what is already so positive might be damaged in the process.

The Role of Managers When it comes to creating meaning in an organization, the role of managers is complex. In some ways, they often overestimate their influence; in others, they tend to underestimate it. The most common expression of their overestimation is the belief that all processes within a company can be regulated and defined top-down, including those that create meaning for employees. This leads to the assumption that managers simply need to say the word and everything else will follow automatically. If employees are told the right story, they will surely be able to derive meaning from it. This perception is founded on mechanistic thinking: Press the right button and the desired outcome will occur. Even though technological processes might work this way, social situations are never fully predictable, and each intervention might lead to unforeseeable results. As a consequence, meaning-making narratives can only be developed through cooperation and exchange between various stakeholders. This also requires an ample storylistening process to build knowledge about the meaning employees are already drawing from the stories inside their heads. By contrast, managers frequently underestimate their own influence when they assume that they can simply delegate the central processes of meaning-making to the lower levels of their organization. In hierarchical organizations, those at the top of the hierarchy need to be actively involved in these processes. Otherwise, employees might not take them seriously either. This applies to all areas—teams, departments, divisions, the company as a whole. In each case, those at the highest hierarchical level need to actively partake in the desired development.

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Meaning Makes Efficient Sharing not only a purpose, but finding meaning in one’s shared work, makes the operations of a company more efficient, more innovative, and more self-reliant. Many of us might be familiar with jobs and assignments that are parts of bigger wholes which we do not (yet) fully understand, perhaps because we are still new to them. In these situations, we often need to reassure ourselves that we are actually doing things the right way. Cooking is a great example. Trying out a new recipe, we might have to check the instructions often and carefully to make sure that we are not missing any steps and that we are not adding too many or the wrong spices. If we keep preparing the same meal over and over again, however, we will soon develop a feeling for the right combination of spices, erasing the need to check the recipe and follow our intuition instead. Work in organizations is exactly the same. The better the employees know the shared meaning of the organization and the more they learn to appreciate it, the more adept they become at deciding by themselves which steps are best for achieving shared goals or how to do things in novel, innovative ways. "

In the absence of a meaning-making narrative, each individual task or step might need to be explicitly ordered from above—just like with a new cooking recipe.

And this sends us back to Yuval Harari’s claim with which we began the chapter “Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of”: Narrative structures are essential for the organization of social systems with more than 150 members—in a manner that is efficient and agile and without the need to constantly give detailed orders.

What Actions Speak Of: The Values of Organizations Most companies have defined certain “company values” which are then often turned into “guiding principles.” These lists of values frequently feature terms like “customer orientation,” “appreciation,” or “profit-thinking.” Our larger culture has its own recurring themes whenever we talk about values: charity, frugality, compassion, or efficiency comes to mind. The complete list of values held by an individual or a group is known as their value system, and sometimes we talk about these systems as if they were drawers into which certain objects, i.e., values, are filed. In many instances, this view is fairly unproblematic. However, when we try to communicate values and value systems in organizations or society at large (“Judeo-Christian values”), this drawer perspective becomes too narrow. Everybody is quick to agree with values like customer orientation, responsibility, efficiency, or quality assurance, and we tend to reject “negative values” such as dishonesty, envy, or selfishness just as readily. This apparent consensus is usually interpreted as a tacit agreement that everybody is already actively living according to these values.

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Values as Stories But what exactly do these values and the commitment to them mean? When asked about them, employees often do not really know or give very different, even contradicting, explanations. Different employees might for example have vastly different understandings of “customer orientation.” One employee might interpret it as the duty to do everything for customers without asking any questions in return while a colleague sees it as the ambition to understand their customers’ needs better than the customers themselves. Finally, a third employee might simply resist trying to trick customers in any way. If we want to understand how individuals or social systems concretely define a certain value, we need to take a look at the concrete actions that stem from it. And this in turn means to understand the typical stories connected to the value. Placed in a drawer, values are nothing more than placeholders or labels for certain stories: “When customers approach me, I first let them do the talking and try to understand what they are looking for. Then I try to sell them the right product.” As such, the definition of what “customer orientation” can mean has a narrative structure: Beginning: Middle: End:

When customers approach me, I first let them do the talking . . . . . . and try to understand what they are looking for. Then I try to sell them the right product.

We can only really speak of values at all if we know the narratives that individuals or a group associate with their labels. Narratives construct values (for a particularly good illustration of this process, see Sommer 2016). And this is why the communication of company values remains ineffective in so many instances: The labels are merely pointed out without any explanation as to how exactly they affect and shape an organization (see Fig. 4). Filling this gap requires knowledge about the relevant processes and their stories to show which values are truly lived (see also the project in chapter “Case Study on Future Stories”). From this, we can draw two conclusions for narrative organizations: 1. To learn more about the values that are actively lived in an organization, an understanding of its narratives and stories is indispensable. These stories reveal a lot about relevant processes and behaviors in cases in which they cannot be observed directly. 2. To change the value system of an organization or implement new values, efforts must be directed toward these narratives and stories. Working on the labels alone will not yield any meaningful results. Regarding the first conclusion it is important to note that employees’ authentic stories about their work reveal the underlying patterns of their actions. In turn, these patterns expose the values on which their actions are built.

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Fig. 4 Values as labels and values as stories (# authors)

Changing Values The second conclusion is less straightforward. We will introduce several concrete methods and processes that can bring about change in Part II of this book. At this stage, the most important thing to keep in mind is that changing organizational values always requires (at least) the following three steps: 1. The lived (not the postulated!) values of an organization must be known. The best way to trace them are storytelling projects with narrative interviews (see chapter “Narrative System Map”). 2. Desired values need to be defined as narratives, i.e., concrete behavioral patterns. Labels alone are never enough! 3. If the lived and desired values are the same, no change is needed! However, should there be a discrepancy (which is usually the case whenever an organization considers a change process), the search for suitable procedures and stories begins. These are meant to facilitate the transformation from the old to the new values. Simply announcing new values is never enough! Example

In one large company with offices across multiple locations (e.g., factories, administration, distribution), we found that a sense of “protection” for one’s own location was one of the most prominent lived values. The underlying narrative was something like this: “If there are several options for how to do something, choose the option that is best for the preservation or even expansion of your own location.” In narrative interviews, the employees usually told us stories about “transformations” that expressed the wish to protect their own workplaces

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or even improve its relative standing. These preferences, however, were of course at odds with the official ambitions and goals of the company as a whole. It was for example extremely difficult to start projects or matrix organizations that required the collaboration of all locations. The company’s desired value resembled a form of “agile project work” guided by the following instruction: “If there are several options for how to do something, choose the option that brings the largest benefits to the entire company.” The announcement of this new value had not persuaded the employees to change their attitude. There were after all very real concerns that had led to their location-specific value in the first place: During past reorganizations several locations had been moved, merged with others, or shut down entirely. The intent had usually been to save money, but in most cases those savings had been shortlived. At times the restructuring had eventually even backfired. At the heart of the value was thus the worry that something similar might happen again. There were three different options for us to proceed: (1) The organization had to find a way to erase these fears; (2) get employees to accept changes in spite of their fears; or (3) develop a brand-new value story as a means to alleviate the fears. In the case of the third option, the story needed to prove that agile project work would indeed be a more promising approach to protecting individual locations than its ersatz value. ◄ At first glance, this strategic construction of change stories might feel fairly manipulative. This is why employees need to play a central role in their development. Most importantly, management ought to be fully committed to the stories that are eventually chosen. There are of course ethical reasons for this. Broken promises, however, can also harm the credibility of managers in the eyes of their employees (which is often already a major obstacle to the dialogue between both sides), and as a consequence, motivating employees might become even more challenging. In the example above, the first option was completely unrealistic. Large companies can never make long-term guarantees about the future of their various sites. The most advisable option turned out to be the third: Agile project work in this matrix organization was indeed suited to support line organization elements and thus the individual locations. Our final value story was able to communicate this possibility in a persuasive manner because its several protagonists underwent the shift from the old value to the new one in a narrative that also openly addressed the employees’ fears. The next step was for the employees to personally engage with this story through “storydoing.” This allowed them to genuinely feel the impact of the new value at their individual locations. Storydoing means creating suitable contexts in which narrative contents can be actively experienced. For the establishment of new values, even an announcement in narrative form is not enough by itself. Employees need to be given an opportunity to see and live these values, to have their own individual experiences with them. Only this way can the values of the story become lived values (see chapter “Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations”). To accomplish this, the company in our example started designated projects spanning all locations that stressed the individual strengths of each site.

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The Perks of Values Behavioral patterns and habits generally stabilize in individuals, groups, or entire organizations because they provide certain advantages. Even smokers find perks in smoking: relaxation, pleasure, breaks, etc. Let us simplify this example for a moment by keeping addiction out of the equation and think about how to break a habit. For this, we usually need a new behavior with even greater advantages. Mentioning the health benefits does not usually work when taking a stance against smoking because these benefits tend to be somewhat abstract and delayed into the far-off future. An immediate, tangible advantage is much more convincing—for example the perk of freeing oneself from annoying smoking routines. Changing values follows the same logic. If new values are to succeed in an organization, i.e., if employees are expected to act according to new narratives, they must offer some kind of advantage over the values they are replacing. As for what this advantage might look like, there are no general rules; it may in fact come in many different shapes and forms. It can for example be a reduced workload or a stronger feeling of social cohesion. The organization needs to tell its employees a credible story that closely ties the new values to their benefits; otherwise, they become mere lip service. Just like every other change process, a successful change of values requires more than just communication, regardless of how captivating its story might be. The new values must be incorporated into existing structures and reward systems to make lasting change possible. Example

An international company was hoping to turn improved work safety into one of its core values. “Safety first” should become its foremost guiding principle. The plant managers, however, did not update their target agreements which meant that the implemented incentives continued to be driven exclusively by financial considerations. Unsurprisingly, each time a conflict between improved safety and profit maximization arose, the final decisions were always in favor of the latter. ◄ Values are of course closely connected to the identity, purpose, and meaning of an organization. Just like meaning-making narratives, the narratives about lived values are a vital component to the organization’s identity formation. All of these aspects are essentially overlapping and interconnected parts of its culture. Narrative identity work must always involve an explicit or at least implicit consideration of the values and the meaning of an organization and vice versa. When an organization changes its values, the transformation also directly affects its identity and meaning. This close connection is often overlooked during change processes. Particularly in engineering companies, we have often encountered fierce resistance to new values involving a stronger customer and service orientation. Many employees who saw themselves as tinkerers and makers first and foremost were unable to identify with new positions in which they had to provide services to

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customers (see also the example in chapter “Stories Are Always Everywhere”). Successful change hinges on the ability to not only be familiar with already existing identities but also find a narrative that either explicitly addresses the identity change or operationalizes the new value in a way that fits the old “engineer” mold.

When We Share Our Experiences: The Knowledge of Organizations Since the beginning of the current millennium, the transition to a knowledge society in industrialized nations has turned knowledge into an essential economic resource for organizations (cf. Reinmann 2009). Companies hire knowledge workers for jobs that deal primarily with knowledge. In turn, knowledge has become a form of intellectual capital that is a central part of organizational balance sheets alongside material assets (e.g., the knowledge balance made in Germany, http:// akwissensbilanz.org/en/phase-four/). Yet, knowledge has always been vital in organizations, even before the most recent boom. Without knowledge, making and selling products would be impossible! The academic and popular literature on what exactly “knowledge” entails is very extensive. Different disciplines have suggested different classifications for different types of knowledge. Depending on the underlying worldview, there has also emerged a dichotomy between theories that define knowledge primarily as an “object” and those in which it takes the shape of a “process.” While knowledge is thus something a person or group may “possess” in the former perspective, the latter sees knowledge as something that instead simply “exists” (Schneider 2000). The object view furthermore moves knowledge very close to the “information” one might receive from a person who is already in the know. Textbooks are essentially based on this perspective as are formats like documentaries, podcasts, or images—all forms of media that attempt to codify knowledge as information.

Why Is Working with Stories So Successful? Thinking of knowledge as a process, however, links it inseparably to the behavior of those who have obtained it. In other words: Knowledge becomes something that defines what a knowing person does. In turn, it becomes observable, for example through the actions of experienced employees. From a narrative perspective, this form of knowledge is particularly interesting as the following two examples will illustrate: Example

Some time ago we supported a knowledge transfer (see chapter “Transfer Stories”) at a large church. In particular, we worked alongside a former executive who had retired 3 months earlier and agreed to participate in the process during which he would return for several conversations with his successors. Our goal

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was to collect his knowledge from roughly 30 years of experience, 15 of which had been in the position of division head. We scheduled three separate meetings and the retired expert had a lot to tell us—about projects, federal financial support, cooperation with job agencies, the impact of changes in the law, and the people who had found a new job thanks to his work. His two successors, one of whom had had 20 years of experience at the church himself, were present during these conversations and encouraged to ask any questions they might have. And together we listened to the stories. At the end of one of our sessions, before we scheduled the next meeting, one of the two new division heads told his predecessors this (reproduced here as an excerpt from our transcript): “I am really impressed how you were able to share all of your experiences in such a clear and structured way! I have been here for about 20 years myself, but in my head all of the memories are somehow blending together. It’s one giant ball of yarn that I can’t unravel. I could never talk about all of it in such a detailed way that makes complete sense.” The former division head replied that he had had the exact same impression, that of a ball of yarn, but: “Once I started to tell my story, everything just fell into place.” ◄ Structure and meaning entered the shared experiences once they were turned into a story. The act of telling them to others created more precise memories of past events; it brought back memories that are stored with associations, emotional valence, and patterns. Storytellers thus remember more and see a clearer connection between their individual memories. Through the flow of a story one event follows another, and a causal chain of events emerges that makes the past coherent and meaningful. In a way, sharing experts thus remind themselves of why they acted in a certain manner or how they felt about certain events. They are able to arrange their experiences and transform them into experiential knowledge. Example

Another example of storytellers informing themselves took place during a series of narrative interviews in a nonprofit organization. The participants here were asked to talk about their experiences with donations to charity as well as personal wealth they might bequeath to others. The organization was hoping to learn more about what motivates people to donate money and thus make their calls for donations more effective. Once they had shared their experiences, many participants followed up with thoughts like this: “Now that I have talked about it, I finally understand my own thoughts on donating.” By telling their stories, the participants had gained insights into their own views and beliefs. ◄

Explicit and Implicit Knowledge The main difference between so-called explicit and implicit knowledge is that we can easily put the former into words and have a conscious representation of it in our

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minds. By contrast, it is impossible or at least very difficult to articulate implicit knowledge “either because we have no words for it or because it has become second nature to us. Sometimes we might not even be aware of knowing something even though our behavior proves that we do” (Reinmann and Vohle 2005, p. 83; translation by authors). Examples of implicit knowledge include muscle memory, such as the knowledge how to ride a bicycle, or the hunches of a TSA agent who is well versed in identifying smugglers. In both cases, the knowledge is almost inexplicable; it is more like a “gut feeling” or intangible certainty. Implicit knowledge is therefore closely connected to the knowing individual whereas explicit knowledge may be decoupled from personal experiences, making it much easier to verbalize and impart. As such, explicit knowledge is also much more accessible in organizational contexts as it is codified in language and signs. "

The implicit components of knowledge have a narrative structure. Therefore, a narrative approach is required to put them into words.

The experiential knowledge pertaining to past projects and cycles, the history of an organization, and its past successes and hardships—all invaluable information— lies hidden in the memories of employees. In order to be analyzed, measured, stored, and shared, it first needs to be made accessible. The same goes for the implicit knowledge that plays a crucial role in defining the identity of an organization as well as its members’ behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. Learning about these aspects can uncover resources and potential risks, but attaining this knowledge is always a demanding process. There are, however, ways to gain access: by listening and asking the right questions, or sometimes no questions at all. These efforts can only succeed if an organization accepts the existence of a fluctuating organizational culture at its core, one that is constantly being renegotiated. Implicit knowledge has a narrative structure because it is stored in the form of memories, which makes it almost impossible to express it verbally. It may be reclaimed when it is turned into stories (“how I fixed the welding plant” or “what I learned in my training”). Narration is also the most effective method of imparting implicit knowledge.

Subject Knowledge and Organizational Knowledge For organizations, the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge is relevant at two levels. The first covers any knowledge that allows an organization to realize its purpose and mission. This includes: • Explicit subject knowledge about products and services (how to build a car; how to tend to the sick; how to train managers) alongside knowledge about economics • Experiential knowledge that cannot be found in textbooks or process documentations. This is the implicit knowledge in the heads of (experienced)

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employees. Here, we cannot go into more detail about the exact components of this implicit, experiential knowledge. For a comprehensive overview, see for example Erlach et al. (2013). The second level pertains to the knowledge an organization has about itself. This is all knowledge about its unique characteristics or features and any behavioral patterns that have emerged as a consequence. Once again, this knowledge contains explicit and implicit elements: • Explicit organizational knowledge includes knowledge about the organigram, the responsibilities of different members, the quality of the canteen food, or whether the conversations between employees tend to be formal or casual. • Implicit organizational knowledge is once again knowledge that employees might be unaware of even though their behavior is strongly influenced by it. It includes hidden rules, beliefs, tacit agreements, etc. These two different flavors of knowledge are of course not independent of each other. Engineering companies in which technical knowledge is key will differ from media companies with regard to their respective organizational knowledge. Other aspects in which companies might differ include structure (hierarchical vs. flat), communication (formal vs. casual), dress code (necktie vs. jeans), or how clearly responsibilities are distributed. Familiarity with the implicit components of knowledge is particularly important for organizations. Even though they are largely unconscious, they have a significant impact on their employees’ behavior, and thus, their influence is as least as considerable as the influence of explicit knowledge. Example

The following example of a program designed to train and promote prospective managers in a large company illustrates the impact of implicit organizational knowledge on the actions and perceptions of employees. This program primarily consisted of a series of seminars on leadership skills. Narrative interviews (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”) revealed how male and female participants had very different stories to tell about their respective career paths so far. The interviewed men brought particular attention to the importance of networking (among men). Their stories would focus on meetings with managers with whom they would keep in touch, and those managers would later pull them up a few rungs higher on the corporate ladder. “Official” career paths like seminars did not make it into their stories. If those men had attended any at all, they at least did not consider them worth mentioning. Female participants shared completely different stories in which they often went into great detail about the seminars they had attended. Many of them also lamented that, in spite of their efforts, they had not yet been able to significantly advance their careers. This difference exposed the implicit knowledge about “how careers work” in this organization—knowledge to which male participants were privy, but that had been inaccessible to their

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female colleagues. Because the company had many more male employees than female ones (the story took place in 2004) and this knowledge tended to circulate in networks of men (“how X got ahead”—“how things went for Y”), it became a major obstacle for the women in the company. ◄ This anecdote is an excellent example of knowledge that is simultaneously accessible throughout a company while still remaining unconscious. In this particular case, it was even limited to only one segment of the workforce: only the men. This kind of knowledge shapes organizational culture—and studying it well comes with considerable benefits for mergers, change processes, or a company’s general future development.

Losing Knowledge Another big concern is the loss of knowledge, particularly in its implicit forms. When experienced employees leave or team projects come to an end, companies are at risk of losing valuable expertise. The departure of experts may cause disastrous knowledge gaps while the benefits of their knowledge are often gone because companies miss their chance to retrieve it in time. The aftermath of the moon landings during the 1960s that were made possible by the thrust of Saturn V marks a particularly formidable instance of such a loss (cf. Quarks 2019). The last moon landing took place in 1972, and today NASA would hardly be able to repeat this feat. Explicit knowledge about how to rebuild Saturn V might still be available as the plans are kept in the NASA archives. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that these plans might be outdated, none of the experts who made them and actually constructed the launch vehicle are still alive. Not even the suppliers exist anymore! The implicit experiential knowledge is lost—and this loss has created a gap so severe that there has not been another moon mission in almost 50 years! Implicit experiential knowledge like this—about how to go to the moon in the case of NASA, or how to have a successful career in the case of the male employees in the example above—is difficult to record. It can only be reconstructed through stories because stories embellish events with the context necessary to put implicit knowledge into words. This “embellishment” of the dry facts is precisely the part that communicates the meaning and information enabling any knowledge transfer to new members in an organization. Neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer put it this way: “Stories get to us, not facts. Stories contain facts, but these facts are to their stories what the skeleton is to the human body. [. . .] Details only make sense in a context, and it is this connection and meaning that makes the details interesting” (Spitzer 2007, p. 35; translation by authors).

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The implicit components of knowledge lie hidden in the experiences of employees. Therefore, they have a narrative structure. They are vital sources of information to organizations that allow them to better understand their own culture. Access to implicit knowledge also facilitates the transformation into an agile and transformative organization. Only narrative approaches can succeed in verbalizing, transmitting, and storing this implicit knowledge.

Stories Are Always Everywhere: Communication in Organizations Communication is often the first thing that comes to mind when we hear about storytelling and narratives in organizations. This is because storytelling has increasingly gained traction in marketing and external communication since 2010—to such an extent that some people seem to think that this is all that storytelling can do. In fact, however, marketing only makes up a small part of the narrative communication in organizations, albeit one that usually receives a lot of public attention. We explained in the chapter “Organizations Are the Sum of Their Stories” that stories are the foundation of all social systems including organizations and companies. And as we have also already seen in this chapter, large portions of the communication in such systems are narrative in nature.

Directed and Undirected Communication Communication in organizations always takes place within four fields (see Fig. 5): There is a fundamental difference between directed and undirected communication. Directed communication includes everything that might be considered “official” communication. Outside the company, this includes PR, marketing, and its general image. Internally, it means all open communication with employees or everything managers say during meetings about new strategies, the mission statement, and so on. This is the level at which the work with stories has been rediscovered in recent years. More and more, undirected communication has also received growing attention. Specifically, it refers to anything that is said during breaks and internal meetings, what employees share with their friends and families, or of course what people on the outside are saying about the organization. Directed communication has a very high priority in organizations because they are social systems with a specific purpose. This differentiates them from less purpose-driven social systems like families in which directed communication tends to be much less important. As a consequence, theoreticians and practitioners frequently overstate the role of “official” communication channels in organizational contexts. In fact, they are far from being the only, or even most important, form of communication. Undirected and “unofficial” communication is at least as relevant—

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Fig. 5 Directed and undirected communication (# authors)

and its relevance has further intensified in recent years due to the advancing digitalization. "

Directed and undirected communication in organizations are always present and interact with each other.

Directed, “official” communication does of course affect what employees talk about in “unofficial” situations. And ideally, this influence goes both ways, and directed communication takes its undirected counterpart into account.

Dissonant Communication Major discrepancies between official and unofficial communication bode ill for an organization. Narrative communication is of particular importance here: Which stories does management tell, and which stem from the experiences of the employees? Example

Here are two examples: A manufacturer of technical parts, appliances, and equipment for the optimization of energy consumption in the field of gastronomy had announced a new product strategy: The company should no longer only assemble the parts, but

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additionally offer services and consultations. This new position painted the company as a service provider for energy optimization, and all future sales and installations should reflect this new scope. Management saw this move as the only way to survive on a market increasingly populated with cheaper competitors from Asia. The foundational narrative of the company thus changed—from “We are a manufacturer of technical appliances that help gastronomical businesses optimize their energy consumption” to “We are a service provider that helps gastronomical businesses optimize their energy consumption.” At first glance, this change to the core story (see chapter “Core Story”) might seem like a minor adjustment precipitated by a changing zeitgeist. Of course, the company had always advised its customers and appraised their individual needs. And still, the new phrasing of the strategy provoked a massive backlash. Many employees whose identity had been framed by their expertise as technicians or engineers felt uncomfortable with what they understood as their new role as “service providers.” Their stories disclosed that many of them perceived the duties of engineers and service providers as incompatible. After all, engineers were first and foremost concerned with guaranteeing technical excellence without the need to heed every last whim of their customers. They were outraged. Other employees, however, had already had a self-image that matched the new strategy. For them, the change felt like a validation of their own narratives because they had previously been looked down on by the “traditional engineers” of the organization. The change created a deep chasm between these two different groups of employees: stories about “real engineering work” vs. “the outdated engineering ideology.” A successful change process takes both sides seriously and tries to show appreciation to “traditional” engineers while searching for a common path toward a new shared narrative. In another company undergoing a similar change, the situation was very different. Here, most employees agreed that their customers had no interest in the planned service options and only cared about technical support. This position was expressed in the many stories told throughout the organization. In the eyes of management, the transition to a service provider had already occurred. The employees, however, noted that the relationship with their customers had not changed at all, and their stories were proof of that. “Cognitive dissonance” like this is a common occurrence during change processes. ◄ If the cultures of employees and their superiors are founded on disparate views and beliefs, and particularly if this difference is never openly addressed, an organization is forced to live in two “worlds” at once. These worlds might have entirely incompatible rules, and their conflict is draining the organization’s resources and energy. Even in “ideal” organizations, there will always be a divide between the higherups and the regular employees, different groups, departments, jobs, etc. There is no organization without conflict, but perfect, uninterrupted harmony would not even be desirable. It would keep an organization from staying dynamic and alive. Once again, we find narratively competent organizations, those that know their own

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stories, to be at a decisive advantage. Listening to stories helps quickly identify the source of a conflict and start the search for a solution. The examples above also show again that undirected communication has just as strong of an impact on culture and identity, on efficiency, and on the relationship with customers as directed, official communication.

Storylistening When an organization pays sufficient attention to both types of communication, the stories that employees share through undirected channels are not only told but also heard. The same applies to external communication: The organization needs to be amenable to the stories customers, partners, the press, and others are telling about it and its products. "

Only those who know the stories of others can successfully communicate through stories; only those who know what employees have to say about specific tasks or their work in general can make proper use of strategic, directed communication without running into hidden obstacles or being perceived as unauthentic by their employees.

And only those who know the stories of their customers, B2B or B2C, can adjust the stories about their own products in a convincing manner. Even though internal and external communication serve distinct functions, they seem to have more and more in common—they “converge” as media experts like to call it. All internal communication is potentially also external as employees can share anything freely on social media. Particularly for larger organizations, this has actually always been the case to some extent. Just like employees have always had at least some idea about how the general public perceives their company, particularly when this perception is untrue, those on the outside can also develop a fairly accurate feeling for what things look like on the inside.

Communication as “Carrier Medium” of Organizational Culture Communication in social systems has the double functions of information exchange and being a carrier of meaning, values, knowledge, and identity. Stories are essential for this carrier function: The stories shared among employees reveal what they think about working in their company, which experiences they have in common, by which values they live, and how they construe the identity of their employer. There are of course also stories about the communication style itself: Can we communicate openly or are there any taboos? Does the hierarchical structure of the company have a strong impact on our communication at all? We found the following running joke in a company that had just completed a merger with another company (“Company A”) which had become the dominant partner in the process:

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Example

On the first day after the merger an employee from Company A and another employee from Company B stepped inside the office they would be sharing from now on. The Company B employee noticed a thumbtack on his chair, shook his head, picked it up, and took a seat. Soon he noticed a groan from the Company A employee who was sitting in his own chair with a painful expression on his face. “Did you actually sit down on the thumbtack,” asked the Company B employee. His new colleague replied: “Of course. There has to be a very good reason why Mr. Myer put it there.” Mr. Myer was the name of the CEO of Company A who would now assume the same position in the newly merged organization. ◄ This joke that was widely shared among former employees of Company B revealed their impression of various components of Company A’s culture: Identity: Meaning: Values: Knowledge: Communication:

Company A is completely different from us. Leadership decisions in Company A are accepted unconditionally; no questions are asked. Obedience is very important in Company A. It is attributed primarily to executives (Mr. Myer knows better). It is very hierarchical. Even if the employees have any suspicions regarding the thumbtack, they still need to accept it.

The image created of Company A in these stories is perhaps exaggerated, maybe even entirely based on prejudice. Nevertheless, it plays an important role in the meaning-making and communication of former employees of Company B. Any obstacles encountered after the merger can only be overcome successfully if the decision-makers of the new organization are familiar with this image. In the end, companies need to create an environment in which directed and undirected communication overlap more and more regarding what both have to say about reality. This balance is imperative if companies wish to continue their work in a creative, innovative, and efficient manner.

Literature Abels, H. (2010). Identität. 2. Aufl. Wiesbaden: VS. Demirkan, O., & Iversen, S. (2016). Chronik des Ergo-Skandals. http://www.handelsblatt.com/ finanzen/banken-versicherungen/versicherer-chronik-des-ergoskandals/13603678.html Dietrich, F. O., & Schmidt-Bleeker, R. (2013). Narrative Brand Planning. Wie Marken zu echten Helden werden. Heidelberg: Springer Gabler. Erlach, C., Orians, W., & Reisach, U. (2013). Wissenstransfer bei Fach- und Führungskräftewechsel – Erfahrungswissen erfassen und weitergeben. München: Hanser. Frenzel, K., Müller, M., & Sottong, H. (2005). Das Unternehmen im Kopf. Storytelling und die Kraft zur Veränderung. Wolnzach: Kastner. Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Vom wahren Sinn der Arbeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

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Grubendorfer, C. (2016). Einführung in systemische Konzepte der Unternehmenskultur. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer. Jost, H. R. (2003). Unternehmenskultur. Wie weiche Faktoren zu harten Fakten werden. Zürich: Orell-Füssli. Koziol, K. (2013). Der Sinn macht den Erfolg. Mit christlichen Werten Unternehmen führen. Ostfildern: Patmos. Quarks. (2019). Zugriff am 15.07.2019, from https://www.quarks.de/weltall/raumfahrt/darumschafft-es-seit-jahrzehnten-keiner-mehrauf-den-mond/ Reinmann, G. (2009). Studientext Wissensmanagement. https://gabi-reinmann.de/wpcontent/ uploads/2009/07/WM_Studientext09.pdf (letzter Zugriff am 25.07.2019)tart> Reinmann, G. & Vohle, F. (2005). Der Umgang mit Geschichten in Organisationen – Beispiele und Kategorisierungsvorschläge. In Reinmann, G. (Hrsg.), Erfahrungswissen erzählbar machen – Narrative Ansätze für Wirtschaft und Schule (S. 71–89). Lengerich: Papst Science Publishers. Schein, E. (2018). Organisationskultur und Leadership. 5. Aufl. München: Vahlen. Schneider, U. (2000). Management als Steuerung des organisatorischen Wissens. In G. Schreyögg (Hrsg.), Funktionswandel im Management: Wege jenseits der Ordnung (S. 79–110). Berlin: Duncker & Humblot Sommer, A. U. (2016). Werte. Warum man sie braucht, obwohl es sie nicht gibt. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Spitzer, M. (2007). Lernen. Gehirnforschung und die Schule des Lebens. München: Elsevier. Wittgenstein, L., & Anscombe, G. E. M. (2001). Philosophical investigations: The German text, with a revised English translation (3rd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

In the previous chapters, we explained in detail the importance of narrative structures for central facets of any organization. Underlying narratives are fundamental to the emergence of values, meaning, and identity because a large portion of all internal and external communication in organizations has a narrative form. They are indeed narrative systems. This begs the question how exactly this relationship shapes the everyday operations of an organization, its development and leadership, and its communication as well as treatment of knowledge. Some advantages of certain narrative approaches are more obvious than others, and we have already encountered them in several of the examples mentioned thus far: Change projects are more likely to succeed; companies gain more reliable access to knowledge, and meaning-making narratives improve the cooperation between teams and departments. In recent years, new insights have been added to this list, such as the superiority of narrative communication in marketing, the ease with which it activates relevant areas in our brains, its emotional qualities, or its ability to create empathy and identification. All of this has been documented in many dedicated publications on how to work with stories (see for example Sammer 2014; Müller 2014; Thier 2018). All of these advantages are real and impactful. And the methodological part of this book will discuss them in greater detail. "

Still, this leaves us with the question how exactly organizations benefit from the more general paradigm shift by which they consciously apply narrative work to a multitude of areas and processes. Why should they become “narratively competent organizations”?

We have seen repeatedly that organizations are (also) narrative systems. Narrations are a core requirement that enables organizations to structure themselves and pursue their goals. In this function, they join economic characteristics (companies), educational characteristics (schools and universities), or even philanthropic ones (charities), depending on the concrete case. Companies need to engage # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_4

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in market communication on the outside and facilitate the narrative exchange of experiences on the inside. And they need a story to encode and communicate their purpose (for more on this currently popular term, see Fink and Moeller 2018) and their expectations for the future.

Narration Creates Resonance On top of these specific aspects, there is also a general factor to be considered that sociologist Hartmut Rosa called “resonance.” Originally, he defined it as the connection between individuals and their environments. High levels of resonance allow individuals to act in the knowledge that their own actions are consequential and meaningful; they are thus able to react confidently to challenges and changes (cf. Rosa 2016, p. 52). The individual and the world are in sync. Metaphorically, “resonance” is reminiscent of the soundwaves emitted by the body of a musical instrument. These waves do not oscillate unidirectionally: An instrument also “resonates” with other soundwaves from the outside. When an electric guitar is played next to a piano, for example, the strings inside the piano begin to vibrate. A resonant organization is receptive to whatever waves might be coming from the outside and thus able to establish new resonances. Overtones are a suitable musical example to illustrate this multiplication of resonant interplays. A lack of resonance, on the other hand, creates a feeling of being cut off from the outside world. Actions and reactions seem disconnected, and the organization is incapable of meeting external challenges adequately. For Hartmut Rosa, resonance represents the essential “sealant” in social systems. Narrations play an integral part: If it is appropriate to think of social communities as resonant communities because they occupy the same resonance spaces, they are first and foremost narrative communities with a shared repertoire of stories that creates resonance. (Rosa 2016, p. 267; translation by authors)

Shared stories thus create resonance, which in turn creates a feeling of community and identity. "

An important implication of Rosa’s concept is that all social systems (including organizations) are resonant communities that communicate with stories. They are their primary tools to share knowledge, transmit values, and mold a common identity.

All of the qualities of stories we introduced in the preceding chapters are involved in the creation of resonance. This connection is twofold: • Resonance between employees and the company • Resonance between the company and the outside world, i.e., society, the market, the general public

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Some readers might shrug this off: This seems nice and all, but what’s the point of resonance? The short answer is this: Resonant individuals and groups are competent at spontaneously and flexibly reacting to internal and external changes and challenges. This case study exemplifies what a resonant company can look like: Example

A while ago we were approached by a medium-sized company with a long history to develop a suitable narrative for its future. The hope was that this narrative would carry the company through times of rapid change and digital transformation without losing sight of its roots. As such, the story was meant to become a kind of signpost for employees and win them over for upcoming change processes. When asked about the motives behind the intended changes, one manager replied during a strategy workshop that a clear vision for the future would be necessary for the company in order to survive. It needed to become agile and quick-witted, so it would not be outdone in the age of digital transformation. This is a common motivation that drives organizations to change processes. A widespread belief throughout the corporate world appears to be that those who do not change will inevitably be left in the dust. Consultants and the media disseminate this threat with remarkable regularity, and textbooks and magazines frequently write about the massive impact of digital transformation on companies. The manager’s reasoning in this concrete case therefore did not surprise us at all. It is an obvious reply, and with good reason: Of course there is huge pressure on organizations to change because our work lives are indeed transforming rapidly. Yet, this motive did not at all match the core of the organization we had identified during another workshop weeks earlier. Most employee stories had conveyed feelings of pride: pride to be part of the company; pride in one’s own work, knowledge, and abilities; pride in the meaning of the company and its role in society, etc. None of the stories had been about the fear of losing their jobs or that digital transformation might turn their whole work life upside down. Instead, the core identity of the organization was pride in what it had accomplished throughout its history until today. A resonant organization is aware of its core and integrates it into its communication and guiding principles. Therefore, we openly addressed this core during our strategy workshop and highlighted its importance for identification with the company. What would happen if decisions about the future were not obsessed with a need to transform? What if change in the company were not dictated by external pressure, but instead by the already well-developed internal identity? During the workshop we used a hero’s journey (see chapter “Hero’s Journey”) to equip participants with a useful tool for the development of a future narrative and guiding principle that could motivate employees and convince them that the planned changes were indeed beneficial. The metaphorical hero’s journey had two possible “calls to adventure”:

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• The first potential inciting incident was the fear of not being able to survive and of drowning in changes imposed from the outside. • For the second variant, the driving force was the inner strength of the organization which it could bring into the adventure world, i.e., the future, like an elixir. The metaphorical power of our hero’s journey soon led to a lively discussion among the participating managers about the different stories that might result from these two different starting points. Eventually, everybody agreed that a story about a terrifying monster chasing the protagonist would not be the right approach. Instead, the managers agreed on a narrative about a prince who leaves on a happy journey of his own volition. This was the most powerful moment of the workshop because the company, represented by its management, now entered a state of resonance with itself. It became aware of its own strengths that had already materialized through the many stories of their employees with their focus on a feeling of “pride in our own abilities.” This breakthrough allowed the managers to conceive of a future narrative that was not preoccupied with fear-mongering, but instead sought to further motivate the employees. The new guiding principle shaped by the prince’s journey painted the picture of an organization that strived to become market leader in the service sector. The company’s pride in its own competence not only made this goal desirable, but also quite realistic. It had become resonant with its own values and was thus able to write a compelling narrative for its future. ◄ Skeptics might interject at this point: So what? Maybe we are not in resonance. We’ll simply use fear to make the desired change happen. The only thing that matters is that we’re getting our employees to the finish line somehow! Why would it not work to use the outside pressure as the primary rationale for the new strategy? Why not use a “monster story”? This is indeed a possible path, and many organizations do take it. But they often end up paying a high price! Stories like this usually fail to motivate employees in the long run. They cease to perceive their work as meaningful and instead enter a mode of mere preservation. Silo mentality, inflexibility, and an insistence on established structures soon smother the initial impulse to change. Even if the change goes through after all, it requires a much larger amount of resources, a long list of stifling rules, and enormous effort. Resonance between an organization and its employees, its values, and its identity, on the other hand, makes change processes much easier, almost automatic—and of course also much more efficient and cheaper. An organization that is not in resonance. . . • . . . has employees who feel isolated and disconnected, without any sense of meaning. • . . . has employees who are demotivated and unable to see their own work within a bigger picture.

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• . . . has organizational processes that only run properly with strict hierarchies and clearly defined tasks, i.e., the organization is the opposite of agile. • . . . does not fully understand its customers or the market. • . . . has a hard time reacting to changes in market, politics, or society in a timely and adequate manner. • . . . is not agile, neither internally nor toward the outside. As mentioned above, Hartmut Rosa defined resonance as a distinct quality of the relationship between individuals and their world. It is the extent to which people are in sync with their environment, a “. . . kind of relationship with the world in which subject and world touch and simultaneously transform each other” (Rosa 2016, p. 298). To Rosa, alienation is the opposite of resonance. It is a feeling of being completely separated from the world, of not being a part of it, or of being in the wrong place. The same can be said about employees’ relationship with their companies. Across many different projects, we have seen numerous organizations in which the employees did not resonate with their colleagues or their workplace as a whole, but also many in which they did. Visitors often pick up quickly on the level of resonance in an organization; it colors its entire atmosphere. A slightly broader definition of resonance allows us to also apply it to a company’s relationship with its environment: “Resonance is not about echoes; it is about responses. It requires that both sides speak in their own voice . . .” (Rosa 2016, p. 298). This means that a company ought to have a good intuition about its customers, the market, and society while communicating openly and closely with its stakeholders. This is much more than “just” market research; the somewhat ambiguous term “intuition” is indeed the only word that can do this connection justice. Apple for example was definitely resonating exceptionally well with its environment during the 2000s. Every single product the company introduced under Steve Jobs—iPod, iPhone, and iPad—was not only a huge success, but also helped define entirely new product fields. The popularity of “podcasts” proves this to this day! Things had not always been this peachy for Apple, though. In the 1990s, several products had flopped, including the “Newton” which was a precursor of modern-day tablet computers. By contrast, Nokia is a company hailing from the same industry that did not resonate with its environment during the same decade. Apparently, it had lost its intuition for the market so badly that it was completely unable to react quickly to the iPhone—unlike Samsung. This does not mean that companies that are not resonant can never be successful for a while. But it requires significantly more energy, effort, and resources. Intensified market research may temporarily make up for a lack of external resonance, and middling internal resonance may be compensated for with increased investment in hierarchy, incentive systems, planning, and communication. Major companies might be able to afford this for a comparatively long time, but small companies usually do not have this luxury. When large companies stumble, however, a lack of resonance is most definitely one of the major reasons as the example of Nokia shows. Or to give another example from the time when we were writing this

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book: The acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer might one day be understood as a catastrophe caused by insufficient resonance.

The Paradigm Shift: Resonance Through Narrative Work If we accept, as Hartmut Rosa put it, that resonant communities are always narrative communities, the path toward higher internal and external resonance leads through greater attention to and appreciation for the stories and narratives of an organization. These stories exist either way: Employees share stories with one another about the company, their work, their hopes and concerns for the future and customers and the public about the products and services. Stories and narratives are central to everything we have discussed so far even though organizations may fail to realize their importance. Meaning, values, identity, knowledge, and communication have a narrative structure. A narratively competent organization knows this and is ready to tell and, more importantly, listen to these stories. Resonance is thus a necessary condition for becoming such a narratively competent organization. By exchanging stories and paying close attention to them, the individual parts of an organization (i.e., employees, departments, hierarchical levels) resonate with one another, and the entire organization resonates with the outside world. All narratively competent organizations that are in resonance share the following characteristics: • They encourage the internal exchange of stories. • They encourage internal storylistening. • By working with stories, they know their true lived values, identity, and their employees’ perceived meaning that shape their actions. • They can thus successfully and efficiently undergo change processes, innovations, and organizational development. • They know the stories told by customers and the market and can therefore swiftly react to changes. • They are able to use the right narrative communication to trigger the telling of beneficial stories by customers and the general public. • They can tell stories about the future that create resonance in customers and partners. • They provide employees with guidance and make their work meaningful. • They are agile. Discovering the narrative structures of an organization and making use of them is thus a major step toward greater internal and external resonance. This is particularly important in an era defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Organizations are absolutely required to react to these changes in an agile and quick manner (i.e., with the shortest possible planning time).

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Fig. 1 The journey toward a resonant, agile, and sustainable organization (# authors)

Narrative Work Is the Prerequisite to Agility, Transformation, Innovation, and Fast Reactions Part II of our book will elaborate on how exactly organizations can become resonant. The narrative methods we will introduce pave the road toward the narratively competent organization in the same manner the rabbit hole transported Alice to a new and wonderful world. Our list of methods is of course not exhaustive, and we invite you to develop your own methods in time. What we are presenting here are the fruits of our 20 years of experience in organizations and companies. You may commence your own journey anywhere, depending on your current interests and needs. There is no ready-made or definitive “roadmap.” Wherever you might begin, whichever rabbit hole you might choose, your journey is certain to make your company more resonant (see Fig. 1).

Literature Fink, F., & Moeller, M. (2018). Purpose Driven Organizations. Sinn – Selbstorganisation – Agilität. Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel. Müller, M. (2014). Storytelling. Die Kraft des Erzählens für die Unternehmenskommunikation nutzen. Berlin: SCM. Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Sammer, P. (2014). Storytelling. Die Zukunft von PR und Marketing. Köln: O’Reilly. Thier, K. (2018). Storytelling in organizations: A narrative approach to change, brand, project and knowledge management (Management for professionals). Heidelberg: Springer.

Intermezzo: Clearings in the Jungle of Narrative Terms Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Before we begin with our explanation of how exactly organizations can become narratively competent, it is about time to take a closer look at words like “story” or “narrative” that we have used almost “casually” throughout Part I of our book. In everyday conversations, we might also hear people talk about “storytelling” or similar terms without really making any clear distinctions between them. This synonymous use does not usually do too much harm in these situations. For our purposes, however, it might still be beneficial to establish some sharper definitions and delineations. In general, organizations, the public, and the media tend to use the word “story” for very different forms of communication: • Journalists might announce a “big story” in reference to a major event or topic on which they are currently doing research. • A manager might announce that the story for the future of the company is to become the number 2 on the global market. • During a workshop, participants make up a story using the metaphor of a fleet of smaller and more versatile ships in contrast to a large tanker. • A corporate video makes use of spectacular pictures accompanied by emotional music—and because of these qualities the video is perceived as “amazing storytelling.” Most of us have probably heard the words “story” and “storytelling” in a plethora of different situations. The four instances above also pertain to vary different communicative acts. In the first example, story is used as a synonym for topic; in the second example, it is a description; in the third, a metaphor; and lastly, in the fourth example, “storytelling” refers to a certain aesthetic and emotionality. All of these connotations definitely have something to do with the act of telling a story: Each story has a topic, uses descriptions and metaphors, and addresses emotions. But none of these instances captures the meaning of “story” or “storytelling” in its entirety, particularly if we are looking for a workable definition of these terms. Of # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_5

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course, we could simply accept that “storytelling” eludes all unequivocal interpretations and remains a blurry concept by nature. However, because we do not only use “narrativity” in a creative context, but also in the structural context of working with “narrative organizations,” a more precise definition will come as a significant boon. Aristotle (who else?) was the first to deliver a definition of “story” in the Western canon. In his Poetics which primarily discusses drama—especially tragedies, i.e., plays without a happy ending—he defines the basic structure of a story as follows: We have already agreed that tragedy is a mimesis of an action—purposeful and whole [. . .] A ‘whole’ is [something] that has a beginning, a middle and an end. A ‘beginning’ is what does not necessarily have to follow anything else, but after which something naturally is or happens; an ‘end’, the other way round, is what naturally is after something else, either of necessity or usually, but has nothing after it; a ‘middle’ is what comes after something else and has something else after it. Well-constructed plots, therefore, must neither begin at an accidental starting-point nor come to an accidental conclusion, but must have followed the principles we have given (Aristotle et al. 1997, p. 77).

What Aristotle is saying here—in his signature somewhat cumbersome, yet precise style—is essentially this: Stories (the Greek word used by Aristotle is “mythos”) are self-contained. They begin with something new, have several events in their middle part, and finally arrive at an end. This makes their plot “complete.” The Greek word for action is “drama” which also means “play” (i.e., a performed story) in our modern language. Its original meaning is neutral, without the presentday connotation of “drama.” Here is an example of a story that is “complete” according to Aristotle’s definition: Start: Middle: End:

John and Mary meet each other and fall in love (something new happens without the need for any prerequisites). Their relationship is going through a rough patch: fighting, jealousy, even violence! Mary stabs John after a particularly vicious fight and thus their relationship is over. There might still be legal consequences for Mary, but the love story comes to an end.

Using Aristotle’s take as a point of reference, many more philosophers and writers have since then tried to refine this definition of “story.” One particularly prominent perspective was developed by English author E. M. Forster whose most famous novels include A Room with a View and Howard’s End. In his 1927 collection of literary lectures “Aspects of the Novel,” he made a clear distinction between what he calls a “story” and a “plot” in which he used the former term very differently from Aristotle (and this might initially lead to some confusion): To

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Forster, the simple phrase “The king died and then the queen died” is a story, but it does not fulfill Aristotle’s criteria. It merely lists two events that happened in succession; there is no causal connection between them. “The king died and then the queen died of grief,” on the other hand, is a “plot” (i.e., what Aristotle referred to as “story”) because it has a middle part that connects beginning and end causally: Start: Middle: End:

The king dies. The queen is sad about his death. Overcome by grief, she dies too.

Thus, the queen’s death is a consequence of her grief which in turn is a consequence of the king’s initial death. Literary scholar Gerald Prince proposed a list of the minimum conditions for a story in his book A Grammar of Story (1973) which refers back to both Aristotle and Forster. We may summarize his definition like this: An act of communication has a narrative structure, i.e., is a story, if the following criteria are met: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

There is a protagonist or a group of protagonists. There are at least three points in time (t1, t2, t3). There is a description of the state of the protagonist(s) at t1. A change occurs in the protagonist(s) or their environment at t2. There is a description of the final state of the protagonist(s) at t3. There is at least one difference between the final state at t3 and the initial state at t1.

Based on these criteria, Forster’s example of the grieving queen would qualify as a story (or a “plot” in his own words): 1. Protagonist: Queen. 2. Three points in time: t1—The king dies; t2—The queen grieves; t3—The queen dies of grief. 3. t1: The queen is alive. 4. t2: The queen is overcome by grief. 5. t3: The queen is dead. 6. Difference: Dead vs. alive. This means in conclusion that Forster’s simple sentence has a narrative structure and is therefore a story—though it could of course still benefit from a little more embellishment to make it more interesting. With this general definition in tow, we can now distinguish between different terms in the world of storytelling. Here is our little lexicon:

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Fig. 1 The narrative structure (# authors)

" Narrative structure: An act of communication has a narrative structure if it

meets all six criteria listed above. This can be the case for texts, conversations, films, etc. We can visualize narrative structures with the following illustration (see Fig. 1):

" Narrative: A narrative is a narrative structure that may be told explicitly or be

implied in all different forms of communication. This is fairly abstract, so let us take a look at an example. An employee of a large company says: “If I want to know anything here, I have to jump through all kinds of hoops before I finally get the right answer.” This complaint includes a narrative! Start: The employee wants to know something. Middle: The employee needs to search around, ask several colleagues, etc. End: The employee finally obtains the desired information. This concrete narrative structure does not refer to an isolated event; it is a recurring sequence. It is an explicitly told narrative that comments on the idiosyncratic culture of an organization—and any organization has a lot of these! An example of an implicit narrative is the Western European custom of shaking (right) hands: Offering the hand with which one might draw their sword means that they are unable to do so. The implicit narrative is thus: Start: I meet somebody during a time of war. Middle: They offer me their unarmed drawing hand. End: We avoid a battle. Handshakes thus started out as a gesture of peace that was later codified as a gesture of politeness. " Story: A story is a concrete sequence of events or actions that is built on a

narrative structure. An example of a story based on the narrative mentioned in the last definition might look like this: “This morning I wanted to know the sales for product group X in the last quarter, so I asked John, our project leader, but he said that the controller should have them. But the controller also didn’t. . .” and so on. Narratives and stories are obviously closely connected. Many different concrete stories work together to shape an overarching narrative (also known as a “metanarrative”) that reveals “how things are” in a given organization. In other words: Stories are concrete iterations of narratives (although some stories are also completely independent).

Literature

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" Narration: A narration is the concrete act of telling a story. If a story is thus a

sequence of told events, the narration is the specific way in which it is told. The disgruntled employee from before might tell their story multiple times, and a little different with each repetition. The first time, the story might start from the very beginning; another time it might go like this: “I finally got the data from Z. But you can’t imagine what I had to go through! Before getting it from Z, I had to talk to Y and X. . .” and so on. In the latter case, the story is told in reverse, which means a change to the narration. And there are many other imaginable variants of the same story. There is a narrative structure—a sequence of start, middle, end—behind each story or narrative. For organizations, this sequence becomes relevant under various circumstances. Even at the most superficial level, stories are everywhere! During their breaks employees sit together to exchange them. As such, there is a myriad of different stories and variations of these stories that address different cycles and conditions, and through their interplay, they shape superordinate narratives. In turn, this means that there is of course also a large number of these narratives that describe and define the organizational culture. Informal stories are part of each social system. Families also have narratives and stories about “how we are,” about whether they are happy or unhappy families, or about their lived values. Is thriftiness more important than charity? Stories and narratives are among the most influential means of communication in all social contexts. We hope that these definitions were able to clarify the similarities and differences between some of our central terms. Now it is time to get started on the many concrete benefits stories and narratives may offer organizations.

Literature Aristotle, Whalley, G., Baxter, J., & Atherton, P. (1997). Aristotle’s poetics. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the novel. San Diego: Harcourt. Prince, G. (1973). A grammar of stories. An introduction. The Hague, Paris: Mouton.

Part II Change, Transformation, and Renewal

Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Whenever we are consulting companies with the help of narrative methods, we are pursuing specific goals. The concrete shape of these goals depends on the requests of the organization and might look like this: “Gather the experiential knowledge of one of our experts who will retire in a few months.”—“Support us in revising our leadership guidelines.”—“How can we attract the right employees with our recruitment strategy?”—“We are looking for a great story to boost our content marketing.”—“We need help with drawing up a large-scale change process.” Companies and nonprofit organizations have approached us with vastly different wishes and projects in mind. Their seemingly dissimilar requests represent more or less distinguishable areas of operation. At first glance, they might seem to have little, if anything, in common and be completely independent of one another. Securing expert knowledge and winning over employees for a change process might look like thoroughly unrelated goals. And using storytelling to imbue a project with a certain emotional quality to make it more attractive to potential customers can feel far detached from the ambition to make managers more mindful of internal values and attitudes and thus improve their leadership skills. The truth is, however, that this motley collection of requests and goals has quite a lot in common, and all of these ambitions strongly influence one another. We established their common core in Part I of this book: All of them take place within the framework of a shared, narrated culture. They share the same stage. What makes the narrative approach so elegant is that it allows its users to start at any point and move on from there, step by step, to turn their organization into a narrative one—into an organism that is continuously adopting and taking new forms.

As soon as the first story is being told about it, the narrative organization comes to life. # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_6

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It does not matter if an organization hopes to use narrative approaches for knowledge management or change processes: Stories can build bridges and close the gaps between different departments, purviews, or teams. As soon as the first story is being told about it, the narrative organization comes to life. And this may happen in every single one of these seemingly so different areas and projects.

The Stone That Makes a Ripple in the Water: or Something Else Entirely? Think back to a time when you threw a stone into a lake. Right after its impact it immediately sinks down to the bottom. And yet, something about the lake has changed: Even the smallest stone makes circular ripples. They are big at first, and then gradually get smaller until the water is perfectly still once more. The force of the stone, transferred to the surface of the water by the throw, abates over time. This image makes for a great portrayal of any outside intervention in an organization. A company might hire external consultants to support its development or run a specific project. Each project inevitably comes to an end—and for a while some effect or change might be felt throughout the organization. But just like the ripples on the surface of the lake, this change soon fades away. The systemic perspective of organizations has a technical term for this evanescence: “autopoiesis.” Every system has the tendency to stabilize, and it cannot be easily changed by external forces. In fact, the system might even “swallow” these forces whole. All too often, interventions disappoint in the long run because they are brought into an organization from the outside without making a lasting impact on its core. Some readers might object that the lake actually is no longer the same after the stone throw. After all, there is now a new stone at its bottom, right? And sure, that is a difference; there is indeed a new stone now where there was no stone before. Yet, the stone’s impact on the system “lake” is negligible. If we want to stick with the metaphor, we have to throw hundreds or thousands of stones into the lake to make a noticeable difference. Eventually, the bottom of the lake will rise, push the water upward, and thus change its appearance on the surface. Throwing this many (metaphorical) stones would be tedious and exhausting. Even the most well-intended attempts to force a change in the distant future are guaranteed to burn out external and internal consultants alike. The autopoiesis of a system is always stronger than any individual—regardless of how many stones they might throw into the lake.

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What about our claim then that each narrative approach may start from anywhere to create a narrative organization, i.e., a flexible, adaptable organism? How can we assume that a narrative intervention will not simply be swallowed by the lake as well?

Finding answers to these questions requires us to leave the lake metaphor behind—because it is based on a premise that contradicts the foundation of narrative work: Somebody applies force (throw) to add one object (stone) to another (lake) and thus bring about change equivalent to the size of the stone (ripples). In psychological terms, this thinking betrays the expectation that, given the same circumstances, an action will always result in the same intentional and predictable outcomes. Or in other words: The image of the stone that makes ripples suggests a clear-cut chain of cause and effect that is characteristic of traditional organizational theories and management models. These approaches assume episodic change in organizations, i.e., rare, directed adjustment to a changing environment. Initial state and target state are thought to be stable; only the change period itself brings temporary instability. In various ways, this position stems from a classic model proposed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s (Lewin 1947). His theory revolved around three distinct phases— unfreeze, transition, refreeze—and assumed that change always means a disturbance in established attitudes and behaviors. Today, the theory of episodic change is usually contrasted with the concept of continuous change that regards organizations in constant flux: Whereas episodic change [. . .] focuses on the shakeup of established patterns, this [continuous change] is about becoming aware of continuously unfolding adaptation and shifts to allow for a shared understanding of the current situation and facilitate a ‘recalibration’ of established patterns to altered expectations. As such, the driving force for the establishment of new patterns in an organization is the collective creation of meaning. (Chlopczyk 2017, p. 38; translation by authors)

Nevertheless, we have worked with many organizations in which managers clung to their belief in controlled interventions for established systems, exposing the implicit theory that these interventions must follow a strict cause–effect chain with plannable changes and an objectifiable reality. The narrative approach to organizations questions these assumptions; it is based on completely different convictions and thus creates a potential for completely different interventions. Returning to our image of the lake, we would need to find a way to ceaselessly make ripples. But does that mean that we are forced to keep throwing stones after all? No. Because the ripples we are looking for are able to make their own ripples until eventually the entire surface of the lake is in motion. Only then can we enter a state in which we are “becoming aware of continuously unfolding adaptation and shifts” (Chlopczyk 2017, p. 38). Or we could also say: Only then may a narrative organization emerge that resonates with itself and its environment. Thus, we need to say goodbye to the metaphor of the lake. With narrative approaches, we never expect things to work in simple cause–effect chains. And

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we acknowledge that lasting change requires more than our input as consultants or one-time interventions.

How to Bring the Narrative Perspective to Organizations So what exactly does it mean then to look at organizations from a narrative point of view? As we established in Part I, all organizations are built around stories and narratives that are continuously exchanged, developed, and redefined. This perception greatly affects the core beliefs of consultants and managers who wish to work narratively, and they need to regularly reevaluate how exactly their work can truly live up to this central assumption. We are convinced that the narrative perspective is a logical follow-up to movements in management and organizational theory that were based on systemic-constructivist views and popularized by Peter Senge’s “fifth discipline” during the late 1990s (Senge 2006). Its roots, however, date back even further. A brief timeline of some of the most influential milestones in the development of narrative thought will allow us to shed some light on its history. In the 1960s, Douglas McGregor, a management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, proposed a dialectic between what he called Theory X and Theory Y. These two theories differ with regard to how they conceptualize the working morale of employees. Unsurprisingly, McGregor is often credited as one of the founding fathers of modern management theory and his work has been developed further into various models of participation, responsibility, and delegation. Theory X assumes that employees have no intrinsic motivation to work and can thus only be motivated with extrinsic rewards and strict control. Theory Y, on the other hand, claims that employees do have intrinsic motivation and desire ample freedom of action (cf. Ulich 2011). "

The most notable thing about McGregor’s model is that both theories can be true under different circumstances. Depending on the personal views of managers, organizations develop in one of these two directions. Those who are at the top of the organizational hierarchy (usually senior managers) directly influence the principal structures and processes of their organization.

Leadership informed by Theory X will thus prioritize rewards and sanctions while stressing control and a strong level of hierarchy. As a consequence, employees become passive and reluctant to take responsibility. In the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the theory creates a reality that confirms it—employees’ behavior adapts to the expectations of their superiors. Frederik Laloux (2014) expanded on McGregor’s work with his organizational theory based on the premise that “you reap what you sow.” He described the ways in which employees’ behavior shapes the culture of their organization and thereby perpetuates a distinct take on reality. Companies following Theory X are usually strongly hierarchical, implement a duty to report, reward individuals, and are thus

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highly competitive merit systems. By contrast, companies shaped by Theory Y usually have a flat hierarchy and are project organizations in which the efforts of teams, and thus cooperation, are valued above the contributions made by individuals. Fittingly, Laloux suggested that management in organizations with a strong hierarchy often invests a lot of energy in maintaining established structures and views of reality: Hierarchical structures with non-hierarchical cultures—it’s easy to see the two together like oil and water. That is why leaders in these companies insist that culture needs constant attention and continuous investment. In a hierarchical structure that gives managers power over their subordinates, a constant investment of energy is required to keep managers from using that power in hierarchical ways. [. . .] (whereas) culture in self-managing structures is both less necessary and more impactful than in traditional organizations. Less necessary because culture is not needed to overcome the troubles brought about by hierarchy. And more impactful, for the same reason (Laloux 2014, pp. 228–229).

Efforts to keep a clearly defined view of reality intact are thus the norm in hierarchical organizations. They tend to reject deviations or changes. Narrative organizations, on the other hand, perceive individual experiences with all of their facets and potential contradictions as normal—as opportunities in fact! They do not stubbornly cling to any preconceived rules and are thus able to pay more attention to each individual employee. The resulting appreciation of narrative management encourages active participation throughout the organization: Employees are directly involved in central processes and developments (such as changes in organizational culture or values) regardless of their hierarchical position. Thus, employees strongly identify with their employer and remain committed to their work. In his 2013 book Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, organizational psychologist Edgar Schein discusses how equal and respectful communication keeps an organization “healthy,” by which he means innovative and adaptable to environmental changes. This idea corresponds to Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance which we introduced in Part I (see chapter “Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations”). Instead of telling employees what to do, managers should primarily ask questions—questions to which they do not know the answers. This approach connects seamlessly to the narrative position: Informing and interrogating are replaced with telling and listening. Old-fashioned employee surveys tend to be structured around immobile guidelines. In the narrative mode, conversations are instead guided by experiences. Traditional protocols play a minor role at best, and instead narrative interviews (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”) become the method of choice.

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Table 1 Comparison between the traditional and the narrative view of organization and management Traditional view Implied epistemology: Positivism Objectivity claim: It assumes the existence of one objective reality that is the same for everybody. What does not fit into this reality is rejected Communication and reports are expected to be neutral and concise (bullet points, management summaries, numbers, data, facts) Communication style: Interrogating, informing Defining goals is the most important part of strategic development

Theory X (McGregor 1960): Humans are lazy by nature. As a rule, employees are unwilling to put effort into their work and try to shirk their responsibilities whenever possible • Therefore, a hierarchical organization is required (allowing for little participation) • Maintaining the reality employees shape as a consequence requires management to spend a lot of energy (cf. Laloux 2014)

"

Narrative view Implied epistemology: Constructivism Subjective worldview: It assumes that each individual has their subjective reality which might differ from the reality of others without being false Communication and reports are expected to deliver information in a subjective-emotional way with a lot of context and in a narrative form Communication style: Listening, narrating The journey is more important than the destination, i.e., things can change along the way. The narrative view pushes companies and their employees to engage constructively with their past, present, and future. One central concern is the reflection on important events, projects, and changes as well as the behavior of management and employees in these situations Theory Y: Humans are willing to work by nature. As a rule, employees are ambitious and motivated to assume responsibility • Therefore, flat hierarchies in smaller organizational units are possible (with a high degree of participation) • Employees are able to make new experiences. This allows for a continuous transformation into a narrative organization

This is because the narrative position is interested in the “story” behind the facts. What was the context in which a decision was made, knowledge gained, or a project planned? Which experiences define the employees’ daily responsibilities? Which stories to they tell one another? And which assumptions are their stories based on? Surveys and “interrogations” can never reveal these hidden contexts. Their discovery requires open-minded listening.

Table 1 is a compilation of some of the most substantial differences between the traditional and the systemic-narrative positions on organization and management. As we have seen ourselves in countless projects, traditional views are still very much alive in many companies.

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Entryways into the Narrative Warren The narrative view of organizations and the approach that comes with it are thus fundamentally different from the principles of management that continue to dominate major companies today: Narrative interventions allow employees to make genuinely new experiences by enabling an open dialogue, focusing on listening, and respecting all voices and perspectives equally. Narrative organizations do not attempt to suppress the subjective nature of “truth” and “reality” by imposing norms. The constructivist position appreciates each and every take as a subjective interpretation of reality and thus paves the way for a multilayered understanding of corporate life. The immediate effects of narrative projects on a company are therefore easy to see: They introduce employees to a genuinely new form of collaboration that the vast majority of them deem highly desirable. "

This is a decisive step toward initiating a fundamental change in an organization, instead of merely planning a short-term intervention (like throwing a stone into a lake): In the eyes of employees, traditional interventions are rarely more than old wine in new bottles. They perceive them as annoying or useless, or do not even take them seriously in the first place. The narrative view, on the other hand, is much more likely to speak to employees. Narrative interventions usually do not struggle to be perceived as meaningful, worthwhile, and “right” for the company.

At the moment we are observing a growing interest in companies to work with the narrative perspective. Proofs of this are the many publications on narrative work beyond storytelling in communication (see for example Chlopczyk 2017; Tonninger and Breu 2016; Bachmair 2019; Chlopczyk and Erlach 2019) or the growing number of participants at events like “Beyond Storytelling” (a network of organizational development consultants who work with narrative methods and organize annual meetings, events, and conferences for a growing community). Consultants across many different fields are increasingly willing to adopt a narrative position and create new experiences for the organizations they work with. A wide range of methods is available, and the best part is that you may choose freely where you would like to start. The various approaches and the unique experiences they enable always coalesce and vitalize one another. If you nonetheless wish to go through the methods in a particularly beginner-friendly order, storylistening might be the best starting point for most first-time users (see Fig. 1). Storylistening refers to all narrative methods that are dedicated to the collection of stories. Its foundation is the narrative ambition to create an appreciative, genuinely interested listening situation that encourages others to share their stories in an open and unadulterated manner. Examples include narrative (continued)

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Fig. 1 Narrative approaches on the journey toward becoming a narrative organization (# authors)

interviews (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”) and storylistening workshops (see chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”). Storydoing happens during all narrative interventions that make new experiences possible for employees. In the chapter on narrative change architecture, we will discuss an example of a change process for which established beliefs were invalidated by a successful intervention in a different setting, i.e., the canteen. Through the new experiences with the “canteen project,” employees could feel real change as they saw their persistent belief that projects always remain unfinished in their company debunked. This old conviction would have doomed any new change process from the start. Storyexperiencing refers to the same kind of intervention—but from the other side, i.e., from the perspective of the people who make new experiences and thereby enrich their identity narratives with new (exceptional) stories. The greater the number of new experiences and exceptions, the more powerful these exceptions to the rule become. Changes in attitudes and beliefs are only possible when individuals make new experiences that cause them to question their personal value systems. Story co-creation is a process for which several members of the same organization get together to create a new story. One concrete example is the (continued)

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co-creation of a new shared future narrative. In the chapter on narrative strategy development, we will describe the steps leading to an open story about the future that incorporates a multitude of different perspectives. A storyrunner team produces a base story which is then further revised by so-called story circles. The final product is thus a co-created narrative resulting from an ongoing development process. Finally, storytelling is the communicative component of narrative interventions. Its focus lies on the directed and purposeful application of stories in the communications of a company alongside the rhetorical means to reach target groups in emotionally effective ways. In our examples here, this might involve a company-wide retelling of the new future narrative by a manager or the dissemination of information about the “canteen project” via the intranet. One particularly popular storytelling method is the springboard story (see chapter “Springboard Story”). But storytelling should not be the end of the journey, merely one more station during the transformation into a narrative organization. In fact, each single narrative method is its own invaluable step toward this transformation, a step toward being in resonance with the surrounding world. Reaching this goal requires that listening to the stories told by employees becomes second nature: Just like turning the page and starting the next chapter, storylistening keeps revealing opportunities for further developments and new experiences. However, senior management plays a key role at the beginning of this journey: Is it going to be a helpful mentor to the process, or rather a gatekeeper seeking to nip any possible change in the bud? As McGregor and later Laloux (see above) illustrated with their models of change based on Theories X and Y on the working morale of employees, executives’ beliefs shape their organizations. If senior management oversees processes with a commitment to the narrative perspective and its interventions, the sky is the limit for the emerging, new kind of collaboration. More and more participatory processes can write more and more stories and thus make space for more and more new experiences—expanding the creative potential of an organization further and further. "

As soon as the first story is being told about it, the narrative organization comes to life. Each new story can then widen its employees’ horizon of experiences to spur further change and make transformation second nature.

To help you with your leap into the rabbit hole like Alice and discover your own Wonderland on the other side, full of potentials and opportunities, we would like to show you the many different entryways in Part II of this book. In accordance with the narrative perspective, the interventions, methods, and tools introduced in the following chapters are not meant to claim that “this is how it’s done.” Instead, think of them this way: “Here is something we could try!”—there are so many possible approaches

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for different companies, needs, and contexts. Whatever your own first step toward narrative work might be: It will change your organization—a little at first, and then more and more—toward more resonance, agility, and spontaneity.

Literature Bachmair, S. (2019). Storywork: Facilitating the transformational power of story in brand and organizational development. In J. Chlopczyk & C. Erlach (Eds.), Transforming organizations – Narrative and story-based approaches (pp. 89–102). Springer International Publishing, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Chlopczyk, J. (2017). Wandel und Stabilität in der Geschichten erzählenden Organisation. In J. Chlopczyk (Hrsg.) Beyond storytelling. Narrative Ansätze und die Arbeit mit Geschichten in Organisationen (S. 23–45). Berlin: Springer Gabler. Chlopczyk, J., & Erlach, C. (Eds.). (2019). Transforming organizations – Narrative and storybased approaches. Springer International Publishing, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Laloux, F. (2014). Re-inventing organizations: A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage in human consciousness. Brüssels: Nelson Parker. Lewin, K. (1963). Gleichgewichte und Veränderungen in der Gruppendynamik. In K. Lewin (Hrsg.). Feldtheorie in den Sozialwissenschaften. Ausgewählte theoretische Schriften (S. 223–270). Bern: Hans Huber Verlag (englischsprachige Erstveröffentlichung 1947). McGregor, D. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schein, E. (2013). Humble inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling (The humble leadership series, Vol. 2). Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Broadway Business. Tonninger, W., & Breu, U. (2016). Wegmarken im Möglichkeitenland. Wie der narrative Zugang Menschen und Unternehmen beweglicher macht. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer Verlag. Ulich, E. (2011). Arbeitspsychologie. 7., überarb. u. aktualisierte Auflage 2011. Vdf Hochschulverlag.

Narrative Interviews: The Big Stories Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

The Stories of Others: How to Learn More About Employees, Customers, Partners, and the Ecosystem of an Organization Through Storylistening We discovered in Part I that, to a narratively competent organization, storylistening might be even more important than storytelling. Organizational identity, culture, values, meaning, and knowledge are always based on the existing stories and narratives that employees tell one another and that shape their behavior as well as the behavior of people on the outside. In order to become narratively competent, an organization must become familiar with these stories and learn to genuinely appreciate them, and the best way to start is often the approach of the narrative interview. Storylistening with this method means paying close attention to the stories that different stakeholders, i.e., employees, customers, partners, have to tell about a company as these stories disclose common perceptions about the company itself and its products. Because regardless of how many positive stories there might be inside an organization: If the public has a completely different impression, something is fundamentally awry! Narrative interviews make it possible to include the stories of others into an organization’s strategy as the following example of a South African company demonstrates: Example

Alan Fleming is a social entrepreneur from Cape Town. He developed an affordable and uncomplicated fish farming technology to help people in the townships earn a living. His goal was to provide families with the means to farm their own fish which they can then sell to restaurants around the city. For a project by the Institute for Applied Narratology (IANA) at the Hochschule der Medien (a tertiary institution for media studies in Stuttgart, Germany) in cooperation with the Siemens Foundation, narrative interviews were conducted with Alan Fleming, his financial backers, employees, partners, # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_7

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and other relevant stakeholders. Alan had expected that the other interviewees would primarily talk about the fish farming project itself. However, many of the partners told stories that focused more on the concrete benefits for the participating families, about how fish farming had improved their lives. This was a huge revelation for Alan: His business model had never been about “growing fish” but instead about “growing people.” Following the project, he completely changed the core story (see chapter “Core Story”) of his social enterprise (cf. Siemens Foundation 2018). ◄ This example shows very clearly that it is not only important to know the stories told by customers, but also those told by employees. In many cases, they might have a completely different image of their organization than their superiors—in a positive or negative sense. Hearing their stories allows managers to recognize potential and identify problems at an early stage.

What Are Narrative Interviews? The roots of the narrative interview lie in qualitative social research, and sociologist Fritz Schütze is often credited as one of its original creators (Schütze 1983). We do not have the space to talk in depth about the history of the method and their many variants here. Great introductions to these topics can be found in Müller and Grimm (2016) or Glinka (1998). Narrative Interviews Create an Open Space for Storytelling While “regular” interviews ask interviewees about facts or their opinions, narrative interviews encourage them to tell their stories. The only thing they are interested in are experiences. And the only task of the interviewer is to assist the interviewees with becoming storytellers. But why is it beneficial to simply let interviewees talk instead of asking questions like with common customer and employee surveys? It is because this approach actually changes the employees’ answers. Questions about opinions and facts usually yield responses that interviewees deem agreeable. When they are encouraged to tell their stories openly and without restrictions, however, interviewers can gain much deeper insights into their actual behavior. If employees are for example asked explicitly if they always make sure to cater to all of their customers’ needs, they are virtually guaranteed to reply in the affirmative. Which employee would ever openly admit to neglecting customers? And usually they also believe their own responses. Narrative interviews, however, might nonetheless discover that the word “customer” or the concept of customer orientation is completely absent from many of the employees’ stories. And this would in turn show that the company is in fact not customer-oriented. Researchers have long been familiar with this problem of traditional interviews, the problem known as “social desirability.” Narrative interviews enable organizations to circumvent it.

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The Role of the Interviewer The differences in the interviewers’ behavior is what most clearly distinguishes “regular” from narrative interviews. Their role is not to uncover facts, but to inspire their interviewees to share their personal stories. Interviewers still ask questions. But their questions only pertain to experiences: “How did this idea first come up?”— “Did you experience this directly?” and so on. Whether or not a narrative interview is successful thus depends much more on how the interviewer acts than on a well-made list of questions. The key attributes are: • Amenability and appreciation: Interviewers do not only give impulses; they also listen proactively by giving clear, nonverbal signals to show their interest in their interviewees’ stories. Checking one’s cell phone or excessive note-taking usually breaks this flow and suggests that the interviewer is not really paying attention. The best way is to make eye contact and show interest with nodding and affirmations (“That’s interesting”). • Discourse instead of topic management: Interviewers need to encourage storytelling instead of asking for facts. The interview usually does have a certain framework, e.g., a concrete product, but the interviewer avoids suggestive questions like they are for example commonly found in market research (e.g., “Do you like the product?”—“What do you think about feature X?”). Instead, interviewees are invited to share their own personal experiences with the product (“Please describe the first time you ever used the product.”). If interviewees never mention a particular feature throughout the entirety of the interview, it probably was not important to them. And this can be very insightful! More traditional questions can of course expand on the narrative format, but they should be asked after the narrative interview. The same goes for the use of narrative interviews in (internal) culture analyses: Employees are not asked about specific topics (“How about teamwork?”); they are only asked to share their experiences: “You were talking about Project X. Tell me more about what happened during this project.” • Narrative focus: Interviewees are bound to mention some facts, opinions, or analyses in their stories. In response, interviewers always ask about concrete experiences that illustrate these: “Do you remember a situation in which this was the case?” Types of Narrative Impulses There are two different types of so-called narrative impulses. The first are biographical narrative questions that basically ask for the “full” story. For example, we always begin our narrative interviews with the employees of an organization with the following impulse: “Please tell us everything that has happened until now since the first day?” Sometimes, when employees are able and willing to talk for a long time, this might even be the only question we ask. In actuality, however, interviewers often need to keep the flow of the conversation going. The following are some examples of biographical impulses (see Fig. 1):

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Fig. 1 Biographical narrative impulses (# authors)

The second type of narrative impulses are episodic narrative questions. They ask interviewees about their concrete experiences in certain situations or circumstances. The following are some examples of episodic impulses (see Fig. 2): Narrative interviews in organizations usually incorporate both biographical and episodic narrative impulses. The most important thing is that interviewers refrain from stubbornly clinging to a pre-made list of questions. Interviewees decide what the interview is about; the role of the interviewer is to keep them talking.

Applications for Narrative Interviews Narrative interviews can be used in many different situations: Customer Surveys What are customers saying about our company and our products? And does that match our own stories? Narrative customer surveys can provide valuable feedback for the marketing and further development of products and services. Market Research Before introducing a new product or service, conducting narrative interviews with individuals from the target population can be extremely useful. It is of course not yet possible to ask about the experiences with the new product or service; instead, the

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Fig. 2 Episodic narrative impulses (# authors)

questions revolve around the living environment in which they are meant to be used. If the service is an app that helps women avoid dangerous situations, the questions focus on their everyday experiences in public spaces. If the product is a building material, the questions are about construction. And if it is a water filter, nutrition questions are at the center. It is usually not advisable to introduce the concept of the new product or service and then ask interviewees if they would use it: Their answers have for the most part little to do with their actual behavior. Here is a personal experience (Michael Müller) to illustrate this: Example

A few years ago there were plans to create a new TV station with a focus on a cultural program. Before its launch I was part of a panel during which I was introduced to the concept of the station and subsequently asked if I would watch it. And I was genuinely excited. Of course, I said—at last a channel with a sophisticated program! One year later the station was bankrupt. When I read about this in the newspaper, I realized that I too had only ever watched it twice. Remembering my enthusiasm during the panel, I was surprised. I reflected on my own television habits: I’m an avid reader and usually only watch TV when I’m too tired to read. But when I’m tired, I don’t really want to watch intellectually challenging shows, and instead opt for action flicks or shallow entertainment. The market researchers at the panel had been unable to uncover my habits with their traditional approaches. If they had instead asked me about my typical media consumption,

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my usual television habits, etc., they would have realized that I was not a potential customer to them. I’m guessing that this was the same for many of the other interviewees as well. The launch of the TV station was therefore based on wrong assumptions. This would explain why it only lasted for a year. ◄ Employee Surveys If employees are allowed to share their personal stories about their organization, a much clearer picture of their positive and negative experiences emerges. The organizational culture, including unspoken rules that influence behavior, becomes more transparent and this knowledge can in turn inform change processes. Narrative interviews are required for the creation of narrative system maps (see chapter “Narrative System Maps”). Narrative Interviews Supported by Event Curves for Knowledge Transfers One method we use particularly often, especially for knowledge transfers, is the narrative interview alongside an event curve. The basic idea is the same as with the completely open narrative interview, but the impulse with which the interview begins is different. While the open format uses the aforementioned narrative impulses (biographical and episodic questions), the variant with event curves sets the narration in motion with a visualization. The so-called event curve (see chapter “Event Curve”) assists the interviewees with structuring their stories around emotionally impactful experiences. Before the actual interview begins, the interviewee is asked to think back to moments that were particularly positive or negative during a specified period of time and draw them on a curve. This period can span several months or even the entire time during with the interviewee has worked for the organization; its exact time span is decided prior to the interview. The visualized memories provide the starting point for the narrative interview. In contrast to the completely open variant, the use of an event curve directs particular attention to experiences that stood out emotionally to the interviewees. This focus is especially helpful for knowledge transfers because the interview functions as a means of restoring the experiential knowledge of experts or those involved in a particular project. We will explain how exactly knowledge transfers work in the chapter on transfer stories. Regardless of the situation in which narrative interviews are used, they always result in a treasure trove of stories. These stories (in anonymous form) are a priceless asset to marketing and other areas. Checklist: Preparing and Conducting a Narrative Interview 1. What is the purpose of the narrative interview (employee or customer survey, market research, knowledge transfer, etc.)? 2. Who will be interviewed? In market research and customer surveys, even relatively small groups of six to twelve interviewees can yield very good (continued)

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4. 5.

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results. For employee surveys, the ideal number depends on the size of the company, but even in large organizations, 30 interviewees are a good benchmark. Think about the narrative impulse with which you would like to begin the interview alongside other narrative questions that you might ask during the conversation. Make sure that the interview takes place in a quiet environment. Recording the interview is very important! On the one hand, many nuances of the interviewees’ stories might go completely unnoticed until the interviewer has a chance to listen to the recording; on the other hand, interviewers are able to pay full attention to the interviewees without the need to take written notes. A subsequent transcription is usually the best practice for the evaluation. Watch your own behavior closely: The interviewer’s main task is to encourage the interviewees to tell their stories! Do not ask about facts unless the interviewees introduce them first. Once all interviews are over, listen to all of them one more time before evaluating them.

Literature Glinka, H.-J. (1998). Das narrative Interview. Eine Einführung für Sozialpädagogen. Weinheim und München: Juventa. Müller, M., & Grimm, P. (2016). Narrative Medienforschung. Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung. Köln: von Halem. Schütze, F. (1983). Biographieforschung und narrative Interviews. Neue Praxis Kritische Zeitschrift für Sozialarbeit und Sozialpädagogik Jg 13, S. 283–293. Siemens Foundation. (2018). The fabulous fish farm. https://www.empowering-peoplenetwork. siemens-stiftung.org/en/about/projects/

The Storylistening Workshop: Sharing Experiences Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

What Is a Storylistening Workshop? At first glance, the storylistening workshop might come across as a fairly basic narrative setting. Yet, it is arguably also among the most effective methods! It usually takes between two and three hours and involves up to 16 participants. The premise is simple: After a “search question” is presented, each participant shares a memory about a personal episode or situation. Search questions may come in three major forms. First, they might be an open call for stories such as: “Think back in time and tell us about moments that represent best what is typical for the company.” Search questions may also introduce a specific topic and thus direct the participants’ focus toward related memories: “Can you think of a situation in which you made a very positive experience when you were collaborating with different departments?” Lastly, search questions can be resource-oriented and thereby gather information about best practices or exceptions that pertain to positive past experiences: “Can you think of a situation in which everybody was working together in an agile/appreciative/. . . way?” Depending on the search question, the goals of the storylistening workshop will differ. We will say more about this later. The basic structure of the workshop, however, stays the same. Once everyone has had a chance to share their personal experience, the group searches for patterns that crop up throughout the stories, for example similarities and differences or recurring themes. The workshop might be followed by further steps and narrative methods, or it might stand by itself. After all, each storylistening workshop is already an intervention because it allows for a completely new access to the everyday experiences of others: # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_8

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• The storylistening workshop creates a neutral space for listening. • It gives employees an opportunity to share their own stories. • And it facilitates shared meaning-making by placing various perspectives side by side. The focus on concrete events in the storylistening workshop gives the participants authentic access to the selected topic. This is because they do not exchange their opinions and attitudes about the organization at a descriptive-declarative level; rather, they collectively connect their personal experiences by underscoring their narrative structure.

Case Study with the SWM Munich The teams for personnel and organizational development at the Stadtwerke Munich (SWM; the public utility company of the city) were interested in learning more about storylistening workshops in order to integrate them into upcoming change processes. (SWM gave permission to use this example in our book.) The participants were human resources employees, members of organizational development teams, or “multiplicators” who assumed an organizational development role across different departments. One of the core goals for personnel development in 2019 had been to facilitate and implement “new forms of cooperation” suitable to meet the demands of the digital transformation. In addition to more technical concerns, the main task for organizational development consultants was to introduce a new mindset among employees and thereby raise their willingness to cooperate across departmental lines. The purpose of our storylistening workshop was to help achieve this goal. Its search question was thus: “Can you remember moments that demonstrate great collaboration at the SWM?” We first split the workshop group into pairs in which two participants exchanged several memories and then helped each other with selecting the most suitable one to share with the entire group. Next, all eleven participants presented the memories they had selected. And at the end, the group decided on a title for each story (see light gray cards in Fig. 1). Once all stories were told and their titles decided, the group began to discuss them together. Stories were moved around repeatedly as the group deliberated them, compared them with one another, and searched for emerging patterns and values that allowed for inferences about SWM in general or the company’s various teams. The workshop participants came to the conclusion that cooperation at SWM was taking many different forms: At times, it could be very formal and rule-bound; at other times, it was uncomplicated, direct, and informal. The colorful patchwork of memories about cooperation surprised the organizational development team. In their preliminary talks, the focus had almost exclusively been on the formal nature of cooperation that had been hindered by the boundaries between departments and purviews.

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Fig. 1 The storylistening workshop brings the employees’ stories to light (# authors)

The light gray cards (see Fig. 1) show the most important questions and thoughts during the discussion: • • • •

How much “novelty” can the system take? How do we talk about reality, and why? How can we benefit more from our competences and diversity? How can we make integration easier?

The workshop unveiled an intricate network of these questions and the many scenes that had taken place in the employees’ stories. This helped the group make the relatively abstract questions more concrete and approach them with tangible experiences. Both the workshop atmosphere and the reflection phase were met with positive feedback. The participants lauded the mere fact that it had created a space to share stories and listen to the stories of others because it had acquainted them with a completely different, appreciative, and open form of communication. In particular, they emphasized the benefits of reflecting on the individual stories as this process was able to reveal latent patterns—still overlooked positive experiences that made work in the company easier and beliefs or behaviors that continued to present obstacles. Depending on the concrete goals of the storylistening workshop, the

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final discussion may go into great detail about a specific topic, e.g., potential conflicts between teams. The shared reflection imbued previously empty words with meaning: The goal of finding “new forms of cooperation” was made accessible through concrete experiences and associations.

Various Applications and Variants of Storylistening Workshops The search question selected for a storylistening workshop determines which purpose it can serve for an organization: • A call for stories about a specific topic, e.g., cooperation in the case study above (“Can you remember moments that demonstrate great collaboration at the SWM?”), sends participants in a concrete direction without restricting them to only positive or negative experiences. • An open call for stories removes the specific topic (e.g., “Which moments show what is typical of the SWM?”). These search questions are ideal when a neutral position regarding the thoughts, patterns, experiences, and attitudes in a company is preferred. They are particularly suitable for culture analyses or narrative system maps (see chapter “Narrative System Map”) because they examine whether there are any unexpected views among the employees in general or among specific individuals or groups. • Resource-oriented search questions are best suited for the preparation of change processes as they streamline the collection of best practices and success stories which can then be communicated back to the company and thus provide guidance for other employees. An example for our SWM case study could be: “Which moments do I recall that show best how we can work efficiently across departments?” The exchange of positive experiences along the lines of a suitable search question can increase employees’ willingness to accept changes during organizational change processes. On the one hand, the search question directs their attention selectively toward positive experiences about a specific topic, e.g., cooperation among departments. This causes them to remember positive situations they may wish to re-experience. On the other hand, listeners who have not made similar experiences before will be motivated to make them in the future. Regardless of whether an open or specific search question is selected, the narrative approach to change processes leaves mere attributions (“We are. . .”— “We want. . .”—“We think this and that. . .”) behind and concentrates on personal experiences instead. Example

Let us assume a company wishes to become an “agile organization.” Nowadays “agility” makes an appearance on the mission statements of almost every major company, but it is frequently just an empty word that their various members fill with some form of personal meaning. Everybody might have their very own

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interpretation of what “agility” actually means, and this does not change until the word is suffused with a shared definition—ideally one that was created together. Instead of asking “what does agility mean to us” and compiling a list of attributes from the responses, the storylistening workshop chooses a narrative form for its question: “What have we already experienced that might help us become an agile organization?” This search question gathers concrete past experiences of which the employees are reminded when they think of the goal “agile organization.” Linking concrete experiences to an abstract concept makes the latter more tangible as it is turned into something employees can see and feel every day. It is a collective journey into the past to find the factors that have created the present-day “organization in our heads” which in turn allows an organization to discover a path toward the desired future. ◄ Applications of Storylistening Workshops There are many situations in which companies can use storylistening workshops: for teambuilding processes; to solve conflicts between teams; for culture analyses; during change processes; or, if a resource-oriented search question is selected, to collect success stories and best practices. The method is quite simple, but the impact of the collective sharing and listening is substantial! As such, storylistening workshops may be used repeatedly in the situations listed above without too much effort.

Hands On: How to Hold a Storylistening Workshop Take your time to select the ideal search question for your workshop. Open-ended questions are perfect for the identification of patterns and attitudes across an organization and thus provide a solid foundation for testing hypotheses or conducting culture analyses, whether or not they are connected to change processes. Resourceoriented search questions are most likely to uncover positive memories of past successes and can thus provide helpful materials for the further dissemination in an organization. They are often extremely effective to kick-start change processes. Invite 8–16 employees for 2–3 h (depending on the size of the group). At the beginning of the workshop you introduce the search question to the group before they form pairs. For about 20 min these pairs assist each other with finding memories of concrete events and experiences. Next, each individual participant shares the personal story they find most relevant with the entire group. There is not yet any discussion at this stage. However, you should ask the group to find a suitable title for each story. All of these titles are collected on moderation cards and pinned to a whiteboard. Similar stories are arranged in clusters. The clustering method depends on your search question and may for example focus on similarities and differences or group all negative and positive stories together. Even though storylistening workshops try to shift the focus of the group toward concrete experiences, participants’ stories might still rely on the attribution of qualities (“We are like this. . .”) rather than the description of events (“Then this

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happened. . .”). Through sensible moderation you should try to counteract this tendency and encourage participants to give concrete examples: “Can you give us an example for this?”—“Can you think of a concrete situation that illustrates what you just told us?” Once the final member of the group has shared their story, the reflection phase begins. The participants work with the complete set of stories and consider the search question, similarities and differences, emerging patterns, etc. Sometimes the clusters change during this phase and the visualization should reflect this: Move the cards around if the discussion calls for it! The reflection in the group fills otherwise empty words with concrete experiences and associations. Train-the-Trainer Guideline for Storylistening Workshops Storylistening workshops are equally suited for major change processes in large companies as they get employees actively involved in them. Their experiences can inform the necessary “fine-tuning” to increase the likelihood of successful, lasting change. The guidelines below (see Table 1) provide an overview for internal coaches and managers interested in running a storylistening workshop in their organizations. The final steps of this train-the-trainer guideline make sure that the results of the workshop are being secured: The participants are asked to nominate the most memorable and informative story with regard to the planned project or change process.

We Need Your Experiences! We started Project XX at the beginning of 20YY. Since then we’ve accomplished a lot! A culture analysis in our company has shown that our employees are fully committed to the goals of XX. But many of us are still unsure how to achieve them! We understand that we can’t plan a project of this size from the top. This is why we need your experiences and the experiences of your colleagues! We would like to ask you to conduct a storylistening workshop in your team to exchange your personal experiences with the XX process with one another. Our goals are to (1) enable all employees to gain new perspectives on the project by exchanging their views with others and (2) to share vital experiences with other teams. Please allow 2 h for the storytelling workshop and follow the guidelines below. It’s easy to do! The perfect group size is 8–12. Of course your workshop may also have a few more participants; just make sure to allow a little more time in this case. You will need the following materials: • Moderation cards • A surface where you can pin these cards (whiteboard, etc.) • Poster “Our Story”

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Table 1 Guideline for the storylistening workshop No. 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Description Introduction Explain to the employees that the goal of the workshop is to learn about their experiences with Project XX so far. You may also give some background on XX, but don’t go over 5 min. Explaining the Procedure Ask your employees to think back to a concrete experience related to XX that captures the project particularly well in their eyes. Make sure to stress the importance of concrete experiences (“Three weeks ago I met X and he asked me. . .”) rather than general processes (“We always do it this way. . .”). To make this a little easier, ask your employees to first pair up with a partner and help each other for 10 min with remembering relevant situations. Working in Pairs In pairs, the employees decide which of their experiences they would like to share with the entire group. It should be something concrete that they experienced themselves. To avoid a ruckus, the employees should remain in the same room during this step. Sharing the Experiences with the Entire Group Back in the plenum, the employees share their stories one by one. At the end of each story, ask the employee which title they would give their story if it were a Hollywood movie. Write the title on one of the moderation cards and pin it to the whiteboard. Do not yet discuss the stories at this stage. Make sure that each employee gets to tell their experience first. By the way: Applause after each story is a nice touch! Clustering Stories Once all employees have told their stories, the group thinks about possible clusters (types) to group some of them together. Are there for example stories that only talk about internal processes of one team and others that mention collaboration between teams? Or maybe there are stories about interactions with customers and others about interactions with superiors? These are of course only examples! The group should decide together how to best group their experiences with XX. Picking the Most Informative Story Decide together which of the stories might be the most helpful one for other teams. Which story should others definitely know to learn about XX? Documenting the Most Informative Story Write down the story you selected on the poster “Our Story.” Think about what its central message is. In addition, decide on three to-dos as a takeaway from the

Time 5 min

5 min

10 min

40–60 min (depending on the number of participants)

15 min

10 min

15 min

(continued)

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Table 1 (continued) No.

8

9

Description workshop that are meant to make it easier for everybody to advance XX in the following weeks. Communication Put up the poster in clearly visible spots throughout the organization. Everybody should always be reminded of the story and the other experiences shared during the workshop. Take a picture of the poster and upload it to a website. This way, other teams can benefit from the story too! Ending the Workshop Thank all employees for their interesting stories and their willingness to share them with others.

Time

5 min

Event Curve: Identifying Central Experiences Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

What Is an Event Curve? Event curves, also known as “fever charts,” play a vital role in systemic therapy settings and coaching addressing biographical questions. Depending on the goal, the horizontal timeline may represent any time span—an entire life, a work biography, or the duration of a certain project. The y-axis shows ratings between +5 and 5 (see Fig. 1). Regardless of the time span covered, the visualization is a helpful tool for interviewees to more easily remember and arrange their positive and negative experiences from a point t0 to the present. Event curves may precede a narrative interview (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”) and serve two main functions for knowledge transfer. The Interviewee Determines the Content of the Conversation The person asking the questions is usually the one deciding the direction of a conversation. Interviews on a specific topic or semi-structured interviews (see chapter “Learning Histories”) are a classic example of how many companies try to access their employees’ knowledge and experiences: They select a topic prior to the interview and then have interviewers ask interviewees questions about it. To a certain extent, being in charge of choosing the subject thus puts interviewers into a position of power over the interviewees. The event curve reverses their roles as the interviewees become the ones deciding what will be discussed during the interview. The curve determines the topics before the interview even begins: Peaks in either direction along the time axis indicate points of particular “emotional relevance” (more on that below). It does no longer matter which topics or questions the interviewer might deem particularly important—and this is one of the central ideas of narrative work. In the context of gaining and spreading knowledge, this approach can also reveal previously overlooked topics (for more details on this, see chapter “Transfer Stories”). Lastly, making the subject selection the responsibility of the interviewees is a signal of appreciation: # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_9

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Fig. 1 The event curve (# authors)

The interviewer communicates trust in the interviewees’ ability to take the conversation into their own hands. A situation that could easily turn into a form of interrogation thus becomes an act of listening. Event Curves Identify “Critical Incidents” and Thereby Point to Experiences in Which Experiential Knowledge Was Gained In the 1950s, psychologist John C. Flanagan (1954) was developing a handy classification system to differentiate between effective and ineffective work activities. The result was an observation and survey method to identify situations in which an individual’s behavior leads to significant situational changes in the shape of outstanding successes or failures. Flanagan called situations like this “critical incidents.” As their name suggests, they are deviations from regular processes and thus become highly relevant not only in specific situations; they also have a lasting impact on the individual. Research on expertise (e.g., Gruber 1999) was able to show in the 1990s that these critical situations elicit a large number of different emotions— and emotions in turn play a vital role in the creation of experiential knowledge. Brain researchers (e.g., Roth 2006) have time and again confirmed how emotions function like passwords for encoding new information into memory. Emotionally significant

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situations enter our memories more easily, whereas it usually takes conscious thought processes to remember neutral events. "

Critical incidents are events that (1) result in transformation (the behavior leads to change), (2) are closely tied to emotions, and (3) generate experiences. By focusing on particularly positive or negative moments, the method of the event curve steers interviewees toward these critical incidents and thus toward those situations in which they gained experiential knowledge.

Hands On: How to Use Event Curves Begin by asking your dialogue partner or interviewee to think back to situations at work that were particularly positive or negative to them. If they ask in return what exactly “positive” or “negative” means, your reply should be open-ended; otherwise, it might restrict the selection too much: “Just go back in time and see if you remember any situations that feel particularly positive or negative.” Hand out an empty event curve on a piece of paper and explain what the axes mean: The y-axis indicates how positive or negative an event was; the x-axis shows different points in time. This is probably when the interviewee will ask about the point t0: How far back in time should they go? To their first day on the job? Or to the first day in a new project team? The time span of interest might also be the months that have passed since a major re-organization took place in the organization. You should decide the time to be covered together with the interviewee as it will determine t0. If there is no fixed starting point, e.g., when the focus is not on the duration of a specific project, the interviewee might ask: “How far do I have to go back in time to gather as many experiences as possible that are relevant for this?” What is relevant does of course depend on the goal of the event curve and thus on the purpose for which it is used. We will introduce a few possible applications below. For the next 5–15 min the interviewee draws points or a line on the curve by themselves. Ask them to add brief explanations next to each peak or inflection point. Once the interviewee finishes their event curve, the interview can begin. Invite them to talk about the curve they have drawn and explain the experiences represented by the points. In a workshop setting with several participants, you can display all event curves side by side and discuss their similarities and differences. We have never seen a group in which all members plotted the exact same memories. Different people often experience the same situations with a different emotional intensity, and thus their event curves might have vastly different progressions. (See for example also Fig. 2: The red line indicates the relatively uninteresting average of all curves. The 17 superimposed individual curves, however, expose huge differences in the perception of critical incidents. The x-axis was divided into quarters during this workshop.)

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Fig. 2 The superimposed event curves provide an insightful visualization of the many different perspectives in the memory of a team (# authors)

Event curves make transparent how greatly even the perspectives and emotional evaluations of the same situations may differ across employees. Comparing a set of multiple curves can thus be a constructive first step to find possible explanations for these differences.

The Various Applications of Event Curves As a straightforward narrative approach that directs the interviewees’ attention toward critical incidents, i.e., meaningful events in the past, the visualization with event curves can benefit organizations in various contexts: • Event curves to discover relevant experiences. As we described above, event curves excel at unearthing hidden experiential knowledge for the goal of knowledge transfer—because they find the “right situations” without pushing participants in a pre-set direction. They can be used in one-on-one talks with leaving experts or in workshops where they can for example secure team knowledge at the end of a project. • Event curves in workshops also visualize different perspectives in teams. As Fig. 2 illustrates, the members of the same team working on the same project might still highlight different events in their shared past. The method accentuates the appreciation for different, even contradicting, truths and realities that is characteristic of the narrative position. Each person remembers the past differently, depending on their experiences, personality, or needs, and their memories may also change over time. Narrative work therefore eschews the search for “one truth” that applies to all. Instead, it sets out to find individual truths that exist in the present and encourages everybody to share their truth with others. Event curves make these various perspectives visible and show employees how others see the world through different eyes, with their own unique perceptions, attitudes,

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and conclusions. This also makes each perspective open to further reflection in the group. Subjectivity is no longer perceived as a confounding variable; instead, it grants access to the personal experiences of each and every employee (Erlach 2017, p. 280). • Event curves to collect stories worth telling. Events that stand out as particularly positive or negative on the event curve indicate critical incidents, i.e., moments that led to significant change. These incidents make for particularly good stories because, from a storytelling perspective, they introduce higher stakes into the narration. As a rule, stories become more captivating when they confront their protagonists with critical situations like crises, challenges, or important tasks. If the protagonist manages to resolve the situation, the story communicates a transformation, a turning point that differentiates its beginning state from its end (for more on the definition of stories, see chapter “Intermezzo”). Event curves highlight such personal turning points that may then be used as motivating stories throughout an organization to support transformation processes.

Literature Erlach, C. (2017). Wissenstransfer mit Geschichten. In: J. Chlopczyk (Hrsg.), Beyond storytelling. Narrative Ansätze und die Arbeit mit Geschichten in Organisationen. (S. 275–301). Berlin: Springer Gabler Verlag. Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327–358. Gruber, H. (1999). Erfahrung als Grundlage kompetenten Handelns. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber. Roth, G. (2006). Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Wissensvermittlung und Wissenserwerb – Erklärungsansätze aus Lernpsychologie und Hirnforschung. In: Ralf Caspary (Hrsg.), Lernen und Gehirn. Der Weg zu einer neuen Pädagogik (S. 54–69). Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder.

Learning Histories: Learning from Multiple Perspectives Karin Thier

What Are Learning Histories? Learning histories started as a method for academic research, making them one of the few narrative approaches that were not originally designed for consulting purposes. The goal of each learning history is to give a narrative form to the (experiential) knowledge of individual employees and teams about significant events in the past (e.g., memorable team experiences, mergers, reorganizations). For this reason, the method assembles and evaluates the perspectives of various employees before condensing them into a single story which can subsequently be disseminated across the organization in designated workshops. This makes it possible for other employees who are working on similar projects to learn from their colleagues’ past mistakes or come up with entirely new solutions to existing problems—with the help of learning histories, they can benefit from otherwise unobtainable information. The resulting “experience story” has a narrative form and has conventionally been presented as prose, though it may also be a comic, podcast, or video. The classic format is a document of 25–100 pages with two columns (see Fig. 1). The right column is for the actual retelling of the story and incorporates as many original quotes as possible. This is where the readers find the employees’ immediate perspective on the events. The quotes are anonymous and individuals only identified by job titles (e.g., employee in marketing, project leader in human resources, customer of company XY, intern). Depending on the participants’ preferences, even these identifiers might be cut and replaced with placeholders such as animal names. The right column connects the individual quotes in a way that turns them into a coherent and emotional story, sometimes by adding explanatory passages. By contrast, the left column consists of the analyses and (at times provocative) comments by the writers of the story who are also known as “learning historians.” Their task is to get readers to ask questions about those aspects of the story that might still be somewhat unclear or only superficially addressed in the quotes. The experience story can also take the shape of several connected or even independent short stories. In general, its presentation allows for a lot of flexibility # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_10

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Fig. 1 Experience story with two columns (# Karin Thier)

and creativity: All kinds of media may be used. To make the story as effective as possible, it should be preceded by a brief introduction that gives the readers helpful tips as to how to engage with it. It should also provide some context regarding the project, the participating employees, and the goals the organization hopes to achieve with the story. Together, the experience story and these supplementary materials constitute the final experience document to be disseminated in the organization (Kleiner and Roth 1998; Thier 2015). Learning histories are stories about important events in an organization that capture the (experiential) knowledge of employees or teams in a narrative form and recount the events from multiple perspectives. Their goal is to store and impart experiences, suggestions, and tips, so the organization may benefit from this knowledge during subsequent projects. The ultimate goal of this storytelling method is never the experience document itself; it is the use of this document by the organization to prepare for future projects and increase their chance of success. Making the knowledge and experiences of individuals and groups accessible to everybody is therefore always a means to the end of avoiding past mistakes and improving analogous processes in the future (Kleiner and Roth 1998). The Origins of Learning Histories The first learning histories were written at MIT in the 1990s. Their theoretical foundation was a form of organizational learning proposed by Peter Senge in his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline (1990). Learning histories started thus as a methodology to identify and present experiences and knowledge about central organizational processes from various perspectives simultaneously. In 1997, there were already over 15 learning history projects at MIT that experimented with different methodological and theoretical approaches, e.g., ethnography, action

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research, history, or journalism. The Harvard Business Review article “How to make experience your company’s best teacher” (Kleiner and Roth 1997) that described their methodology and initial results quickly became a source of inspiration for other researchers with similar interests, especially in Europe. In Germany, the department for educational psychology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart are among the institutions that have run several research projects on knowledge management and transfer since 2000. Learning histories have played a major role in these projects and the method has been further developed with regard to its efficiency and ease of use. Meanwhile, an MA program in history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has implemented and modified learning histories since 2004. At the time of writing, learning histories were used worldwide as a method for project debriefing and knowledge management. They have also received growing attention as a research method as shown by projects in Turkey, Pakistan, and China (Gearty and Coghlan 2018, p. 463).

How Do Companies Benefit from Learning Histories? By focusing on events, people, and experiences, learning histories can offer organizations a long list of benefits. Of particular importance is the participating employees’ boosted sense of trust and appreciation. Even those who previously felt left out or ignored get a chance to have their voices heard with the method. The workshops and discussions about the experience document enable a collective reflection on experiences that are relevant to everyone, and the employees are able to talk about their fears and can build stronger relationships with one another. The palpable increase in trust transforms an organization into an environment that encourages employees to learn together and perceive their work as meaningful (Kleiner and Roth 1998). As the demand for skilled employees continues to grow, companies that manage to cultivate this feeling stand out from the rest. Another advantage is that experience stories may address topics and issues that are not usually the center of attention even though they might strongly influence the inner workings of an organization. With its anonymous quotes and thoughtprovoking commentary, the method can facilitate an open discussion without exposing the participants. Learning histories are moreover a central building block of the knowledge management in an organization. They make knowledge transferrable between different groups (Kleiner and Roth 1998). Instead of copy/pasting “success stories” or “lessons learned” that have nothing to do with their lived experiences, the readers of learning histories can learn more about the concrete contexts that have led to certain events and situations in their own company. These insights are much more relatable and easier transferred to their own situation. On top of that, learning histories may even initiate or analyze change processes because they can lead to a dialogue about the processes and behaviors in an organization—and this dialogue can in turn uncover new potential for change. Learning histories can have the following effects on companies: • Increased trust in the company and stronger commitment • Collecting the knowledge of project teams • Identifying and discussing taboos

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Securing and transferring experiences, knowledge, and tips Kicking off and supporting change processes Laying open concrete ways to improve processes Making time for a reflection on important events in the past and learning for the future

Kleiner and Roth (1996), the founding fathers of learning histories, therefore concluded that the positive effects of storytelling methods are so plentiful that they ought to become a standard tool in the future repertoire of organizations.

The Six Phases of Working with Learning Histories In most instances, organizations use learning histories with a concrete goal in mind. They might wish to document an important project to learn from the experience, or they might want to accompany an ongoing change process with a learning history. The method is also effective for the further development of an organizational culture or as the groundwork for employer branding activities. In practice, each use of learning histories goes through the following six phases (see Thier 2003, 2018) (see Fig. 2): 1. Planning During the planning phase a team of “learning historians” gets together to decide on the frame and scope for the use of the method. Its members are external consultants alongside employees of the company who are willing to support the procedure. Once formed, the team trawls the organization for “noticeable results,” i.e., recent projects and events that warrant closer examination. The team also

Fig. 2 The six phases of working with a learning history (# Karin Thier)

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selects a target group that is expected to benefit from the finished learning history. In addition, this phase needs to settle all contractual and budgetary questions. 2. Interviewing Unsurprisingly, the interviews are at the heart of this phase. Depending on the exact project or topic, a total of 10–50 people should be interviewed. When selecting the pool of participants, the team needs to ensure that as many different viewpoints as possible are included in the process—hierarchies should not be a deciding factor, and the interviewees should range from interns to CEOs. By including customers, distributors, and consultants, external impressions become just as important as the internal perspectives! The team first develops a guideline for the interviews. During the actual interviews, however, this guideline should merely be used for orientation to make sure that all aspects the organization wants to cover are addressed during the conversations. The main challenge for the learning historians is to strike the right balance between the interviewees’ personal stories and anecdotes and the organization’s interests. Appreciation and active listening are key! The approach to interviewing when writing learning histories combines two common interview techniques of qualitative social research: the theme-centered interview (also known as problem-centered interview) and the narrative interview (see chapter “Narrative Interviews”). It is theme-centered because it addresses themes and topics that were selected and decided prior to the interview; it is narrative because it allows space for the interviewees’ personal stories (e.g., Flick 2014). The second phase ends with the “raw material” that will eventually turn into the learning history. 3. Extracting This phase is about bringing structure to what Kleiner and Roth (1996) called “the mass of data.” The team transcribes all relevant quotes from the interviews and maybe already groups them into preliminary categories. Next, the learning historians refine these categories by searching all available materials (i.e., interviews and documents) for central themes, significant quotes, and contradictions. The extraction process is based on the concept of the “grounded theory” proposed by Glaser and Strauss according to which all attempts at interpretation must be substantiated with the available data until new data only confirms existing hypotheses and does no longer suggest new ones. The evaluation also strictly follows the three imperatives of the storytelling method (see chapter “The Three Imperatives of Learning Histories”). The phase ends with a “scaffold” for the learning history. 4. Writing This is when the team of learning historians pens the actual learning history. The writing process follows the anthropological concept of “jointly told tales” (Kleiner and Roth 1996; Van Maanen 1988). This means that the interviewees and the learning historians tell the story together: The combination of the original quotes and the commentary by the historians creates a factual, meaningful,

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cohesive, and interesting story. The visual representation usually has two columns (see Fig. 1). 5. Validating Unless stated otherwise, the first draft of the learning history is then returned to the interviewees, so they have an opportunity to double-check the quotes and possibly make alterations or addenda. This phase is crucial to ensure the acceptance of the learning history among the employees and ascertain that everybody agrees with the final selection and presentation of the original quotes. Should anybody have concerns or disagree with anything, the text can be revised collaboratively by rewriting certain parts, making them anonymous, or relocating certain elements to the left column for the commentary of the learning historians. 6. Disseminating The learning history is now complete and includes the interviewees’ experiences, suggestions, and lessons learned. However, this is not yet the end of the process! For the story still needs to be told throughout the organization. To make sure that the new learning history can have a lasting positive impact, the organization needs to allow for sufficient space in which employees may discuss the story and ask questions about it. Ideally, as many employees as possible from all different departments benefit directly from the learning history. A great first step is a dedicated workshop during which interviewees and other employees in similar situations get a chance to talk about the contents of the story and learn from one another (Thier 2018, pp. 92–95). The best practice for further dissemination depends a lot on the individual needs and circumstances of a given company. Possible follow-ups include the use of the story as a project debriefing tool for new teams in relevant projects, its integration into the training of project leaders and managers, or the use as an interactive knowledge transfer tool.

The Three Imperatives of Learning Histories According to Kleiner and Roth (1998), the entire process of creating a learning history, particularly the extraction and writing phases, ought to follow these three imperatives that represent the general guidelines for the use of the method: • The research imperative: The method must uphold scientific standards and clearly distinguish between facts, data, hypotheses, and interpretations. • The pragmatic imperative: The final learning history must be structured and written in a way that is accepted by its readers, so it may lead to the largest possible learning effect in the organization. • The mythic imperative: The procedure and resulting story need to take into consideration the concrete context of the organization and provide an interested read (Thier 2015).

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The creation of learning histories is one of the most intricate narrative methods, demanding a lot of time and manpower. Because both the procedure and the final story result in so many substantial benefits for the organization, however, it is well worth the effort! By now, there are simplified variants of learning histories with efficient resource management that have been used successfully in many organizational contexts (for more information, see Thier 2017). While the traditional fields of application have been knowledge and change management, more and more attention has been given to learning histories in the contexts of employer branding, recruitment, marketing, and PR in recent years. They have also been used for internal team development and the coaching of teams in conflict situations (Thier 2017; Thier and Erlach 2013).

Case Study at the Aircraft Engine Manufacturer MTU Aero Engines The following is a case study on the use of a learning history for project debriefing at the aircraft engine manufacturer MTU Aero Engines. Instead of the classic format with two columns (see Fig. 1), the presentation of choice was a fictional story with comic strips (example published in Erlach and Thier 2015, pp. 103–121). The company was about to finish the construction of a complex high technology hall for the series production of “Bliskshop 77,” a delicate engine component cut from a titanium block that is partially responsible for the generation of engine noise. MTU had developed a procedure with which this component can be produced from a single block, eliminating the need to weld it from several separate parts and dramatically decreasing the noise pollution in the workshop. In 2013, the company had even been awarded the so-called Innovationspreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft (English: “Award for Innovation in the German Economy”) by the German government. Due to its many subsections, ventilation and energy needs, etc., the construction of the production hall for this “Bliskshop” was a flagship project for the company. As such, the heads in charge of the responsible teams of engineers spent a long time contemplating the lessons learned and best practices of the project. One source of concern had been an external supplier with which the internal construction team had run into several difficulties throughout the collaboration. The internal team who had worked alongside the external general planning company had repeatedly complained about these issues, even going as far as noting that the external employees’ behavior had at times suggested a complete unwillingness to collaborate. Unsurprisingly, this conflict had made the project more time-consuming and expensive. Because there had been other instances of troubled collaboration with externals in the past, management decided to use the experiences with this major project as an opportunity to better understand the source of the problem. The goal was not only to see where the reluctance to work together came from; the company also hoped to discover ways to improve future collaborations. During the planning phase for the learning histories, the project leader and the team of learning historians decided on the following topics for the procedure: diffuse understanding of roles (duties and responsibilities in the project), cooperation

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(working together in teams and with externals partners), and leadership (acceptance of and reaction to leadership). The company thus set out on a journey into the unknown—because nobody knew which knowledge, opinions, or experiences the learning histories might reveal. All that was certain was that the team of learning historians had to expect many different perspectives that would not fit into a simple schema when it came to complex issues such as responsibilities, cooperation, and leadership. A thorough dissection of the multifaceted project to construct the new high technology hall instead required the team to explore all of these questions in an interconnected fashion. Understanding them fully called for an active reflection process with those involved which might teach the company important lessons about how they interpreted their own roles in the project or how they felt about the collaboration with their external partners. The use of a narrative methodology furthermore required that all participants were open to talk about potentially sensitive topics for which the project needed to create an appreciative and open-minded atmosphere. Therefore, the company decided from the beginning to anonymize all statements and not to distinguish between testimonies from individuals at different hierarchical levels. As a consequence, the employees perceived the storytelling project right away as an opportunity to share and discuss their knowledge about specific cycles or mechanisms and thereby set in motion a learning process in their organization. Specifically, the creation of the learning histories went through the following methodological phases: 1. Determining and Analyzing Areas of Knowledge The first phase began with a conversation during which management introduced the project and its milestones and specified the areas of knowledge that the learning histories should capture (perspective on roles, cooperation, and leadership style). These areas went on to become the guideline for the structured parts of the employee interviews which were conducted as a combination of two distinct styles: narrative interview (i.e., the employees spoke freely about the project as well as experiences and lessons learned from their personal perspective) and structured interview (i.e., the interviewers asked explicitly about experiences and events pertaining to the selected topics). Apart from the topics that had been relevant in the eyes of management, “appreciation” emerged as a reoccurring concern in the narrative part of the interviews and was thus added as a central component to the learning histories. 2. Visualizing and Presenting the Findings As the team of learning historians deliberated on the best possible way to present and document the employees’ stories, it quickly realized that a lot of what the employees had shared during the interviews was of a very sensitive nature and hence difficult to discuss openly in the company. Therefore, the team decided to detach the interviews from the real world and transfer them into an analogous, fictional setting centered around an archetypal protagonist. The results were four separate short stories (about project roles, cooperation, leadership style, and appreciation). The stories did not take place on a construction site but on

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“Route 77” (a portmanteau referring to iconic Route 66 and the product name “Bliskshop 77”), and the goal of the team in the story was not to coordinate a major construction project but to transport airplane parts to distant “Santa Montagna.” The protagonists were depicted as comic characters. Their experiences in the fictional world, however, resembled those of the real employees during the construction project. The interviewees had for example repeatedly spoken about decisions the project leader had made without ever consulting anybody else, including management. Even though these decisions frequently resulted in swift progress toward the completion of the project, they nevertheless strained the relationship with the external partner who felt left out, and at the same time with the managers who would have preferred a more cooperative approach by the project leader. The latter, however, did not see anything wrong with his behavior during the interviews. After all, his constant success seemed to justify his decisions in hindsight. The short story about the perspectives on roles and responsibilities addressed this issue by having the trucks heading for Santa Montagna run into an obstacle, namely a herd of cows blocking the road. The truck of collaboration partner Gabe Able (representing the external project leader), who is driving at the front, stops to have a talk with the other drivers about what to do. As they speak, the truck of Fred First (representing as an archetype the project leader of the internal construction team) roars past, honking at the herd that is quickly making a bolt for it to clear the road. Fred is visibly happy about this result and keeps going—while in the dust clouds he leaves behind, the distraught cooperation partner needs to be cheered up by the accompanying motorcyclists (representing management). The transplantation of the events into a fictional setting and the use of humor (exaggerated comic strips) gave the “real” protagonists, i.e., the members of the construction team at MTU, the opportunity to evaluate the behavior and events of the story from a certain distance. This way, the parallels with real-life events became less threatening. 3. Disseminating and Applying the New Knowledge When the learning histories were completed, the organization ran a one-day workshop with external moderators during which all team members involved with the project presented the story. The comic characters went through all kinds of different hardships in their metaphorical world and their behavior in critical situations was at times problematic, at times helpful and competent. The workshop participants did in fact recognize their own problematic and positive behavior in the story; yet, it did not stoke the existing conflicts any further. The distance created by the metaphorical setting enabled critical reflection and a search for better alternatives among the employees even though it was at its core a depiction of their own experiences. Together, the participants discussed the different perspectives, experiences, and areas of conflict while searching for possible improvements and solutions for future projects.

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Teams who had not been a part of the project also had a lot to learn from the metaphorical learning histories. They gave them concrete ideas as to what to consider before beginning a new project, how to work cooperatively with partners, and which obstacles to collaboration might arise. "

Today MTU uses these learning histories in manager trainings and project briefings throughout the entire company. The “cow problem” has become synonymous with situations in which project leaders act too rashly toward their team members and external collaborators.

At the end of the project the final learning history should not be misunderstood as a replacement for classic forms of knowledge documentation. MTU chose the method for this particular project because of an interest in areas of knowledge that were hiding beneath the surface! The relevant experiential knowledge is partially unknown even to the involved employees themselves, or it might otherwise be difficult to put into words. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, it can have a huge impact on the behavior of each individual in a large organization (Erlach and Thier 2015).

Areas of Application of Learning Histories Companies can use learning histories in many different situations. These include project debriefings during which the stories can teach the lessons learned through past experiences or change processes during which they can inform the creation of new visions for the future. The quotes, experiences, and anecdotes in learning histories also make a great foundation for authentic PR and marketing. Unsurprisingly, the method has long spread beyond its initial use in academic research to consultants and companies, particularly for the management of personnel and knowledge. This overview sums up the many different areas of application to which learning histories can make a meaningful contribution (Thier 2018, p. 39): Overview of Potential Areas of Application of Learning Histories • Knowledge management, i.e., as an addition to fact-oriented instruments to document employees’ knowledge and helpful suggestions • Project debriefing, i.e., as a standardized way to collect experiences with projects • Documentation of important projects, i.e., as a way to learn from past mistakes and transfer successful strategies to similar projects • “Leaving experts,” i.e., as a means to secure and store the knowledge of employees who are leaving the company (continued)

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• Analysis of organizational culture, i.e., as an identification of the “real” culture in an organization from the employees’ perspective • Change processes, i.e., as a development tool for management and employees to create shared visions for the future • Brand management, i.e., as a way to identity and strengthen the unique “mythos” of a company for successful branding • Market research, i.e., as a foundation for a marketing that meets the customers’ emotional needs • Quality management, i.e., as a method to ensure continuous improvement processes (CIP) • Networks, clusters, and collaborations, i.e., as a way to work on the “interpersonal” component of cooperation and strengthen interpersonal trust • Conflict management, i.e., as an opportunity to reflect one’s own behavior and understand the behavior of others • Scientific research, i.e., as a qualitative instrument for scientific investigations Even though these disparate fields of application might seem to share little at first glance, they all empower an organization to reflect on its past and prepare for its future. Learning histories can inspire far-reaching change and acute insights if their discussion and distribution is planned well. The stories should never disappear in the cabinets of a dusty archive to be forgotten. Their goal is always to reach as many employees as possible! As such, their dissemination should not shy away from using every channel at the disposal of an organization—such as employee presentations with subsequent discussions, major events held for large groups, workshops, or seminars.

Literature Erlach, C. & Thier, K. (2015). Narratives management – was trübe Teiche mit Organisationen zu tun haben. In: H. Beier, U. Schmidt & D. Klett (Hrsg.) WISSENSMANAGEMENT beflügelt: Wie Sie einen unbegrenzten ROHSTOFF aktivieren (S. 103–121). Berlin: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, AKA. Flick, U. (2014). An introduction to qualitative research. London: Sage. Gearty, M. R., & Coghlan, D. (2018). The first-, second- and third-person dynamics of learning history. Systemic Practice Action Research, 31(5), 463–478. Kleiner, A., & Roth, G. (1996). Field Manual for a Learning Historian. MIT-COL and Reflection Learning Associates. Kleiner, A., & Roth, G. (1997). How to make experience your company’s best teacher. Harvard Business Review, 5(75), 172–177. Kleiner, A., & Roth, G. (1998). Wie sich Erfahrungen in der Firma besser nutzen lassen. Harvard Business Manager, 5, 9–11.

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Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. M. (1996). Grounded theory: Grundlagen Qualitativer Sozialforschung. Weinheim: Beltz, Psychologie-Verlag-Union. Thier, K. (2003). Die Entdeckung des Narrativen für Organisationen. Entwicklung einer effizienten Story Telling-Methode. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač. Thier, K. (2015). Storytelling in Unternehmenskontexten. In: M. Fludernik; N. Falkenhayner & J. Steiner (Hrsg.), Faktuales und fiktionales Erzählen. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven Schriftenreihe des Graduiertenkollegs 1767 (S. 265–287). Würzburg: Egon Verlag. Thier, K. (2017). Storytelling – eine narrative Managementmethode. Heidelberg: Springer. Thier, K. (2018). Storytelling in organizations: A narrative approach to change, brand, project and knowledge management. Berlin: Springer. Thier, K., & Erlach, C. (2013). Der Storytelling-Prozess. Narrative Methoden zur Reflexion und Prävention von Teamkonflikten. Dynamik, 4, 272–281. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Core Story: Finding a Common Denominator Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Organizations are narrative systems in which many areas, processes, and structures are fundamentally shaped by stories. We discussed this at length in Part I of this book. These stories always do their work, whether or not it is being recognized, and influence the behavior of employees, the relationship with customers, and the identity and image of a company. In some instances, the various stories are congruent, which means that they match or complement one another. In other cases, however, the stories might contradict one another and construct very different realities, for example when the employees are sharing completely different stories about the quality of a certain product than the marketing department. If a company wishes to be perceived as coherent, it is thus highly desirable for the many complex stories told by different stakeholders to share a common core and communicate the same identity. As long as at least the most important stories do share such an essence, we call it its core story. Actively developing this core story and using it for guidance in (brand) communication and strategy development is one of the most decisive steps to becoming a narrative organization. In general, core stories may be developed in two distinct directions. Internally, they can represent the heart of each story about a company’s identity (“Who are we and what do we do?”), and toward the outside, they can be tantamount to its products or entire brand. However, core stories do not always try to capture the essence of an entire organization. They may also be developed for a single department or project. Should an organization have different inside and outside core stories or multiple internal ones, they should of course never contradict one another.

Variants of Core Stories Core stories generally come in two forms: core narratives or model stories, i.e., concrete examples that illustrate the core. A core narrative is like the backbone of an organization, while a model story is an example inspired by this backbone. In general, a core narrative is more suitable as a universal benchmark for all storytelling # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_11

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processes and the strategic behavior of an organization, department, or project. A model story, on the other hand, is a “real” story and thus more emotional, intuitive, and immediate if it manages to represent the mission of an organization well. Our recommendation is to start the development of a core story with a core narrative and then proceed to a model story. Should there be difficulties with writing the latter, this step may also be postponed until a later stage when a better feeling for the core story might make creating a concrete model easier. Here is an example (which is partially real, partially fictitious) to illustrate the difference between the two forms: Example

In 1984, Apple released its Macintosh alongside a short ad telling the following story: A crowd is assembled in a large hall; everyone is clad in gray with the same emotionless facial expression and body language. They are all staring at a massive screen on which a dictator is blaring a speech. Suddenly, a young woman in colorful clothing rushes into the room. She is swinging a giant hammer and is being chased by security guards. When she reaches the center of the hall, she hurls her hammer into the screen and silences the propagandistic speech. The following lines appear: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” (the ad is still available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼2zfqw8nhUwA). This slogan is of course a reference to George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel “1984” in which an authoritarian figure called “Big Brother” rules the world. The ad tells a model story about Apple’s mission at the time: The company was striving to make a free and self-determined life possible for everyone. It is interesting to note that the clip does not feature the advertised product at all. It only illustrates “how we want to live, and which values we want to represent.” This ad is a core story in the form of a model story. Now for the fictional part of our example: the core story in the form of a core narrative. We do not know if Apple ever put it this way, but an attempt to translate the message of the ad into a core narrative might lead to something like this: “We are developing a new form of digital working and living to make it possible for everybody to experience more freedom, creativity, and happiness.” ◄ Core narratives usually consist of one or two sentences that capture the essence of what an organization does and the changes it seeks to bring to its customers, partners, or other people. The narrative structure of the example above is noteworthy: Beginning: Middle: End:

“We are developing a new form of digital working and living. . .” “. . .to make it possible for everybody. . .” “. . .to experience more freedom, creativity, and happiness.”

All stories told in an organization should follow the structure of the core narrative. If Apple’s core story was indeed similar to the one we created here, all of the

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company’s stories from that time should be about how Apple enables people to live independent, free, and happy lives. And this would be commensurate with the appeal of the brand—and exactly what the 1984 ad is communicating to us.

Developing a Core Narrative As mentioned above, we recommend to first develop a core narrative before writing a model story (or several) as a second step. To guarantee a solid foundation for the core story, we usually plan two half-day workshops (3–4 h each). The first workshop is dedicated to the creation of the core narrative. During the second workshop, which should take place a few weeks later, a communication strategy based on the narrative is developed, possibly alongside a first model story. Workshop 1: Developing the Core Narrative Duration: 3 to 4 hours Goal: Developing the core narrative Participants: Up to 12, which should include the decision-maker in the unit for which the core story is being developed. This ensures that the resulting story can have a meaningful impact on communication and strategic planning. Moderation: A moderator/facilitator with suitable training should lead the workshop. They should be experienced in using the core story method. It is possible to select the moderator from within the company; in this case, however, they should hail from a different unit than the one for which the core story is being developed. The moderator needs to be able to provide an outside perspective and question anything that might otherwise be taken for granted. Step 1: Collaborative Retelling of the Company Story (About 30–40 min) The moderator asks the workshop participants to tell the story of their unit. Whoever has been in the unit the longest begins while the others can jump in whenever they have something to add. The moderator needs to make sure that as many participants as possible, ideally all of them, get a chance to speak, not only those in charge; they encourage everybody to contribute. While listening, the moderator also writes down possible key words for the core story on a flipchart. If the stories told during a workshop with a creative industries company for example repeatedly stress the wish to meet the customers’ artistic and stylistic expectations, the moderator might write down “art” and “style.” After all, these aesthetic goals appear to be very important to the company! The key words merely function as reminders for the creation process of the core narrative; they provide a checklist to ensure that all important cultural, social, and economic factors are included (or intentionally excluded). This form of data collection is a central concern in collaborative storytelling alongside a kind of reassurance for the participants on how their company became what it is today. It is a prerequisite for the development of a core story that all participants are on the same page.

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Once the story has been told, the moderator can use a marker in a different color to highlight key words that stand out. The group then decides whether to go with this selection or make a few adjustments by emphasizing different words. Step 2: Writing the Core Narrative (60–120 min) The goal of this step is the collaborative creation of a core narrative. The moderator briefly explains the central ideas of the core story format without going into too much detail. To kick off this step, the moderator should also write down the three phases of narratives on the flipchart (see Fig. 1): Looking back on our fictional core story for Apple, the sentence we suggested had exactly the same structure—what a company does to cause which kind of transformation in its target group. The highlighted key words on the flipchart are the starting point for penning the core story. Therefore, the second step does not need to start from scratch.

Fig. 1 The basic structure of a core narrative (# authors)

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The entire group works together on refining the sentences on the flipchart, adding and deleting ideas as they come. Meanwhile, the moderator asks questions about the message and formulation of the sentences with the intent to make the final result as precise as possible. It is hard to plan exactly how long this phase takes before all participants are satisfied with the resulting story. Two hours are more likely than one. After about two-thirds of the allocated time, there often comes a “phase of desperation” when the group feels stuck and doubtful if they will come up with a satisfactory core story at all. This is a good time for a short break after which things tend to go much more smoothly again. At the end of the workshop the moderator writes a clean final version of the (preliminary) core story on the flipchart. Protocol About Workshop 1 After the first workshop the moderator writes a protocol that documents all the key words and phrases of the core story and the meaning they held in the eyes of the participants. If the core story states for example that “We offer very aesthetic web solutions,” the protocol should specify what exactly the participants associated with the term “aesthetic” to avoid confusion. Workshop 2: Revisiting the Core Narrative and Developing a Strategy The second workshop should be held with the same participants as the first. The goal this time is to revisit and reevaluate the core story from the end of the first meeting and derive strategic conclusions from it. This workshop is much less structured than the last as the requests and expectations of the participating unit decide how exactly to continue the work. Central components of the workshop should be the following: (a) Revisiting the core story: The moderator asks the participants if the core story from the end of the first workshop still meets their expectations or if they wish to make changes to its phrasing or specific terms. Depending on the participants’ response, this phase can be over very quickly or result in partial changes to the core story. In most cases, the group discusses two or three formulations. (b) Strategic thoughts on the consequences of the core story, e.g., developing a communication concept or a discussion of the resulting strategic decisions. An example for the latter might be: An organization working in coaching and vocational training changes its name based on the core story because the people in charge realize that the old name no longer captures the expanded scope of the offered services. There is an optional third component: (c) Finding a model story: If the group would like to write a story that depicts the ideas of the core story in a more vivid manner, an additional storylistening workshop (see chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”) can be added to the procedure. In some cases there might already be a potentially suitable story that is making its rounds in an organization. With the new core story in hand, the group can now double-check if this story actually includes the central elements of the core narrative.

Case Study: Storytelling in the Press and Public Relations at Porsche AG Karin Thier

Interview with Josef Arweck, Vice President Communications at Porsche Josef Arweck has been in charge of business communications at Porsche AG for 10 years. A journalist by trade, storytelling is a very familiar method to him. In our interview, he talked about the role of storytelling, or more precisely “narrative branding,” at Porsche AG, how exactly stories are used in the company, where to look for emotional narratives and which pitfalls to avoid, and how Porsche plans to continue working with stories in the future.

Mr. Arweck, how exactly would you define the term “storytelling” for the purpose of business communications? Actually, almost everything we do is related to storytelling. We are telling stories about our company, our brand, our products, and the people behind them in internal and external publications like print magazines, online magazines, video magazines, employee television, etc. But there are also stories to be told in our more traditional communications with the press. Each press release should not only cover news but also include a good story. Storytelling, whatever exactly this word might mean, is thus a really big deal in all communications. Personally, though, I don’t really like the term “storytelling.” It’s too much of a buzzword; so I prefer the term “narrative branding” because it goes beyond mere storytelling. It’s like an umbrella for all stories shared in our company. Our brand itself tells stories; it becomes a story. Narrative branding kicks off a cycle through which one story leads to the next. That’s always been the case, but now we have a stronger focus on it. How important is “narrative branding” at Porsche AG and how has the term developed over the years? Storytelling has always been very important at Porsche. Anton Hunger, one of my predecessors, for example coined the narrative of the “David Porsche”: Porsche was at the time the smallest independent car manufacturer in the world but stood its # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_12

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ground against the big competitors. This “David Principle” made it into several films and books and was basically the master story under which Porsche worked throughout the 1990s and 2000s. This also shows nicely how narratives change over time. Since 2009 Porsche has been integrated into Volkswagen. In turn, this took away the foundation for the “David narrative” which has no longer been used since then. When the situation changes, the stories change too. This is not only true for our master story but also for our product stories. We’ve always taken chances with all kinds of different vehicle classes. For example, this year we will introduce the very first purely electronic Porsche sports car which ushers in a completely new era for us. The motives behind storytelling are in a state of constant flux because not only Porsche has changed a lot; our number of employees has almost tripled in the past 10 years and even the world around us has changed so much, for example how we use social media. Ten years ago we could not yet have developed our video magazine 9:11 (https://911-magazine.porsche.com/en/) in its current form and found an audience for it. How important do you think a binding “master story” is? Having that kind of story or such a strong image that can bring your brand closer to people is definitely very helpful. In my experience, though, it is not mandatory to have such a big story. At the moment we also don’t have a master story like the “David narrative.” Rather, there are several narratives we are working with. It is important, though, that the core on which these narratives are built stays consistent and coherent. The questions of the social code by Patrick Hanlon help a lot with this. If I can answer all of these questions from within the company, then there are many motives for stories. Can you tell us more about how you are using stories at Porsche? As a personal rule, successful communication always has to do with structure and strategy. Sure, you might come up with a few good stories spontaneously, but considering the many issues and topics we need to communicate, it is necessary for us to have a clear plan in mind when it comes to storytelling. For this reason, we introduced a very systematic and strategic planning process at Porsche 3 years ago. This means concretely that at the end of a year we are looking ahead at the next year and ask ourselves which topics and dates have already been decided and for when each of these topics will be scheduled. Besides that, there are other topics that are lying ahead for us, like the launch of our first electric sports car later this year. This is a key topic for storytelling. Lastly, we also look at the themes in our strategy for 2025 and put all of this side by side. Each month has one top topic and three other focus topics for us. At the start of a new year we can thus easily see when we need to do what. All of this has been formalized so much that we won’t forget anything important. For the next step, we then look at the topics from the perspective of the media. What does this look like exactly? Could you give us an example?

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Let’s for example look at our video magazine 9:11. We publish it five times per year. Each issue focuses on one general topic that corresponds with our larger thematic plans. Then we think about which stories fit well with the topic and bring everything together like in a jigsaw puzzle. On the one hand, we have our detailed plans that are in sync with our general strategy, and, on the other hand, we ask ourselves what might be a cool topic that would make the magazine more exciting in the eyes of its readers. After all, we hope to tell cool stories in our publications and not only describe our plans. We approach the publication from two angles at the same time to deliver an attractive, polished, and engaging product that nevertheless stays true to our underlying strategy. How do you keep finding good, emotional stories? In the end, it’s always people who are at the heart of the stories and supply us with stories in the first place. Particularly rich sources of stories are for example our retirees. We do speak of our Porsche family after all. Many employees have spent their entire working life at Porsche, and they have a lot to tell us. But also our current employees have many interesting things to say. My colleagues are always staying in touch with all of our departments. We hope that all employees can see themselves as ambassadors of our company and let us know when they have a great story. They are our most valuable repository! Of course, our products and our history also frequently deliver new stories. At Porsche we are in the enviable situation that stories are never hard to come by. Rather, it can be a challenge to identify the strongest narratives. At the same time the expectations are extremely high. Selecting and prioritizing the right stories is not easy. We need to keep developing new formats and expand on our current channels. What went particularly well at Porsche with regard to storytelling in the last couple of years? Personally, I am particularly proud of the relaunch of our customer magazine Christophorus (https://christophorus.porsche.com/en.html) 3 years ago. We have published Christophorus since 1952 with a run of 600,000 as one of the first customer magazines worldwide. It is translated into 13 languages. Redesigning a publication with such a long history was not straightforward. For the sake of the relaunch, we really took a page out of the storytelling book and put people and their stories at the center. Another example is our video magazine 9:11. It is a completely new format that we designed ourselves. I had the idea for it in my head for 3 years and we had a lot of internal discussions about it as well. After all, you can’t just make a 9-minute long video magazine that is published five times per year happen overnight. One day we found the right partner for the job and the time had come. My personal favorite from a storytelling perspective is the piece about race driver Walter Röhrl in the inaugural issue. Everything just falls into place with this one. It has a compelling individual, phenomenal pictures, perfect music, and the key to it all: a sensational story! Getting everything right like in this example is a rare triumph. We even won a lot of prizes for this one.

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Another episode of the magazine that really touched me was the story of a professor at the Technical University Chemnitz who has been missing one hand since birth and was driving a Panamera with an artificial one. When the topic was first introduced, I was skeptical myself, but these are the stories that really touch the viewers. Cars or people: who do you think should be the protagonist in narrative branding? I would say that people should be at the center of our stories 95% of the time. For a long time the philosophy was to place the cars at the center. With our customer magazine Christophorus we are experiencing the opposite right now. The cover almost always also makes people clearly visible. Our creed is that we are a car manufacturer and all of our stories need to be about Porsche cars somehow. The cars don’t always have to take center stage; they can play a smaller role, but there always needs to be some connection to them. Are there also critical points that you need to consider with regard to storytelling? Storytelling often zeroes in on certain individuals. But there might be others who would fit the stories equally well. Especially in our internal communication this can become a great challenge because it is always possible to upset some people. Sometimes I notice how my colleagues are holding back to avoid offending anyone. This can also become an issue with our external communication. If we for example want to decide on somebody to explain a technical question for our video magazine, we need to think about the criteria to go by when choosing the speaker: technical expertise, media competence, looks even? These are difficult questions and they can sometimes lead to frustration. What are your predictions for the future of storytelling or narrative branding at Porsche? Good stories will keep doing good work. Nothing will change about that. What is always changing, however, are the media landscape and the way people use media. In the future we need to involve users, customers, and fans more strongly in the storytelling process. We need to ask them for their opinions and stories, and we have to create a system with positive feedback loops. When we for example publish a story, those interested should be able to contribute their own story to our published one. This trend is to our advantage, though, because Porsche has many loyal fans who have stories to tell and many more who are interested in hearing exactly these stories. We have to keep going and figure out how to create even more interactions and dialogues. Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Arweck!

Narrative System Map: Analyzing the Culture of Organizations Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

There are two sides to the culture of each organization. One side is overt and known to everybody; the other side is hidden or unknown, but it nevertheless affects the behavior of its members. We have spoken about this duality several times in Part I. A narrative organization is familiar with at least the most important rules and communication patterns of the hidden side of its culture. This is the only way for a narratively competent organization to successfully undergo change processes without being thwarted by unrecognized rules or obstacles. The narrative system map is the principal method to establish such knowledge. It is sometimes also known as narrative culture analysis. The method allows an organization to examine the central structures and aspects hidden in the system. The discoveries are frequently connections that the employees have suspected all along but have been unable to make conscious and put into words. Additionally, the method may expose relationships that were previously completely unknown or debunk widely held assumptions and their conclusions. Example

A large tech company had started a change project to modify its production practices. According to its new guidelines, the construction process of each individual component should already consider the final assembly. Therefore, the company sought to have as many components as possible made on the same production line instead of having separate lines for each product. At the time when we were hired for consultation, the project had already run for about a year, but the company had been dissatisfied with its results. The members of the team in charge of the project had different assumptions about the reasons for what they perceived as inertia and apparent indifference among the employees. Two assumptions were particularly common. The first was that it might collide with the professional ethics of the company’s engineers to consider the ease of production during the construction of products instead of solely focusing on their quality and innovative potential. A possible belief among the engineers # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_13

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might have been that the change project impeded or even prevented innovation. The second widespread assumption was that the employees might have had a difficult time planning beyond the confines of their respective departments, which in turn hampered horizontal collaboration with other departments. What both of these assumptions had in common was that they were solely concerned with the employees’ “mindset”—a mindset that needed to be changed. Our task was thus to check to what extent these assumptions were accurate and how they might affect the employees’ attitudes. Based on our findings, we were expected to develop a cultural change project to address these issues. We decided to use the method of the narrative system map and conducted 11 narrative interviews (see Chapter “Narrative Interviews”) with employees who were directly or indirectly affected by the project. All interviews were completely anonymous, i.e., none of the recordings and transcripts, stories, or data were accessible to the project leaders. The interview data allowed us to draw a very detailed map of the company culture and the attitudes relevant to the questions we wanted to answer. Our map covered the following: the basic parameters of the company culture; the perceived borders between units and departments; the narrated histories of the company, the department, and the project (“how did all of this unfold?”); the leadership style and the central values; and the ways in which meaning and identity were constructed in the company. From this broad catalogue of potential topics, we would like to focus our further discussion here only on those that pertained to the project leaders’ two major assumptions. Not a single interviewee expressed an implicit or explicit fear that the consideration of the final assembly during construction would harm innovation in any way. In fact, the opposite was true! All interviewees saw the new goal in a decidedly positive light. However, their perception of the path toward this goal was equally clear. Many of their stories told of the chaos, ambiguity, uncertainty, and lack of transparency that were plaguing the project. In contrast to the project leaders’ first assumption, it had not been the goals but their implementation that had caused the lackluster results. Our findings regarding their second assumption, i.e., that employees were unable to work well together across departments, were quite similar. Several interviewees told us about their efforts to collaborate with different departments, project teams, or divisions. However, their efforts had often been perceived as unwanted “invasions” and had cost them a lot of energy. Just like the project leaders had speculated, there were indeed difficulties when it came to interdepartment collaborations. These difficulties, however, had nothing to do with an unwillingness or “wrong mindset” among employees. Instead, the cause had been the extremely rigid lines between departments that were a central component of the company’s culture: All decision-making authority and vital resources (budgets, employees) were organized hierarchically and localized within the various departments. For the cultural change process, both of these results meant that the “mindset” of the involved employees was not at all the root of the problem even though the project leaders had initially thought so. What had hindered the project was instead

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a lack of direction for the employees who did not know how to achieve the intended goals. Neither had they a say in their original formation. To eliminate this blind spot, new best procedures to achieve the goals were to be developed alongside the employees in a number of workshops. After all, the project leaders agreed that determining these procedures top-down without getting the employees involved would not help the company’s large-scale change project get back on track. In addition, they were determined to improve collaboration across departments by giving more authority and freedom (particularly with regard to budgetary concerns) to project groups that were created vertically to established departments. This required a structural change which was addressed by a project at the management level. As mentioned above, these two topics represent merely a small sample of the complete system map we drew for the company. They show, however, how a cultural analysis with narrative methods (storylistening with narrative interviews) can move change processes in the right direction and thus toward actual change. If the intervention had followed the initial suggestions by the team leaders, i.e., a transformation of the employees’ mindset, the well-intended project would have failed the employees—because the reason for the underwhelming results had always been organizational structures and not the employees’ behavior. Their stories made their actual beliefs and attitudes as well as the obstacles they encountered day by day accessible in a way that a traditional survey never could. Because a narrative system map reveals the hidden facets of a company’s culture and identity, it provides a robust foundation for successful change projects. ◄

Drawing a Narrative System Map Preparations The foundation for each narrative system map, the metaphorical sheet of paper on which it is drawn, are the stories a company’s employees tell about their experiences. Generally speaking, there are two possible methods to gain access to these stories. They differ with regard to how deep they dig beneath the surface and thus how detailed the resulting system map of the unknown parts of the company’s culture may get. (a) Narrative interviews (see Chapter “Narrative Interviews”) Undirected employee interviews about their work biographies provide a lot of breadth to a narrative system map. Depending on the size of a system and the desired accuracy of the system map, 10–25 interviews should suffice. The chapter on narrative interviews provides more information on how to conduct them.

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(b) Storylistening workshops (see Chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”) Giving employees an opportunity to talk about their typical experiences at work during a storylistening workshop is a faster method to get at the narrative foundation of a company—but it is of course also not as in depth as narrative interviews. What makes the method more superficial is that the employees only get to speak about specific events and experiences instead of their entire work biography. Particularly when supporting very clearly defined change projects, storylistening workshops may still provide the required information about the hidden aspects in a system and its culture. If the storylistening workshop is intended as the groundwork for a narrative system map (for other uses of the method, see Chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”), the moderators should record and transcribe all stories. Transcription makes the subsequent evaluation phase much easier than having to rely on recordings alone. (c) A combination of narrative interviews and storylistening workshops It is of course also possible to combine both methods. In this case a smaller number of narrative interviews (four to six) should be enough to enrich the materials gathered during the storylistening workshop(s). Having transcripts of all stories, regardless of whether they come from narrative interviews or storylistening workshops, greatly benefits their analysis. They make it much easier to pinpoint connections between the various stories. Analysis The semiotic-narrative analysis allows the makers of a narrative system map to “read between the lines” or in other words to discover the rules and beliefs that exist beneath the surface of an organization. This method is a combination of approaches from communication studies (“semiotics” is the “study of signs and symbols”) and narratology as it was developed in the context of literary and media studies. An in-depth introduction to the method would go far beyond the realistic scope of this book, and so we will limit our excursion to the basics. In our experience, however, this knowledge is enough to identify 80% of the relevant issues. For a deeper take on the method, see Müller and Grimm 2016 or Sottong and Müller 1998, and for the deepest take, see Titzmann 1977. The general course of action is to begin with the evaluation of the individual narrative interviews or stories but, for pragmatic reasons, quickly move on to the identification of their similarities—because the goal of a narrative system map is not to reconstruct individual stories; it is to identify overarching rules in a system. (1) Timeline and event structure With autobiographical interviews, which usually cover a longer time span, the reconstruction of a timeline for the entire body of stories is possible by drawing an arrow representing time and plot all events (i.e., events in the narrative sense of transformations; see Chapter “Intermezzo”) that were shared by two or more interviewees. It is not uncommon to have important events make an appearance even in the stories of employees who have not experienced them firsthand. In

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one organization this was for example the departure of a charismatic founder that had left a large cultural gap: Even employees who had never met him spoke about this event. Important incidents are often identified by the use of temporal adverbs like “then” or “now”: “Then everything was simple; now everything has become so bureaucratic.” Obviously, there was some kind of change that turned things from simple to complicated. (2) Relations The second major tool for making a system map are the relations between the various elements in each story. These can be people, places, events, themes, etc. Two types of relations are especially conspicuous: Oppositions: There is a contrast between two elements of a story. In the little example above, there is an obvious divergence between a simpler past and the bureaucratic present. Oppositional relations may also appear between different groups of the same organization, e.g., between “business people” and “tech people” in old tech companies. Depending on which side is being asked, the opinions about either group might differ substantially. Equivalences: Two elements of a story are treated “equally” or “similar” in some way. The terms “colleague” and “boss” might for example be virtually the same in an organization with a very flat hierarchy: “My colleague who is actually my boss. . .” Particularly interesting are of course those equivalences that stray from the “usually” expected. (3) Spatial structure The spaces mentioned in the stories are another important component: Which spaces play a relevant role, how are they related to one another, and which meaning do employees ascribe to them? For example, parent company and subsidiary are frequently important locations in stories. The culture of a given organization might establish a strongly oppositional relation between the two (e.g., employees say that they would never work for the subsidiary company because they would have no job security while the employees of the subsidiary complain about the excessive red tape at the parent company, etc.). Or the two might be seen as virtually the same: Employees working for the subsidiary company would then tell their stories as if they were working for the parent company. The arrangement of spaces and the employees’ attitudes toward them often already provide some clues about what does not work in an organization and why. We have for example encountered the following case in which the employees of the subsidiary company saw themselves as members of the parent company in their stories: The responsibility of the subsidiary was media production, and besides doing productions for the parent company, it was also tasked with getting its own orders on the market—without success. Because the employees thought of themselves exclusively as members of the production department at the parent company, it was easy to see why.

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(4) Semantic fields, metaphorical fields Another vital component to the evaluation of narrative interviews for a narrative system map are central semantic fields and recurring metaphors. Semantic fields are “fields of meaning” that employees share when they tend to describe the same events in the same terms. If several employees for example describe a restructuring process with expressions like “uncertainty,” “lack of structure,” or “foggy,” the employees link the process to the semantic field “chaos” in their heads. Semantic fields may be very apparent at the surface level of stories or require some sleuthing. The same is true for metaphorical fields. Example

In one organization we discovered the recurring use of gardening metaphors to refer to the very clear lines between departments (“silos”) that were difficult to cross: Everybody tends their own garden; they are building fences; everybody is planting different seeds, etc. The general image that these metaphors created was of a company in which each individual department might be productive in its own right, but without a shared vision for the development of new products. ◄ (5) Micro-narrations The autobiographical stories employees share during narrative interviews frequently also feature reoccurring episodes about certain projects, managers, or events that were characteristic of the organization or the respective interviewee during a particular phase. These reoccurring episodes can be highly impactful on the organizational culture. For example, in the stories of almost all interviewees at a large company, we once found reoccurring episodes in which the attempts to collaborate between departments were described as “intrusions” and as difficult journeys across foreign borders. Meanwhile, we discovered several stories about canceled or unfinished processes and projects in another company. The central experiences conveyed by these episodes of course shaped the organizational culture in both instances. In the first case, the anticipated challenges caused employees to avoid collaborations with other departments at all costs unless there was no way around them. And in the second case, employees would be hard to motivate for new projects as they were skeptical that anything new would ever get finished. If a narrative system map is based on storylistening workshops instead of narrative interviews, the raw material already consists of episodes. In this case, the identification of clusters reveals which stories are more common than others and how exactly they shape the culture of an organization. Intervention The mere collection of stories already represents an intervention in a given system— this is one of the reasons why narrative methods like storylistening workshops and narrative interviews are so effective in the first place. When employees get an opportunity to share their experiences, they often already perceive this as a major shift in the organization or its management because, more often than not, employees

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are not used to being asked questions and simply accept what is ordered from above. Being asked at all makes them hopeful that this time something will actually change, particularly, if it is not with a traditional survey, but with a situation in which somebody else is listening to their stories for 40 to 60 min. An organization must of course follow up on the commitment these interventions suggest. Something visible must happen, even if it is only a way to communicate the results. If employees do not learn how things continue after the interviews or workshops, the intervention might backfire, and interest turns into hypocrisy in their eyes. The first step after the evaluation must of course be some form of disclosure of the results. The best way to do this is with a day-long change workshop that not only communicates the findings but also develops follow-up steps (e.g., the first steps toward the desired change). The concrete shape of these steps depends on the given goals and needs as well as the results so far. Change processes must always be finetuned to the idiosyncrasies of an organization and its situation—one size never fits all! We will discuss how to make a narrative framework for a change process in the Chapter “Narrative Change Architecture: Making Change Accessible.” There are generally two ways in which the results of a narrative system map may be introduced to the organization during a change workshop: with a presentation at the beginning of the workshop or with a gradual retelling of the results over the course of the entire workshop. The culture of an organization decides which of the two methods is better suited. The presentation format usually works better in hierarchical organizations or those in which a technological mindset is dominant; the gradual approach works best for organizations with a flat hierarchy that are already more agile. In general, the advantage of the latter method is that the workshop participants already get a chance to work on solutions or draw conclusions from the various findings. It also avoids a possibly overwhelming knowledge dump at the beginning of the session, particularly if the results contain negative elements as well. Moderators need to use their experience and intuition to decide on the preferable approach in each individual case. Presentation A classic PowerPoint presentation is possible (but it should have more images than text). Another way is to actually draw the narrative system map on a large poster. Be imaginative! Mountaintops shrouded in clouds from which the managers look down like Greek goddesses and gods; bottomless canyons that carve their way between departments and make collaboration impossible; the bridges built between the company and its customers; or a junkyard of unfinished projects. Creativity is key, and the results are highly emotional and intuitive to all workshop participants. Presenting the Results with the Help of a “Reflecting Team” The “reflecting team” method originated in systemic consulting practices (cf. Andersen 1990), and we have adjusted it slightly for the purpose of the narrative system map. The key advantage of the method is that it presents the results to the change workshop in a more easily digestible form instead of hitting the participants

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with full force all at once. This may soften the blow particularly in cases in which some, or even many, of the results are not positive. After all, particularly senior managers are often unwilling to confront cultural elements that are problematic or at least appear that way. The reflecting team method can lower the resistance in the company and prevent the workshop participants from getting overly defensive. Here is the exact procedure: Example

First, the consultants or the team in charge of evaluating the narrative interviews identify three or four topics that are especially relevant with regard to changes and the further development of the system. Each topic gets its own reflecting team round following this pattern: The consulting team becomes the reflecting team. It might be joined by the internal team leader who was involved in the narrative interviews and is therefore familiar with the results. The team leader is primarily a moderator who asks questions. The reflecting team discusses the first topic for about 20 min as it combs through anonymous stories and episodes from the narrative interviews and develops conclusions and preliminary solutions. All other participants listen and take notes without interacting with the reflecting team that seals itself off by sitting in their own circle, only talking among one another, and not making eye contact with the other listeners. After 20 min it is the other participants’ turn: They sit in their own circle and talk about what they overheard during the reflecting team’s discussion as well as the ideas, solutions, and possible changes that have emerged. Now the members of the reflecting team are in the listener position—the other participants do not interact with them in any way, including eye contact. After another 20 min the roles switch yet again, and the reflecting team gets 10 min to talk about the discussion of the second group. It might also quote a few examples from the interviews. The round on the first topic concludes with a 15 min reflection by the entire workshop group during which the participants write down the major takeaways on cards that are collected on a pinboard. One after another, all topics undergo the same exact procedure. The final two hours of the workshop are dedicated to the development of general conclusions and concrete suggestions and solutions. It is important that the times indicated here are strictly observed for each of the steps even if the teams are not able to cover “everything” they want in their discussions. This improves the communication flow and makes the conversation between the participants more relaxed as it protects the workshop from getting hung up on details. ◄ Everybody who has ever worked with reflecting teams knows how the mere shift between listening, speaking, and listening again may generate new perspectives and solutions. This might come as a particular relief to managers who are normally

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expected to have an answer to everything. Even though they may initially dislike the thought of being “relegated to the sidelines,” they usually end up feeling more at ease in this lower-stakes situation and appreciate its potential to lead to genuinely new ideas. The role of moderators also differs greatly between classic presentations and reflecting teams. While presentations tend to put them in the shoes of experts who have undertaken the analysis of an organization’s culture, they instead work as coaches alongside reflecting teams and support the team in its efforts to find its own answers and solutions. The latter role makes it easier for the organization to accept even (seemingly) negative aspects of its current culture. Because the ultimate goal is never to gain knowledge for its own sake, the narrative system map is always used to build a foundation for new solutions, change processes, strategies, and guiding principles.

Applications of Narrative System Maps Being made from the employees’ stories, each narrative system map brings the past into the present (“how we became who we are today”). Thus, it sheds light on the inner workings and implied values of an organization, even those of which its members are unaware. The map thereby becomes a foundation itself—for the further development of a company’s story in the future. Narrative system maps may be used in all areas concerned with the future development of organizations, such as: • • • • • •

Change processes Strategy development Cultural development Development of a new mission or “purpose” Development of guidelines or guiding principles Starting point for becoming a narratively competent organization

Literature Andersen, T. (Ed.). (1990). Das Reflektierende Team. Dialoge und Dialoge über die Dialoge. Dortmund: Modernes Lernen. Müller, M., & Grimm, P. (2016). Narrative Medienforschung. Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung. Köln: von Halem. Sottong, K., & Müller, M. (1998). Zwischen Sender und Empfänger. Eine Einführung in die Semiotik der Kommunikationsgesellschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Titzmann, M. (1977). Strukturale Textanalyse. München: Fink. (UTB 582).

Transfer Stories: Retrieving Hidden Knowledge Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Good knowledge management might guarantee the conservation and future availability of explicit knowledge. The experiential knowledge of experts, however, eludes these IT systems because it manifests itself in their behavior and thus stays with the experts when they leave (on knowledge as one of the main resources of organizations, see Chapter “When We Share Our Experiences”). Avoiding this loss is crucial to ensure the future success of a company. And as such, the last few years have seen the emergence of various approaches to knowledge transfer that can roughly be grouped into two major categories (Erlach 2014). The first are structured, closed approaches that clearly specify the knowledge to be secured and then use suitable lists of questions and processes for the actual knowledge transfer. The second are open approaches in dialogue form that primarily strive to create spaces for narration and already include the transfer process in these spaces. We cannot go into more detail about these two distinct approaches to knowledge transfer (and knowledge itself) here. For a more detailed introduction to both, see Erlach et al. (2013): The variety of methods and approaches to gain access to the knowledge of experts is [. . .] fairly large. It makes no sense to classify them into ‘better’ or ‘worse’ for knowledge transfer because all approaches have their own individual strengths. Like so often, a synthesis of these two general directions is the best way to record and document expert knowledge: creating open situations for dialogue; structuring knowledge categories before the conversation; concentrating on a solid documentation—together these factors make for a great knowledge transfer. (Erlach et al. 2013, p. 147; translation by authors)

Transfer Stories: A Narrative and Structured Approach to Knowledge Transfer Synthesizing the two different approaches is exactly what transfer stories do. The transfer process starts with an analysis that identifies which knowledge areas are particularly relevant for any successors and the organization in general. In order to # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_14

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cover both implicit and explicit knowledge, the procedure combines narrative interviews (see Chapter “Narrative Interviews”) and semi-structured surveys (see Chapter “Learning Histories”). The combination of structured and narrative elements continues throughout the documentation process. A knowledge or network map (e.g., a mind map) derived from the transfer conversations gives a quick overview of the relevant experiential knowledge. The finest branches of these maps may include concrete passages from the transcripts. These are original quotes from the experts that describe the circumstances under which they made significant experiences—important details that make the conveyed tips, hints, lessons learned, suggestions, and best practices more tangible (for a detailed description of transfer stories, see Erlach 2017). "

The key characteristics of transfer stories are thus their combination of structured survey tools and narrative interviews for data collection alongside a mix of structured and open formats for knowledge documentation.

The final phases of the transfer process are for the reflection on the collected knowledge and on how the organization can gain maximum benefit from it. Depending on the specific needs, interactive workshop elements and didactic concepts might be added. The process is structured around the following questions and the respective phases that seek to answer them (Erlach 2017, p. 291; see Fig. 1): The Process The foundation for the entire knowledge transfer process is the answer to its first guiding question: Which knowledge will be relevant at all? The first phase of the procedure is thus trying to identify what exactly among the many things the experienced employees could share will be most useful for their successors and their company as a whole. A kick-off workshop is the starting point for the knowledge transfer and serves several purposes:

Fig. 1 Core questions and methodological steps for the knowledge transfer process (# authors)

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• Briefing about the procedure: If this has not already happened, all employees involved in the process are informed about the exact procedure. A comprehensive briefing about the potential of narrative methods and the relationship between expertise and implicit knowledge makes the participants open for and curious about the upcoming steps. Knowing that none of the documented information will be accessible to others without explicit consent from the participants may also alleviate still lingering fears and concerns. • Identification of relevant knowledge: All stakeholders (e.g., the expert, their project leaders and superiors, their successors) share their personal thoughts on which knowledge they deem particularly relevant because it would otherwise be lost to successors upon the departure of the expert(s). The resulting ranking of the most important knowledge should guide the rest of the procedure and ensure that it prioritizes the right elements. • Planning the knowledge transfer process: Knowledge transfers often fail because the various company members involved do not get enough time for them. They may be expected to treat the transfer as a kind of “side project” in addition to their regular responsibilities—a “side project” that some erroneously assume will somehow manage itself. This attitude very clearly communicates a lack of appreciation for the experts and their experiential knowledge. At the same time it heavily underestimates the complexity of knowledge transfers. To counteract the detrimental effects of this perception or avoid it altogether, the expert, their successors, and the people in charge of creating the transfer stories schedule several meetings during the kick-off workshop. The conversations at these meetings give them an opportunity to retrieve and reflect on the important knowledge together. Their conversations also try to answer the second guiding question of the process: How can we retrieve the knowledge of our expert(s)? This is where narrative methods make their first appearance: Narrative interviews (see Chapter “Narrative Interviews”) and an event curve (see Chapter “Event Curve”) send the expert back in time and allow them to choose themselves which events they consider particularly noteworthy or informative. This narrative situation creates ample space for storytelling and listening, and this space in turn establishes a “common ground” (Clark 1996), i.e., a shared frame of reference for the participants’ assumptions about reality. This is also the time when the actual knowledge transfer happens—because now the expert embellishes the facts with backgrounds, contexts, and “substance.” The main task for those moderating the process is to keep the flow of stories running and help the expert with putting all of their memories into words by making use of association chains or the progression of the event curve. The meetings that follow this open space for storytelling and listening use semistructured interviews. The knowledge and topics that were originally identified in the kick-off workshop are addressed in a systematic manner one by one (i.e., in the chosen order of relevance): Which experiences can make these areas of knowledge more “tangible” and comprehensible? What concrete information do the successors

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need to ensure that things will continue to run smoothly? Are there any relevant documents to look at? Are there any helpful details about customers, distributors, or other people in the expert’s network? The process leaders record and subsequently transcribe all conversations for the third phase of the process that deals with the presentation of the results and brings passages from all previous steps together. This creates a multilayered knowledge documentation consisting of information, expertise, important documents, experiences, memories, and impressions. A mind map depicts the areas of knowledge selected during the kick-off workshop at its thickest branches while its filaments toward the edges present original quotes by the experts that add their subjective takes on relevant contexts and backgrounds. The selection of suitable passages may follow the social scientific method of qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2000) or, if the process leader wishes to dig even deeper, the semioticnarrative text analysis (Müller and Grimm 2016). An experienced, empathetic process leader might even follow their intuition when identifying the best passages for the knowledge documentation. Finally, only the last guiding question remains unanswered: How exactly can we transfer the knowledge? This means that all knowledge that has been secured must now be channeled back into the organization. Negligence regarding this final question is a common oversight in knowledge transfers, for example during the introduction of a new IT-based knowledge management system: Simply making information available via the intranet is too often mistaken for actively making use of this information. The transfer can only succeed if it follows a plan! If possible, experts might even work alongside their successors and the process leaders or HR to support this step before their departure. In some situations, the circle of employees in direct contact with the leaving expert might even grow: Before they leave for good, a transfer workshop may accompany the knowledge documentation by turning additional employees into “knowledge agents.” Meanwhile, the mind map can create a space for further dialogue between the expert and their remaining colleagues. The transfer workshop also marks the end of the knowledge transfer process moderated and evaluated by the original process leader. It may continue beyond this point with the aid of the transfer plan and the “knowledge agents” who select topics they wish to work on. The formal process of the narrative-structured transfer stories method for knowledge transfer by means of the creation of a space for storytelling ends here. When sharing their experiences, the leaving experts give them a new meaning and arrange them along a clear causal chain and timeline. This also brings those memories to the surface that previously eluded direct questions about what was important and difficult or what went well in the past. Even the most open-ended questions still nudge our memories in certain directions while completely free storytelling can break away from all preconceived notions. The flow of the experts’ stories goes through associations or unexpected turns and thus unearths their implicit knowledge.

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The narrative approach to transferring knowledge from one person to another thus uncovers the contexts of mere facts and makes the storytellers’ personal experiences more “tangible” to their listeners.

Literature Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Erlach, C. (2014). Wissenstransfer-Methoden für Fach- und Führungskräftewechsel. In U. Cress, F. W. Hesse, & K. Sassenberg (Eds.), Wissenskollektion – 100 Impulse für Lernen und Wissensmanagement in Organisationen (pp. 37–38). Wiesbaden: Springer. Erlach, C. (2017). Wissenstransfer mit Geschichten. In J. Chlopczyk (Ed.), Beyond storytelling. Narrative Ansätze und die Arbeit mit Geschichten in Organisationen (pp. 275–301). Berlin: Springer. Erlach, C., Orians, W., & Reisach, U. (2013). Wissenstransfer bei Fach- und Führungskräftewechsel – Erfahrungswissen erfassen und weitergeben. München: Hanser Verlag. Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Grundlagen und Techniken. (7. Auflage). Weinheim: Beltz Verlag. Müller, M., & Grimm, P. (2016). Narrative Medienforschung. Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung. Köln: von Halem.

Case Study: Narrative Knowledge Transfer with Leaving Experts Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Interview with Jörg Lipphardt, HVBG Prologue: “How Can We Access Knowledge That Seems Inaccessible at First” In 2014, we were approached by the HVBG (Hessian Administration for Soil Management and Geoinformation) with the following question: How can we preserve the knowledge and experiences of experts and executives who retire after many years of service? The organization had already implemented a system for managing technical knowledge alongside a form of internal wiki, but these two sources only covered the more accessible facets of knowledge and everyday experiences. The HVBG, however, was hoping to especially gain access to those aspects of knowledge that are inseparable from the personal actions and behavior of their leaving experts: “How should our chief officer behave when interacting with the Ministry; what are the implicit rules and codes of conduct? What exactly does it entail to be a civil servant and which internal processes, structures, rituals, and traditions do newcomers need to learn? Which procedures in land consolidation or, more concretely, in the regulation of waterways have been met with resistance by citizens’ groups, and which mayors are particularly good partners?” Answers to questions like this should no longer be lost. Therefore, the HVBG sought to implement a process under the official name of “personalized knowledge transfer” as their second pillar of knowledge transfer to collect, secure, and disseminate the experiential knowledge of retiring employees (for more information on knowledge transfer at the HVBG [in German], see: http://ebusiness-info.de/sites/default/files/20150728%20HLBG.pdf). At first, we worked with several experts and executives at different hierarchical levels who were close to retirement with the narrative-structured knowledge transfer method “transfer stories” (see Chapter “Transfer Stories”). But it quickly became clear that a personalized knowledge transfer for collecting and sharing experiential knowledge only stood a chance to be established and accepted throughout the organization if the process was headed by specially trained employees on the inside. Therefore, we instructed seven employees who were already working as internal coaches in personnel development at HVBG in the “transfer stories” method. One of these employees was Jörg Lipphardt, a surveyor and internal coach who has since then worked with three experts and their successors using the approach. We asked him about his personal experiences with transfer stories, his thoughts on the method, and his general impressions of narrative approaches in organizations, especially those working in the civil service.

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_15

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Here are a few excerpts from our conversation: Lipphardt: “It all began when HVBG wanted to establish personalized knowledge transfer in our administration. As our first pillar we already had our technical knowledge management system where employees can get information, and everybody can also post their own articles and announcements and that way share their own knowledge. The entire knowledge management system at HVBG originated in an employee survey where we asked them what we could still do better. The employees told us that we had to make sure to keep the knowledge of experts who are leaving in our system. We have to find a solution to also reach the latent knowledge. For that, we need the right framework and also people who can support the process.” What drove your decision to enter the training for the personalized knowledge transfer? Can you perhaps remember a situation or experience that describes how you felt about narrative work then? I’ve always been interested in the story behind the story why people do things the way they do. Or why are they acting this way and not another way, or what drives them, what is their motivation? Not just the things in the foreground, but what’s going on behind the curtain, behind what we’re seeing at the surface. The training on the knowledge transfer method “transfer stories” with its core of letting others talk while I’m listening matched this well; it went exactly in the same direction. So I was very interested in joining the workshop [on “transfer stories”; author’s note]. I can still remember a slide on which they were showing cloud formations: Where all of us could only see some clouds, meteorologists can see so much more. They told us then that an expert can see patterns that those without the experience can’t make out. It reminded me of a book by Krakauer about the ascent of Mount Everest in the 80s during which the mountain climbers got into a storm and most of them died. There was a former pilot in the group who turned around during the ascent and looked at the horizon. And then he decided to return to the camp. That means he stops his ascent. And when he was asked about it later, he said that he had looked at the clouds and then he knew that it would end in a disaster. So he decided to climb back down. When that pilot made his decision, he didn’t really think about it until later when he was looking back while he was telling the story. He said: “I had the knowledge and I used it, but I can only really put my finger on it now.” That was a kind of revelation for me that working with stories works: There is somebody who looks at a cloud formation and knows that he has to go back now. And in the moment when he turned around, he didn’t think about why he was turning around. That only happened later when he told his story to Krakauer [the author of the book; author’s note]. Only in retrospect, when he was telling his story, could he put his knowledge into words. Which experiences did you make with transfer stories later when you were working on your first knowledge transfer process? The first knowledge transfer process was with the staff manager of an agency for soil management. It was also the first knowledge transfer ever for the employees at that agency! And I felt a lot of resistance: There was no established culture to share

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knowledge. For those in the know, what was happening felt dangerous at first— knowledge is power, and if I give my knowledge to other employees or a successor, this might mean a loss of power. I think he hadn’t fully realized yet that he would be gone in a few months anyway, and this would mean that his power would be gone too. He was still stuck in his old role and his old patterns. In a system in which it is not established to share knowledge, the person who does it nonetheless positions himself outside of that system. I think there was a fear like that. During our first meeting I also noticed his concern about delivering something useful: “When the higher-ups are asking for something, I will need something, something to show for, right?” That the biggest part of knowledge transfer happens during the conversation was not yet on anybody’s mind. The attitude toward the personalized knowledge transfer was more like: “We need to have something to show for!” So I was able to calm him down when I said that we would make a knowledge map and a transfer roadmap for the knowledge transfer process. The participants were quite relieved. They have something tangible at the end that they can present to others. I think his reservations had a lot to do with a loss of control: I have to put myself in somebody else’s hands, and somebody from outside of the own agency comes and takes charge. And also: I’m making myself vulnerable in the end because the information is going to a third party. But I could refute this by saying: “Dear expert, before any of your knowledge is leaving the project, you will get to take a look at it and have to give your permission.” And then he could accept it. After our discussion about the expert’s various concerns we could start with the analysis to determine which knowledge we wanted to secure. I explained the procedure and asked him which knowledge he would be willing to share. He should simply write it down on a small piece of paper. I also asked the other employees to write down on a piece of paper what they wanted to learn from the expert. We then posted these notes on a wall and compared them. The knowledge the other employees wanted to gain and what the expert wanted to share were not that different after all! I think that’s when it finally sunk in, the last bits of resistance were gone, and the expert said to himself: Alright, let’s do this knowledge transfer. That was pretty much the key moment for me when he realized that the group didn’t ask him for more than he was willing to give. He was also willing to accept those topics that were not one hundred percent congruent because there was an agreement about at least eighty percent. The highlight was that I later learned during an event somewhere else that the expert had been very satisfied with the knowledge transfer process. I was standing together with the heads of his agency who said to me: “Mr. Lipphardt, you have converted the strongest opponent of knowledge transfer. He is now one of your greatest fans and also of the approach.” How would you explain that? What was the main factor that turned him from the strongest opponent to the greatest fan? The factor was simply that he realized that, as transfer coach, I was providing him with a service: I accompanied and supported his knowledge transfer process, so he

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felt in control of the process at all times. He was in charge. I think that is one aspect that he really liked. The other thing was the great appreciation the other participants expressed for him during the transfer conversations. Even knowledge that felt negligible to him was very valuable to the others. “We didn’t know that at all, and now we see why you decided that way. When you are no longer here, we need to know this!” After this first knowledge transfer process I thought to myself: Yes, this works, this is really great! With narrative work, with storytelling and listening that is, you can even reach knowledge that would have been completely overlooked otherwise. This knowledge is only made accessible through conversations. Maybe you can compare this to a baking recipe: The structured part of the knowledge transfer process is written in such a recipe because I am asking for a specific recipe after all. But I don’t know yet what the cake will taste like. Through narrative work, on the other hand, I still get the information about what I am mixing together, but I also know why the storyteller might sometimes put in an extra pinch of salt or a little less sugar. I learn much more about the context behind it all, behind the obvious things that are happening. When I use narrative tools for the knowledge transfer process, the participants essentially have the taste of the cake on their tongues. This might sound quite metaphorical, but to me this difference is really tangible. Why does the true master chef sometimes do something unusual and deviate from the recipe? I can only find out if I use a narrative approach and let the master chef speak for himself. I think the baking recipe is a nice image! Were there any other experiences you made while working with a narrative approach to knowledge transfer? After the second knowledge transfer process I spoke with the employee who had received the knowledge we had collected, and she told me how she viewed the process: “Mr. Lippstadt, I simply paid close attention to the way you ask your questions when you ask them, and then I did it the same way. Because I realized how much I can learn that way.” During the process it had indeed been the case that when I had a question on the tip of my tongue, she would ask the question instead. That way I was able to almost completely lean back and focus on the themes between the lines that were not addressed because she might have steered the conversation in a different direction with her questions. But this had a high value for her, so I merely asked the questions that had only been hinted at elsewhere. In the third knowledge transfer process a colleague from my own department was expected to transfer his knowledge to two others who were at the same hierarchal level. He had learned about the method during a coaching session, so he was familiar with it. Even though he was also a coach, he had not received any extra training to become a transfer coach. My colleague was really interested in the knowledge transfer process and motivated to experience it and try it out for himself. So he even drew an event curve by himself! He said right away: “That’s how we start, right?” And I said: “Yeah” (laughs) “Yeah, if you’d like. But we should probably first explain to the others what this is and what we’re doing.” The doors were definitely wide open and I did not need to force the procedure. It went really well because he linked the events on the curve to his emotions during those events.

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He could also identify what had bothered him and why. I think that brought an extra benefit for the others to see that work has indeed to do with emotions and that others are sometimes running into problems but find ways to get out of them again. But for me too, seeing him explain the event curve was a highlight! He was explaining and our colleagues were asking questions, completely different questions. They were all at the same level, and the others were always really interested in the stories behind the stories. Why did you do it like this and not another way? They were really stressing the context, the circumstances. Why, what came then, why was it that way, what were the circumstances, who else was there, who were the primary stakeholders, and why them and not somebody else? When the expert went over the story one more time and took it all in, he really understood why he had acted a certain way. And the others understood too. You said earlier that you had the impression that storytelling brings a logical order to events and thus creates a causal chain and meaning. Can you think of a concrete situation in the knowledge transfer conversations that could serve as an example? Basically, it was about the question how to work effectively with a certain executive. Among the others in the group the expert had the reputation of being particularly successful when it came to having his suggestions and ideas accepted and realized by this executive. The expert himself had been completely unaware of this opinion. At least that was my impression from his facial expressions and body language. The group got to this core with their conservation about “approval of training sessions” at which the expert excelled in their eyes. “How did it work the last few times when your training sessions were approved?” After the question the expert began to describe the formal procedure that everybody basically knew about. At some point he stopped and said: “The actual recipe for success that I just realized while I was talking is that I suggest to my boss that it is his idea and I cater to his wish to be the author, originator, maker, etc.” That was one of the key moments that proved to me that the method is working: Here was somebody who had gained knowledge and experiences over years and used them successfully when interacting with his boss on a daily basis. What exactly the explanation for his success was, however, only came to him when he was telling his story and thus putting it into words. Mr. Lippstadt, thank you for your impressions about the narrative knowledge transfer processes you have supported in the last few years! At the end of our conversation I would like to ask you to take a very general look at narrative approaches in organizations. Where in an administration can narrative work be helpful and useful? Alright. After these projects I was completely, how should I put this, convinced of the effectiveness of the method. Therefore, I am certain that narrative work can be very helpful in pretty much any situation that is about securing knowledge, putting experiences into words, or transferring them to others. A narrative approach is also very helpful for leadership contexts and styles. If somebody tells you to jump through a hoop, it makes you feel like a trained animal. But when somebody says, we should jump through this hoop because I had a certain

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experience and it led to certain outcomes, let’s think about it together—that’s a different story entirely. These people can take responsibility, they create sustainability. Different levels are brought together or they reach a consensus. When the bosses tell their employees their own story about a topic, their respective worlds grow closer. It becomes understandable and acceptable to the employees. To me, this is built on the principle of making one’s own actions transparent and creating mutual understanding. When we are interacting with our clients, the narrative method is also amazing! Whether they are surveyors in public projects that hand in their work with us, so we can add it into the land survey register, or other clients. There might always be disagreements, arguments, or unanswered, potentially contentious questions. But in the moment when I get somebody to tell me their story and to listen to mine, our worlds get closer. That’s really noticeable. Everybody is playing their part after all. You can nicely pack the identity of a person into a story. And when my colleague, or even my opponent if you will, tells me their story, I get a feeling for that person. And I believe they are experiencing the same thing. I mean, the other side feels that they are being perceived as human beings. As their essence, whatever makes them who they are. The narrative really touches on the deepest parts of a person. I believe that this is particularly clear in conflict situations. In the moment when a person gets to tell their story and others accept this story, they become alive and understandable to those others. I think this works particularly well when people tell their stories and others listen! I believe that listening really is the formula for success here. Allowing others to talk, listen, and accept. That solves all conflicts. There is a lot of appreciation involved: I appreciate you, I accept you, you are important to me, your motivations are important to me. I don’t have to always do things the way you do, and I don’t even have to agree with it, but I understand why you are acting this way. So, my personal conclusion is this: Stories actually make us human. They are a part of us like our lives. We identify ourselves through stories, we live through stories, we put our knowledge, information, and facts into stories. I think it’s strange that we have forgotten about storytelling in so many places that we are not living it there. And where we allow it to take effect, new potential blooms that was dormant before. It’s like a flower. It suddenly bursts open. There is a potential that has been there all along and suddenly it’s like you are adding mulch. A lot of positive things happen when we work narratively. Mr. Lipphardt, thank you very much for this conversation. (The conversation took place on May 20, 2019, and Mr. Lipphardt gave his permission to print it in this book on June 5, 2019.)

Hero’s Journey: Imbuing Projects and Processes with Life Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

What Is the Hero’s Journey? In the late 1940s, mythologist Joseph Campbell described one of humanity’s oldest narrative structures that he had derived from a comparison of myths and legends across many different cultures. He discovered a recurring cycle marked by the stations along the journeys of heroes and laid out these findings in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2008). Director George Lucas turned this ancient cycle into a staple of contemporary storytelling: The entire plot of his original Star Wars saga was based on the hero’s journey. Since then countless movies have followed the same pattern. The structure is everywhere and even those of us who do not watch movies are very familiar with it: It is a central part of our socialization and has shaped the fairy tales and legends of all cultures. Exploring this monomyth, Campbell also studied the archetypes C. G. Jung, a student of Sigmund Freud, had first suggested in the 1930s as universal and intercultural stencils for specific patterns in behavior and perception (Jung 1935). To Jung, these archetypes have their roots in our “collective unconscious” and thus represent something akin to prototypes in our human behaviors and experiences across all cultures. Even though their facets and features may lack precision, our consciousness can connect with them through archetypal symbols—classic symbols such as the hero, the animus and anima, the warrior, the child, the healer, the trickster, but also the tree, the circle, and the mandala. All of these archetypal symbols awaken certain associations in our consciousness that are similar for all cultures and individuals. Jung derived his concept of the archetypes and the archetypal symbols from the parallels between the dreams of children and myths, legends, and fairy tales. Thus, his approach was similar to the one chosen by Campbell two decades later. Through their respective work with narratives from different cultures, both scholars recognized recurring motifs and structures that affect our thoughts and behaviors, i.e., our consciousness, at a superordinate level that Jung called the collective unconscious.

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_16

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Archetypes and the hero’s journey both create a feeling of “déjà vu” in us and are interconnected: Myths have always applied archetypal symbols and thus became the stage on which we engage with these archetypes. One of the most common archetypal symbols is the hero who sets out on a heroic journey.

We should probably address the term “hero” in this context. In patriarchal cultures—and virtually all cultures whose myths and legends we know best are patriarchal, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the civilizations of India and East Asia—most heroes are men and their heroic deeds are coded in a decidedly “masculine” way as all kinds of spectacular violence. As a consequence, the hero’s journey has garnered a fairly negative reputation in recent years as a typically male narrative that hardly features women and offers them little to identify with. Even though there are a few notable exceptions such as Electra and Antigone in the Western canon, most hero’s journeys are indeed stories about men. But we are certain that this archetypal narrative structure has many different applications and that the “heroes” in the stories do not need to be of the Beowulf persuasion. In fact, the heroes may be silent types, antiheroes, or simply people whose adventure leads them through our everyday world. The hero’s journey is a remarkably flexible format that does not have to yield to patriarchal pressure by always putting an aggressive man at its center. This makes us a little discontent with the word “hero” in our culture as it usually carries the loaded connotation of a brawny macho type who speaks with his fists. Whenever we refer to a “hero” here, we therefore simply mean a central character in a story, a “protagonist.” And this protagonist may of course be a woman, an accountant, a project leader, a team, or a department in an organization. Campbell’s original blueprint for the hero’s journey features 17 stations. For pragmatic reasons, we shortened this list to five central stations when working with organizations: Station 1: Call to Adventure The heroes live their daily lives in a familiar world. But they feel like something is missing, something gnaws at them and keeps them from being content. They wish to change their situation, or they follow the call to adventure to quench a desire. Sometimes the call might also come from the outside if an external event drives them to action. Station 2: Journey into the Unknown Following their initial unwillingness to leave behind their home, the heroes step across the threshold toward the unknown, an unfamiliar land. They often have a mentor who encourages and supports them in this decision—and their eyes are on a distant treasure. Station 3: The Road of Trials Before the treasure can be claimed, the heroes need to press on in the face of many dangers and challenges. They have to win battles, unleash their inner strength,

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Fig. 1 The five stations of the hero’s journey (# authors)

recover from defeats and crises, and overcome their self-doubts. Eventually, they must face their antagonist and vanquish them to reach their goal. Station 4: The Treasure At last, the heroes quench the desire that led them on their journey in the first place. They may find the treasure, rescue their love interest from the forces of evil, or achieve wealth and fame. What the heroes gain may also be an inner transformation, a step toward greater understanding or adulthood as a result of their adventure. Station 5: The Return This might at first seem like the end of the hero’s journey: They live happily ever after. Yet, the heroes are still in a foreign land and need to find a way to return their new treasure safely to where their journey began. Sometimes the treasure might be lost during the journey back—Orpheus who went into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice was forced to leave her behind when he turned around to see if she was still following him just as he was about to step back above ground. If the heroes however manage to return with their treasure, they may continue their lives; yet they have gained the experiences of their journey and are free from their desire. Their community often also benefits from their return and the treasure they found. Campbell discovered an even finer sequence of stations for the structure of the hero’s journey, but as a concise overview of the cycle, the five stations above summarize its most important aspects (see Fig. 1). Frenzel et al. (2006) compressed Campbell’s discovery to these five stations and thereby created a narrative method with a wide range of possible applications that can provide organizations with structure and orientation in many different contexts.

Case Study on the Application of the Hero’s Journey: Conflicts in a Team Background February 20, 2018, 9 AM. A rising sun is drawn on the flipchart in the much too spacious seminar room, welcoming the team workshop participants. The reason for

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our meeting: The team members had complained about serious problems with their leadership in an employee survey. In light of these results the organizational development department of the company had invited us alongside the team leader to a preliminary talk during which we had made plans for a workshop. The team leader had bemoaned massive communication issues in the team in which, by his accounts, the members did not talk with one another at all. Because of this tension, he had been feeling as if he were sitting on a ticking time bomb and was determined to dissolve the team as soon as possible. He had especially stressed the trouble with one particular team member. The purpose of the workshop was to back up the team leader’s request of dissolution when talking to HR. During our preliminary talk it soon became clear that we could not accept this job offer in its original form due to the team leader’s intention and motive for the team workshop. The organizational development department should not be turned into an amplifier for pushing through a personal change agenda. Instead, we agreed on a team intervention in workshop form with three possible outcomes: • Complete dissolution of the team: This was the team leader’s preferred outcome. • Staff change: The workshop quickly revealed that there had been serious conflicts, breaches of trust, and a general lack of communication with one team member in particular. The preferred outcome for the team was thus for this member to leave. • Improving the team situation: This was the preferred outcome for our employer, i.e., the organization itself. We decided that the workshop could only really work toward the third outcome. Even though the other two scenarios remained on the table, the workshop would not influence them either way. It therefore became the goal of our team workshop to search for possible improvements to the team’s communication as well as first impulses for a recovery of the general atmosphere among the team members. The Narrative Approach to a Conflict Situation After our initial conversation we developed an agenda for the team workshop which we planned as a storylistening workshop (see Chapter “The Storylistening Workshop”). Our hope was to collect exceptional stories, i.e., stories about situations in which the team communication had worked better, in which there had been trust, and in which the atmosphere among the team members had been more cooperative and their collaboration thus smoother. On the basis of these positive memories, the group would then try to come up with possible ways in which similar experiences might be recreated in the future. At least this was our plan when we started the workshop. However, on the morning of February 20, 2018, when I (Christine Erlach) had just finished drawing the rising sun on the flipchart, I learned that the problematic team member, who had been at the center of most conflicts, was sick and therefore absent. The employee the

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team leader had cited as the main reason why he wanted to dissolve the entire team would not participate in the workshop! So now there were only six of the seven members sitting in a circle, and the one thing they had in common was that none of them would speak to their absent colleague on that day. They just wanted him out (the second scenario above). All of them were so fed up with their “enemy” that there was little openness to even consider another way forward. My original plan to look for exceptions that might help the team relive positive memories and thus lay the cornerstone for a bridge between the members would not work. All of my requests for exceptional stories were immediately shot down by the group. And it seemed that they were actually quite happy to get a chance to simply vent their spleen in the absence of the source of their shared frustration. What was I to do under these circumstances? I had eight hours of workshop ahead of me but was forced to realize that the agenda on which I had planned to work would not go anywhere at all. I needed to quickly come up with an alternative to pull the group out of its stagnation. So I dropped my original idea for the workshop and instead used a hero’s journey—because the hero’s journey is a narrative method that provides an impulse for movement and change by virtue of its travel metaphor alone. The “pull” of the hero’s journey indeed put the group in motion. The participants began to reflect on whether they wanted to change something about their team situation and what such a change might look like. Through the stations of the hero’s journey, the team members asked themselves the following questions: • Call to adventure: What exactly wears us down as a team? • Journey into the unknown: Do we want to change anything about that? And if so, what can we change? • The treasure: What do we hope to accomplish? What is our treasure, for each individual and for the whole team? • The road of trials: How do we get that treasure? What have we already achieved to get it? • The return: What can I do to make things better for myself and the team a year from now? The sequence for the hero’s journey that evolved during the workshop is slightly different from the basic structure mentioned above: The treasure comes earlier. A hero’s treasure or “desire” is the object they wish to obtain more than anything else and thus the impetus to their journey. Without this treasure, the hero has no reason at all to leave for the unknown, and as such, it is important to have at least a vague notion of what this “treasure” might be in the archetypal structure. The exploration of this “treasure” brought a positive change to the group dynamic during the workshop. It managed to even mobilize those members who had been sticking most adamantly to their image of the “enemy.” The group traveled through the five stations with their respective questions, and this generated concrete ideas about how to improve the situation in their team over the course of the next year. These ideas then turned into concrete actions with

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subordinate goals, schedules, and individuals in charge. This was the final outcome of the team workshop. Yet, the true achievement was that the team had sparked a new, or perhaps rediscovered, hope for better cooperation and a shared future! It is important to note, however, that this “renewal” of the team spirit resulted in the sick member leaving the team three weeks later. He was offered a new position in a different team for which he had been applying for years. The team’s alleged “opponent” was just as satisfied with this outcome as his former co-members. "

The hero’s journey blueprint gave the team members the impulse they needed to go on a journey together. Working with this metaphorical voyage toward the unknown and the team members as its heroes in their everyday experiences created enough mental distance to a topic that had been impossible to discuss before. The method made them open to guiding questions that successively took them through the five stations of the journey.

Hands On: How to Use a Hero’s Journey in a Workshop Prepare five cards with the five stations of the hero’s journey and attach them in order on a flipchart, whiteboard, suitable wall, etc. Explain these stations to the participants using a well-known example like a movie or fairy tale. During this explanation make sure to also connect each station to a concrete real-world experience or event of the workshop group, e.g., the phases of a typical project: All projects fit nicely into the narrative structure of the hero’s journey. Once the participants are made familiar with the hero’s journey, they form small groups of three to five people. Each group gets five cards with the instruction to write about each of the five stations on a separate card. In the example above, the groups wrote down their answers to the guiding questions. However, it is not necessary to be this specific regarding what the groups should write about each station. For example, you might ask them to look back on a past project and reflect on it using the five stations of the hero’s journey. The mere activation of the metaphor with its five markers will lead to lively discussions among the group members. Once each group has had enough time, they pin their cards under the five stations on the flipchart (or wherever you placed your cards at the beginning) and explain their thought process to the others. After these short presentations all participants discuss similarities and differences together and think about possible future steps and pitfalls to be avoided. Depending on the workshop size, the hero’s journey session should take 1–2 h.

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The Many Applications of the Hero’s Journey The case study above applied the hero’s journey to get a group of people to think about the behavior of individuals and the entire team as well as the dynamic among its members. The hero’s journey is a narrative method that may be used in many different contexts and pursue very different goals in various consulting situations: The Hero’s Journey as a Planning Tool Planning an upcoming task, e.g., a future project, can benefit greatly from the use of the stations along the hero’s journey as a narrative structure: The call to adventure represents the initial situation and the question what needs to be considered before the journey may begin. The figure of the mentor who encourages the heroes to begin their journey can help with identifying important stakeholders. The road of trials is a collection of all expected difficulties and challenges during the project; it also helps with the identification of any forces or people that might hinder a successful outcome. The treasure is the goal of the project that the employees who are involved hope to achieve in spite of the obstacles. And the final station of the hero’s journey, the return, focuses the attention on the lasting effect of the implementation and the sustainability of the successfully finished project. Sadly, projects without a narrative guideline often forget about this final phase: Even though a project comes to a successful conclusion with the development of a new process or new controlling tools, there is no permanent takeaway for the organization that preserves the lessons learned. Too often it is all a big fuss that fades away quickly as employees frequently complain when their bosses come up with new projects. The “return” station of the hero’s journey tries to avoid this by asking the following question: How can we successfully implement the result of a project, e.g., the development of a new software, into our daily affairs and make it permanent? "

The hero’s journey can be a planning tool for projects, but it can also support the preparation of seminars for knowledge transfer or change processes with their classic phases and tasks of change architecture. All kinds of different plans can apply the narrative structure of the hero’s journey.

The Hero’s Journey as a Reflection Tool Using the hero’s journey as a reflection tool shifts its focus from the future toward events in the past: How did it all begin and why do we want to change something (i.e., call to adventure)? What was the starting point of a change (i.e., journey into the unknown)? Which difficulties did we overcome successfully and what did we learn (i.e., road of trials)? What did we gain (i.e., treasure)? And how did we succeed in making our experiences and gains usable for everyone (i.e., return)? The hero’s journey looks at the learning history, past projects, or other past events to secure what was learned.

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The Hero’s Journey as a Presentation Tool The use of the hero’s journey for the preparation of presentations or speeches is genuine storytelling, i.e., the creative application of narrative methods! Because it is an archetypal narrative structure with an inherent arc of suspense and a great potential for identification with the hero, the hero’s journey is an excellent way to enthrall an audience. It is thus perfect to turn endless and dull PowerPoint presentations or boring talks into exciting and instructive stories. An authentic personal hero’s journey may also win the listeners over for an upcoming change process.

How to Make Your PowerPoint Presentations More Exciting with the Hero’s Journey The easiest way to give your first narrative presentation is to make slides that already have a narrative structure: This way established formats and “the beaten track” will not interfere with your creativity! But even if you have a set of “traditional” PowerPoint slides ready to go, switching to the narrative format of the hero’s journey for your presentation is a doable task: • Delete the outline and title of your presentation. Because your new starting point is the call to adventure: What drives you or your team? Why is it important to change something? • Add a protagonist. Who is going to be the hero of your presentation? Is it you or other colleagues? If your presentation is about a product or process, you are looking for a protagonist who is going through all five stations of the journey, e.g., a customer. Turn the product or process into the hero’s helper! The narrative is meant to guide you through your slides while the factual information is taking a back seat. • For the journey into the unknown you may show a title slide for your presentation. This is also the time to introduce your hero if you have not already done so. • The road of trials consists of the slides that feature the factual information or stages of your topic. This is the point at which you talk about all the details that might otherwise be boring to your audience. Telling this part from the perspective of a hero who is able to overcome (or fail to overcome) challenges, while making use of these details makes the presentation much more engaging and memorable. • The treasure represents the goal, the idea, or the finished task the hero tries to accomplish or realize. Do not confuse the process or product with the treasure! The hero decides what the treasure is, not your topic! • The presentation ends with the return. This is where the classic summary slides go alongside further steps and suggestions for the future. But do not forget about your hero here either: How do they bring their treasure into their everyday lives?

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Literature Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (The collected works of Joseph Campbell) (Vol. 17). Novato: New World Library. Frenzel, K., Müller, M., & Sottong, H. (2006). Storytelling. Das Harun-al-Raschid-Prinzip. München: Hanser. Jung, C. G. (1935). Über die Archetypen des kollektiven Unbewussten. Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934 (pp. 179–229). Zürich: Rhein-Verlag.

Actants: Establishing the Field of Relational Forces Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

The actantial model was originally developed by French linguist and narratologist Algirdas Julien Greimas (1971) as a means to highlight the relationships between the central forces of a story. These forces may be characters, institutions, or any other influences on the people and events of a fictional world. For this reason, Greimas called them the “actants” of a narration, i.e., forces that move the plot forward. The central actant is of course the protagonist as subject who has a certain goal or “desire”, i.e., an object, that they hope to achieve or obtain: finding a treasure, catching a criminal, kissing their loved one, getting a job, etc. Heroes and their goals are essentially the backbone of a story. Their presence makes the story possible! The protagonist is usually competing for the goal with an opponent and has a helper on their quest. Protagonists may be their own senders or there might be another character sending them on their journey. The sender might also take an abstract shape such as the hero’s conscience or their society that wants them to serve up justice. Once the hero accomplishes their goal, they may themselves be the receiver or there is another person or entity that benefits from their accomplishment. When a criminal is caught in a detective story for example, society benefits in a very concrete way as do the victims and the detective. Several concrete and abstract characters or forces can therefore fill the same function in a narration. Sometimes they are not mentioned explicitly: In the detective story example, society is always already there even though the concept might not have its own independent voice in the narration. Nevertheless, all actants affect one another through their force fields in every story (Müller and Grimm 2016).

Possible Applications of the Actantial Model Whether or not the storyteller points them out explicitly, the actants’ force fields shape each narration. They are in a circular relationship with the actants’ behavior: The forces shape behavior, and behavior shapes the forces. The force fields are not stylistic devices—they are association planes that allow for a form of unconscious # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_17

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“recognition” and thus shape our thoughts and actions directly. We can use this effect to our advantage in coaching situations: As soon as we ask another person to think of themselves as a protagonist, the other actants enter their stories automatically. They either make an explicit appearance or exert a latent influence. In Part I we talked at length about how people make and construct meaning in a complex world with causal connections in the shape of stories. The same happens when we work with actants as soon as a participant steps into the role of the protagonist. Their attention immediately shifts to the question what their goals are and what it is that drives or motivates them. When the axis of “hero/target object” is at the center of a person’s self-perception, the other actants appear “automatically.” We frequently observe the inclusion of archetypal patterns that resonate strongly with everybody. And we have never encountered a person who could not readily identify a helper, opponent, sender, and receiver in their current situation. The actantial model can also support narrative coaching that focuses on a client’s biographical stories: Is there a sender in your story? Could that be somebody else? What would change if you were the sender yourself? Should the goal remain the same, or could it also be something else?

Hands On: How to Use the Actantial Model Arrange the actants as shown in Fig. 1. The main axis consists of the hero and their goal. To their left, the helper is placed next to the hero and the sender next to the goal; to their right, the opponent is placed next to the hero and the receiver next to the goal. Use for Individual Coaching Ask the coachee to stand at the hero card and take a look at the force fields indicated by the other cards on the floor. Start with the goal: “What is your desire, your goal, what is driving you, what do you want to achieve?” Depending on the context or the task at hand, the response will be an attempt to make sense of the constellation. The participant will create a suitable personal meaning for their current circumstances and incorporate those actants that help them express this meaning.

Fig. 1 The actantial model (# authors)

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This is a highly beneficial exercise for the participant: It makes apparent the latent forces that affect them as “protagonist” of their own story. The actantial approach elicits a feeling of self-efficacy, i.e., the impression that they are actively shaping the story. The cards on the floor can help with this process when you ask the participant to experiment with the following question: What would change if you were the sender and/or receiver? Use for Group Coaching If you are working with a group, you can ask each participant to stand with one of the cards and act as the voice of the represented actant. The participant speaking for the hero should begin: Who is standing here? Is it the participant themselves? Or is the entire team? Or perhaps a certain individual within the team such as the project leader? We have used this card approach for example with a project team that was experiencing strong resistance from its company with regard to a specific project goal.

Literature Greimas, A. J. (1971). Strukturale Semantik. Methodologische Untersuchungen. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Müller, M., & Grimm, P. (2016). Narrative Medienforschung. Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung. Köln: von Halem.

Springboard Story: Using Stories to Win Over People Karin Thier

What Is a Springboard Story? The goal of springboard stories is to elicit a mental leap in their audience that allows them to better understand a change. This makes them “change stories” that encourage their listeners to connect the story content with their personal context in their minds, ideally giving them the impression that the change was their own idea to begin with. Transmitting a feeling for the change is thus their central intention (Denning 2001). Stephen Denning originally created the springboard story format when he developed a knowledge management system for the World Bank. "

Springboard stories are change stories that are meant to produce a mental leap inside their audience—from the content of the story to their own experiences—and motivate and excite them for a topic. Their goal is not to convey as much information as possible; rather, they want to win over an audience for a possible change and its potential.

The Origin of Springboard Stories Stephen Denning had climbed his way up to Director for the Africa region in 1996 when the President of the World Bank suddenly passed away, his immediate boss retired, and somebody else took his position. It was a tough situation and because the World Bank did not really know what to do with him, the management assigned the topic “information” to Denning—a topic that was not exactly in vogue with companies in 1996. It almost felt like a demotion! But Denning was interested in the topic, and he realized quickly the enormous potential of information for the World Bank if it could only be collected and shared better. He saw how much valuable knowledge there was—and how little of it was used and exchanged. Yet, the reaction to his findings was lukewarm at best, especially for his vision to transform the World Bank into a “knowledge-sharing organization.” He tried everything to convince his colleagues: arguments, figures, statistics, presentations. But nothing worked until one day he came across a little story a colleague shared with # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_18

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him about a case in Zambia in which randomly exchanged knowledge between two World Bank employees about a malaria outbreak had saved many lives. Denning immediately understood that arguments and numbers would never suffice to win over his superiors for his ideas. Instead, he needed to create a concrete picture of the opportunities knowledge management would offer the World Bank in the heads of his listeners. He began to share the story of the malaria outbreak in Zambia, first with his colleagues, then his team leaders, and finally senior management. The Zambia story and the idea of the “knowledge-sharing organization” spread quickly across the World Bank and eventually also reached the new President—who was thrilled! On October 1, 1996, he announced at a large public event: The World Bank would share its knowledge with the world and transform into a “knowledge bank.” Before the World Bank was ranked the global leader in knowledge management four years later in 2000, Stephen Denning still had a lot of convincing to do. And time and again, he saw that stories were the best way to motivate people and persuade them of the importance of sharing their knowledge. Soon after this, Denning left the World Bank and continued his work as a freelance consultant. Since then, he has assisted organizations worldwide with change processes. In addition to storytelling, he has also done work on the topic of agility. He authored several best-selling books such as The Age of Agile (2018), The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, (2011), and The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (2001). A springboard story has three major characteristics (Denning 2001; Thier 2018): 1. It creates a connection between a new idea, an intended change, and a protagonist who undergoes the change and with whom the audience can identify. A springboard story only reaches its listeners when they can empathize with the protagonist and find themselves in a similar situation. 2. The story should astonish and surprise the audience. Even though the listeners need to be able to understand the content of the story and relate it to their own lives, it should still feature unexpected elements to grab their attention. 3. Hearing the story should make new insights and ideas possible for the listeners. They should gain a higher level of understanding of the change it describes. Example of a Springboard Story

In June 1995, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia logged on to the website for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and got the answer to a question on how to treat malaria. This was June 1995, not June 2001. This was not the capital of Zambia but a tiny place six hundred kilometers away. This was not rich country: this was Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world. But the most important part of this picture for us in the World Bank is this: the World Bank isn’t in the picture. The World Bank doesn’t have its know-how accessible to all the millions of people who made decisions about poverty. But just imagine if it had. Think what an organization it could become. ◄

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(This is the story Stephen Denning used to convince the management of the World Bank to become a knowledge-sharing organization; it is available at: http:// www.stevedenning.com/Books/the-springboard.aspx) Each springboard story really tells two stories. The first is the explicit story, e.g., how one World Bank employee was inquiring about a malaria treatment (see example above). Inside the heads of the audience, however, there should also emerge a second story—one that is much more important and that transfers the contents of the first story to their own situation. This “second story” exists solely in the heads of the listeners; the storyteller does not have direct access to it. According to Denning, however, a good springboard story can elicit an analogous “second story.” The audience believes the latter because they essentially wrote it themselves. For Denning, the true power of springboard stories does not lie in what is actually being told but in the reactions they create in the heads of their audience. Springboard stories are not stories that are merely shared—they are a means to an end of getting the audience to create its own future. The following elements characterize all springboard stories (Denning 2001; Thier 2018): A springboard story. . . • • • • • • • •

. . .is relatively short. . . .must be understandable and interesting to its audience. . . .should lift its audience to a higher level of understanding of a topic. . . .has a happy ending. . . .describes the change in an implicit way. . . .makes it possible for the audience to identity with its protagonist. . . .usually talks about a concrete person or organization. . . .should be tested as often as possible at various hierarchical levels of an organization and adjusted when needed.

Case Study About the Use of a Springboard Story at a Health Insurance Company Forty-two managers of a big German health insurance company attended a two-day retreat to answer the following question: How would we like to realize our leadership guidelines in the future while also filling them with life? Both days were packed with workshops and discussions. On the second day the participants were introduced to storytelling methods for the first time. Our task (Karin Thier and Christine Erlach) was to present various narrative procedures against the backdrop of the topic “living leadership.” In addition to the hero’s journey (see Chapter “Hero’s Journey”) and the use of metaphors (see Chapter “Working with Metaphors”), we discussed springboard stories at the end of the second day. Thus, springboard stories were the finale of the retreat. At this point the participants had already learned a lot about the topic “the future story for our leadership” as well as the basics of storytelling and several narrative methods. The

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springboard stories were now the final tool for winning over their employees and superiors. After a general introduction, the participants had ten minutes to develop a realistic springboard story to showcase their leadership vision. Their stories should not be longer than one minute. Similar to an elevator pitch, we told the participants to picture a situation in which they needed to quickly convince an employee or boss within a very limited amount of time. Once all participants had thought of a story, we asked them to form groups of six and sit in separate circles around the room. With the stroke of a gong the first group member then began to tell their story. After 60 s the gong sounded again and the next participant told their story until all six had had their turn. During a 15 min break the participants then gave each other feedback and tips on their respective iterations of the springboard story. We followed up with a few common suggestions on how to improve the stories, e.g., to keep the time and arc of suspense in mind, to identify unnecessary details and cut them from the story, etc. Next, all but one member from each group stood up and moved to another circle. We repeated the procedure for three more rounds, and all participants tried to tell their stories in group settings with as many different colleagues (and versions of the story) as possible. Each participant thus had the opportunity to share their own version of the story five times and receive different feedback to keep improving. At the end we asked everybody to stand up and put their hand on the shoulder of the participant whose story they had liked the most. This physically and psychologically emotional moment made for an impressive demonstration of the power of stories to the entire group. Finally, each participant shared their personal thoughts on where they could use springboard stories at work after the workshop. Hands On: How to Use Springboard Stories in Seminars and Workshops You should allow at least 1.5 h. If you have more than 20 participants, increase this estimate to at least 2 h. As an introduction to the benefits of springboard stories you can share their origin story (see above). You can use a flipchart or PowerPoint presentation to explain what exactly springboard stories are and which elements they usually feature. Next, you can share a concrete example of a springboard story—either from your personal experience or from the one Stephen Denning told at the World Bank (see above). Give your participants about 10 min to come up with their own springboard stories. They may want to take notes as well. To give them some guidance, you can write down the following questions on a flipchart or on a handout: • What is the intended change the story should bring to the organization or a group within the organization? • Which situation (inside or outside the organization/group) do you know where this change has already happened? (continued)

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• Who is the protagonist? Can the audience identify easily with them? Does the protagonist have an emotional connection with the target group? • Start with the date and place where the experience happened. • Have a happy ending. • Get the target group actively involved: “What would happen if. . .” – “Imagine we would also. . .” Now the workshop or seminar is divided into smaller groups of four to six participants who sit together in their own circles. When you give the signal (e.g., by sounding a gong), one participant in each of the small groups tells their springboard story to the others. They get 60 s for this before you give another signal and the next participant immediately begins to tell their story. Repeat this procedure until all group members have shared their springboard stories. During a 15 min break the small groups now exchange their feedback on the stories with one another. You may also use this intermission to share a few more suggestions and tips about storytelling. Follow the same procedure for three to four rounds. Ask the participants to form new groups each time. After the final round everybody stands up and places their hand on the shoulder of the participant whose story they liked the most. The “winner” tells their story one more time to the entire group and might receive a little gift. The session ends with a brief discussion about everybody’s experiences with the springboard stories.

Applications of Springboard Stories Springboard stories were originally created for change processes and thus have a wide array of potential applications. In workshops and training sessions, they are an excellent tool to get participants excited and motivated for a change. Especially managers benefit from practicing the method because it is particularly effective in settings in which they come together to discuss the development, preparation, and implementation of change processes. The creation of suitable springboard stories should be a central component of all communications about change. Springboard stories excel in any situation in which a storyteller wants to convince others of an idea. Once you have a good springboard story for a particular change project and it has proven itself across multiple retellings, it becomes a central part of all communications about this project and should be told over and over in all suitable situations, e.g., when accidentally running into a superior or employee who is still unconvinced in the canteen, the cafeteria, or the elevator (the classic!).

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Presentations might benefit most from the use of springboard stories as they make for incredible openers about a planned change. They are a fantastic way to get the attention of an audience! Thanks to the mental leap from the story to personal situations that occurs in their heads, the listeners are bound to become much more receptive to the presentation that follows and able to immediately understand its benefits. Stephen Denning put it this way: Why storytelling? Nothing else worked. Charts left listeners bemused. Prose remained unread. Dialogue was just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers. . .in a large organization to get enthusiastic about major change, I found that storytelling was the only thing that worked. (Denning 2001)

Springboard Stories Are Used in the Following Contexts • Manager workshops and seminars on general methodological competence • Manager training on the communication of concrete change • Meetings to introduce change to employees and colleagues • Presentations about intended change for an audience of decision-makers • Situations in which others need to be quickly convinced of a change

Literature Denning, S. (2018). The age of Agile: How smart companies are transforming the way work gets done. New York: McGraw-Hill. Denning, S. (2011). The leader’s guide to storytelling: Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Denning, S. (2001). The springboard: How storytelling ignites action in knowledge-eraorganizations. Woburn: Butterworth-Heinemann. Thier, K. (2018). Storytelling in organizations: A narrative approach to change, brand, project and knowledge management (Management for professionals). Heidelberg: Springer.

90-Second Backstory: Saying a Lot in a Short Time Karin Thier

What Is the 90-Second Backstory? The 90-second backstory was created by consultant, cultural anthropologist, and two-times TED speaker Michael Margolis (2007) who has been using storytelling to consult companies like Facebook and Google. He asked himself why we tell stories. Of course we want to entertain, motivate, activate, excite, explain, make sense, and teach. But something else that narratives can support and that is crucial in the business world is the establishment of trust. Trust is a common theme in all areas of human life. Our brains are constantly asking: Can I trust this person? Margolis found this to be true in many contexts that directly affect organizations: customers before they make a purchase, potential employees during interviews, investors when they pitch business ideas, teams at the beginning of a new project, shareholders at the general assembly, the audience during a talk, etc. "

90-second backstories are short narratives about individuals or organizations that are told with the intent to build trust. Trust cannot be established with numbers or facts—but by answering the following questions: Where do you come from? What influenced you? What are you curious about? Which problems are you trying to solve? (Bachmair 2017).

Trust and “gut feeling” influence many business situations and decisions, making them rarely entirely rational. To gain the trust of their customers, employees, and partners, managers and organizations mostly rely on transparent processes and verifiable product quality. Another way to gain this trust that has not yet received enough attention are narratives. The stories we tell about ourselves and organizations show who we are; they implicitly answer the question whether or not we are trustworthy. Our stories thus decide if others will trust us, or whether customers, employees, and partners will trust a company.

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_19

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Example

Picture the following situation: Instead of rattling down your work biography and current position and responsibilities during a self-introduction with managers or in a project kick-off, customer meeting, or pitch, you are telling your “backstory” answering the questions listed above in about 90 seconds. Or you allow others to share their backstories in interviews or teambuilding events. This will quickly result in mutual trust and thus provide an excellent foundation for future collaboration. The backstory and the questions it covers in 90 seconds can tell you more about another person than some employees know about their colleagues after years of working together. This concise form of storytelling allows for a glimpse of a person’s essence: Somebody is sharing something important about themselves and this builds trust (Bachmair 2017; Margolis 2009). To create the right circumstances for the story and give the storyteller guidance, the backstory answers the following four questions: Where do you come from? (places, people, values) What influenced you? (what shapes your life?—what are you rebelling against?) What are you curious about? (projects, topics, people) Which problems are you trying to solve? (recurring motifs, borders you would like to tear down) ◄

The Backstory of Organizations These questions do not only work when individuals tell their stories; they also allow companies to gain the trust of others. However, the focus of the questions shifts slightly: Where Do You Come From? This question tells others what kind of organization a company is and where its roots are. Its history, founding myths, and the development of its values are important parts of the answer. How has the company developed over the years? Has it taken responsibility in crises? How did it become successful? What Influenced You? In South Africa the question goes like this: On whose shoulders do you stand? This question tells others what the company has already accomplished and who contributed to its success. It is about its competences, people, and teams.

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What Are You Curious About? This question tells others what the company hopes to become. Which products, services, and projects are deemed particularly important? What kind of employees already work here, and whom does the company hope to attract? Which Problems Are You Trying to Solve? This question addresses recurring challenges the company faces: in other words, its ultimate goal. This may be a specific customer problem the company hopes to solve or a societal problem such as sustainable mobility. All four of these questions are far-reaching, and companies are without a doubt constantly contemplating them in various ways, e.g., through organizational culture, change management, and brand management. For practical reasons, however, there is hardly ever enough time for sweeping explanations when interacting with customers, teams, and potential future employees. Here, companies need something to condense the central messages of their principles, history, or employee pamphlets—they need a fast and reliable way to build immediate trust! This is where the 90-second backstory shines. Where do you come from? (company, history, founding myths, values) What influenced you? (themes, concepts, people, teams) What are you curious about? (products, projects, recruiting) Which problems are you trying to solve? (which customer problems or other problems do we want to solve; where do we stand?—visions for the future)

The 90-Second Backstory in a Workshop on Content Development for Employer Branding Measures Because of its persistent struggle to attract skilled applicants for open positions, a middle-sized electronics company was holding a half-day workshop to develop new content for its employer branding. Particularly the company’s external communication via Internet and job ads was very outdated. Potential applicants could barely make out what kind of company they would be applying for—or why they should do so in the first place. The company’s backstory should guide the search for suitable content that would put the topic “trust” at its center. This concrete example illustrates how the 90-second backstory method can be used during such a workshop: Part 1: Who Works for Us? What Defines Us as an Employer? (About 45 min) (continued)

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At the beginning of the workshop we asked all participants (heads of several departments, all employees in marketing and HR) to introduce themselves to the rest of the group by answering the questions of the 90-second backstory: Where do you come from? What influenced you? What are you curious about? Which problems are you trying to solve? A moderator forms groups of two and explains the background and procedure of the method: • It begins with 2 to 3 min to think about the questions and potentially take notes. The pairs decide who begins with telling their story. • The first round of storytelling starts. It lasts for 90 seconds. • The second person tells their story. Again, they have 90 seconds. • Next, the two participants tell each other what surprised, touched, amazed them about their partner’s story. • Both now introduce their partner to the entire group. It is important to note that the participants do not need to remember everything. They should focus on the parts they can remember best and think are important for everybody else to know. • The moderator writes down bullet points from the introductions on a flipchart to document who the employees are. Mutual trust should thus be at the center of the workshop from the very beginning. The participants experienced firsthand how the backstories created a feeling of closeness, trust, and camaraderie. They also provided the first new recruitment content: What defines us as employees of this company? Part 2: What Is the Backstory of Our Company? (About 2 h) The second part of the workshop focused on the backstory of the company. The participants formed groups of three, and their first task was to write down three to four thoughts on each of the four questions for the backstory: Where do you come from? (company, history, founding myths, values) What influenced you? (themes, concepts, people, teams) What are you curious about? (products, projects, recruiting) Which problems are you trying to solve? (which customer problems or other problems do we want to solve; where do we stand?—visions for the future) After 30 min the entire group got back together and each trio presented their thoughts while the moderator clustered similar responses. The group then evaluated how important or relevant the various thoughts and responses seemed to the four questions. They used a simple point system: Each participant could award a total of four points (one per question). (continued)

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The participants then formed different groups of three. Their next task was to spend roughly 20 min with creating a 90-second story based on the responses that had received the highest scores in the previous step. Each group shared their story with the entire workshop and the most popular backstory (gauged by applause) was told a second time. The entire workshop group afterward discussed what to do next with this backstory. The moderator kept track of the discussion on the flipchart: How can we for example use the story in job ads? Is it possible to write a modified version of the backstory for our homepage? How can we concretely implement the trust-building themes into our internal and external communication? Who will do what until when to get this done? Even if the workshop setting does not result in finished content, the collective effort to find a common backstory is a solid foundation on which the topic “trust” becomes more tangible in an organization. This can then help to communicate the feeling more convincingly to the outside.

Possible Applications of the 90-Second Backstory 90-second backstories can benefit organizations in many different contexts. In general, they are excellent tools for managers and moderators during (large-scale) events. A typical use is a classic round of introductions that wishes to establish trust and grab everybody’s attention in a short time. The method can also facilitate teambuilding: In rotating dyads, the team members tell each other their personal 90-second backstories before the entire team exchanges what was new, surprising, or touching to them. A 90-second backstory about a company is particularly useful for (employer) branding. Ideally, all employees of a company are able to tell this backstory from their own perspective—especially those working in HR, recruitment, PR, and marketing should know it! The backstory is the shared foundation for the internal and external communication of a company. Employees may be trained in how to work with the story during workshops with larger groups. Applications of the 90-Second Backstory Personal introductions Team-building processes (Employer) branding activities Recruitment events Marketing and PR

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Literature Bachmair, S. (2017). StoryWork – mit narrativer Arbeit Führungs- und Organisationskultur transformieren. In J. Chlopczyk (Ed.), Beyond Storytelling. Narrative Ansätze und die Arbeit mit Geschichten in Organisationen (pp. 81–107). Berlin: Springer Gabler. Margolis, M. (2009). Believe me, why your vision, brand and strategy need a bigger story. New York: Kindle Direct.

Working with Metaphors: Building Parallel Worlds Karin Thier

What Are Metaphors and What Do They Do? We all use metaphors in our daily lives: Sometimes we might tell our friends that we are looking for the needle in a haystack when we talk about a search that seems hopeless from the get-go; when things go exceptionally well for a long time, we might be riding on a wave of success; or we might speak of a glass ceiling when discussing the disadvantages women face in their careers. In many instances we may be using these metaphors without giving them a second thought. It is, however, also possible to use metaphorical expressions in a completely purposeful and directed way, for example when we want to make a complex issue easier to understand or get our audience to engage with it more deeply. This is possible because our brains need to decode the metaphorical content before we can fully grasp it—and this means extra work. When we hear the expression “looking for a needle in a haystack,” we have to decipher the resulting image first to discover the meaning behind the image, i.e., “a hopeless search.” In a way, our brains have to solve a puzzle each time they encounter a metaphor: What does it mean? And as a result, we not only receive a colorful picture for a certain message, but this message also becomes easier to retain. This is why teachers use metaphors particularly often. Psychologists and therapists also like to work with metaphors because they can make complicated topics and emotions more easily understandable. All of these qualities also allow organizations to benefit greatly from the power of metaphors. " What Is a Metaphor? According to Merriam-Webster, “a metaphor is a figure of

speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them: the person being addressed in ‘you’re a peach’ is being equated with a peach, with the suggestion being that the person is pleasing or delightful in the way that a peach is pleasing and delightful. A metaphor is an implied comparison, as in ‘the silk of the singer’s voice,’ in contrast to the explicit comparison of the simile, which uses like or as, as in # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_20

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‘a voice smooth like silk.’” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ metaphor)

How Organizations Can Work with Metaphors Organizations can make systematic use of metaphors as a narrative method in many different situations: Metaphors as Structure Metaphors are frequently used to add structure to presentations, seminars, etc. Many instructors and coaches for example use a journey or mountain climbing metaphor at the beginning of their presentation to explain its flow and composition. Once a metaphor is introduced, the instructor can return to it at any point during the rest of the presentation: Now we are still at the start of our journey and don’t really know what to expect. . . Now we arrive at the first station. . . Now we can already see the summit. . . etc. The metaphor creates a story in the listeners’ heads and thus makes it easier to identify and follow the structure of a presentation, seminar, etc. The journey metaphor is not a story in the stricter sense; it is not primarily narrative. But it elicits a story in the imagination of an audience: a journey with a starting point, a transformation due to various experiences, and a destination at which the travelers will have undergone a change. Metaphors can also help locate emotions and emotional shifts. Couple therapists often work with an “emotional map” to find out where exactly each partner is located emotionally in the present, where they used to be, and where they would like to go. The same procedure can be helpful for teambuilding or project milestones. The metaphor of a map with lush meadows, tall mountains, sun-kissed beaches, swamps, and deserts that indicates the locations of the individual team members to express their emotional state makes their current situation visible and understandable to others and can support a dialogue to find solutions. Metaphors to Reduce Complexity A fitting metaphor is often the best way to explain a complex issue. The iceberg metaphor for the illustration of the relationship between an expert’s implicit and explicit knowledge is a great example! Only a small section of an iceberg is visible above the ocean surface while a much larger chunk remains underwater. The visible part of the iceberg represents the explicit knowledge that is clearly coded and may be put into words easily. The larger, submerged part of the iceberg, on the other hand, is the implicit knowledge that cannot be seen but is nonetheless there. An expert knows many things without being able to explain them with words; this knowledge is evident in their abilities, actions, and behaviors, but they have no verbal means to communicate it (Polanyi 1985).

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Our brains readily store the intuitive image of the iceberg. Recalling it later, even after some time has passed, is not difficult. In essence, metaphors are like memory crutches (metaphorically speaking). Another advantage of metaphors when it comes to reducing complexity is that the user can assume that all audience members have the same exact image in their heads. This puts everybody on the same foundation for further discussion. It is important, however, to choose a suitable metaphor that is meaningful and comprehensible to a given audience. Any new metaphor should first be tried out with a few colleagues to see if they understand it in the intended way. "

An ill-fitting metaphor might not be coded properly by the audience. Thus, it can cause confusion instead of making things simpler.

Metaphors to Illustrate Differing Viewpoints Organizations often need employees with diverse trainings and backgrounds to work together for a limited time in teams or on specific projects. The different team members might have very different goals and intentions during their collaboration, and their different perspectives are always subtle issues and emotions that remain beneath the surface and are seldom addressed in the workplace—unless the problems become too large to still be ignored or when the success of the entire project is at risk. One way to make the different viewpoints, intentions, backgrounds, and interests of the team members visible and assessable is the work with metaphors. Case Study: An Organization Sets Sail

A German organization was about to kick off its largest and most complex project on climate protection ever. Many different parties were involved, some of them with vastly different intentions, and the collaboration between them was strained from the start. Communication in meetings was difficult, and at times some of the contributors even clashed so fiercely that their differences began to jeopardize the success of the entire project. The project leader decided to address the issue with a metaphor. Her image was the adventure of a fleet with the mission to save drinking water of its home region. The fleet was made up of all kinds of different ships that represented the various individuals who were cooperating for the project. The project leader had originally developed this metaphor with external help before she adjusted it together with the members of the project team during a workshop. Their workshop assignments included to describe their own ship and its task for the expedition, share their opinions about the ships of the other team members, and find a way to save drinking water as a collaborative effort while pointing out the unique contribution each single ship could make. Finally, the participants discussed the implications of the metaphor for the project: What does all of this mean for our work together? With the help of the metaphor, the project team was able to identify and understand the viewpoints, expectations, and interests of its many collaborators while also drawing conclusions and developing solutions for their shared project

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Fig. 1 Metaphor of an expedition with several ships to illustrate differing viewpoints (# Martina Schradi) (translation: “Expedition Euraponia: The fleet on its adventurous journey to save drinking water)

goal. The metaphor thus became the catalyst for a common narrative about the future of the project team. For the remainder of the project, the team members continued to refer to this metaphor to strengthen their collaboration and work out misunderstandings and disagreements (see Fig. 1). ◄ Metaphors for Conflict Management Some of the major causes for conflicts are deadlocked views, opinions, and perceptions. Once these differences are identified and made accessible to the opposing sides, new approaches to conflict management become possible. Metaphors facilitate changes in perspective. They let individuals see a situation from the position of others while also creating some distance to their own point of view. This is why metaphors have long been essential tools in coaching and mediation. Solving an acute team conflict with metaphors requires good intuition and the following steps (for a more detailed description, see Thier and Erlach 2013): Development of metaphorical stories in conflict situations: 1. Identifying hidden attitudes and perceptions: In one-on-one talks, each person describes the situation from their own perspective. 2. Analyzing the different “truths”/perspectives: The different attitudes and perceptions on a specific topic or event are compared.

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3. Searching a common metaphor—asking the following questions can help with this step: Which movie, fairy tale, novel, etc. does spontaneously come to mind? Which genre would this conflict fit into (thriller, action, tragedy, comedy, etc.)? Where would the story take place (space, inner city, desert, fantasy world, etc.)? Which comic/fairy tale/novel characters or actors would play the hero, opponent, etc.? 4. Transferring the events into the world of the metaphor: The situation and the differing perspectives are gradually transferred into the metaphorical context. It is possible to use visualizations like texts, comics, pictures, videos, or audio recordings. 5. Introducing the metaphor to the solution process: The opposing parties learn about the metaphor during a discussion or workshop. A moderator accompanies their conversation about the differing perspectives on the conflict situation. Both parties explain their own perception, but also try to see things through the eyes of the other side to find a possible solution together. All of this takes places within the world of the metaphor first! 6. Transferring the solution to the real world: Lastly, the conflict parties attempt to realize the metaphorical solution in their real-world conflict. Working with metaphors in this manner is without a doubt one of the more elaborate and time-consuming approaches to conflict management. It is usually considered when other solutions have failed or when similar conflicts occur repeatedly. The greatest strength of metaphors in conflict situations is their unique blend of authenticity and distance. On the one hand, all conflict parties clearly recognize their own situation and behavior in the metaphor; on the other hand, there is a certain degree of dissociation because their situation now takes place in a different world which allows them to see the conflict from a distance that is often necessary to find solutions. Humor is another stylistic device that can alleviate conflict situations. An appropriate use of humor alongside a fitting metaphor makes it much easier to address inconvenient truths and criticism. Potential Applications of Metaphors in Organizations • Giving structure • Reducing complexity • Illustrating differing viewpoints • Conflict management

The Pitfalls of Working with Metaphors While the use of metaphors undoubtedly has a lot to offer, organizations can only fully benefit from them if they use them well. Their success always depends on whether their target group is able to decode them. If they lead to bewilderment instead, metaphors fall flat. The introduction of a new metaphor should therefore

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always be preceded by a thorough analysis of the background and language use among the members of the target group. For a group of middle-aged IT experts a futuristic sci-fi world à la Star Wars might do wonders, but the exact same metaphors could go right over the heads of new employees in administrative roles. The selection must also take the culture of the target group into account. This consideration is particularly important when working with culturally diverse groups to ensure that the chosen metaphors work for everybody. Another common pitfall is an unwanted connotation of a metaphor used for narrative work. Imagine a cosmetics company that, in an allusion to the fairy tale Snow White, asks in an ad “Who is the fairest of them all?” before promptly answering: “You are the fairest of them all!” Doing so might imply that the viewer is the one asking the question and thus speaking from the perspective of the evil stepmother who poses the question in the original story. Even though the recipients might not actively think about it, this connotation might still unconsciously affect their attitude toward the product. Some Pitfalls You Should Avoid When Working with Metaphors Strange images, ill-fitting contexts (“Our practical binders are our greatest treasures.”) Wrong meaning (“These tips lead to an immediate solution—and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”) A semantic field that is too close (“The paint on this car is coming off? New seats will work wonders.”) Too many metaphors (“Don’t throw in the towel. We’ll show you the light at the end of the tunnel.”) Hackneyed metaphors (“custom-made solutions” and “working hand in hand”) Creating exaggerated expectations (“After this seminar nobody will be able to hold a candle to you.”)

Case Study on the Use of Metaphors for a Cultural Change Project at an International Beverage Company The acquisition of several other companies and a change at its top had resulted in numerous shifts in the culture of an international beverage manufacturer. Therefore, the company needed to reposition its internal and external image for which it decided to launch a large-scale cultural change project. As its first step the 50 top managers got together to develop a vision that captured the company’s fundamental values and strategies for the future. While working on this vision, they actively aimed to include the perspectives of employees from the company’s branches in various countries. In addition to methods like narrative interviews (see Chapter “Narrative Interviews”) and storylistening workshops (see Chapter “The Storylistening

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Workshop”), the managers introduced a village metaphor to answer the following questions: How do we see ourselves and our branch? What distinguishes our branch from other branches of the company? How do we see the company as a whole? In workshop settings, the participating employees were instructed to work with this metaphor and picture the company as a village—a village with a city hall, a mayor, a village council, a market square where citizens meet, elegant avenues where the rich live, shady corners that most avoid after dark, beautiful mansions and run-down blocks, and of course a diverse population. The participants should describe the village from their perspective and answer questions like: • What kind of village is this (e.g., an isolated community in the mountains or close to a major city, modern, backward)? • What is the population like? • How is the relationship with the mayor? • Which anecdotes do citizens share about the village council? • What is the state of the infrastructure? Is it good or bad? • What different kinds of neighborhoods and houses does the village have? • Which house is yours? • What is the relationship between homes? Are there any feuds or strong friendships? • Which important (historical) events do the citizens remember? Employees often have a difficult time coming up with responses when they are expected to answer abstract and complicated questions about their company’s culture. The use of this village metaphor, however, made it much easier for them to explain how they perceive and feel about this culture. The metaphor was also a good way to overcome language barriers as many conversations were not held in the participants’ native language. And finally, the metaphor made it possible to address even critical aspects safely (Thier and Erlach 2016). The workshop results and the comparison between the different “villages” provided valuable insights into how different employees perceived the company’s culture. Their diverse views directly influenced the development of the guiding principle and purpose for the beverage manufacturer.

Conclusion Metaphors can help organizations in many ways. They are particularly useful for presentations, workshops, and training sessions. Metaphors provide a visual structure for complex events or otherwise complicated and abstract topics. In project management, a fitting metaphor may accompany the participants during their journey along the stages of a project, and in teambuilding, metaphors can for example help identify the differing attitudes and opinions of the various team members. Metaphors also do excellent work in conflict situations where they allow opposing parties to question their own perceptions and beliefs. Lastly, metaphors are

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becoming more and more popular in cultural change processes and for the development and preparation of guiding principles for leadership or entire organizations. Fields of application of metaphors in organizations: • • • • • •

Presentations, workshops, training sessions Teambuilding Conflict management Project management Cultural change management Guiding principles and visions for leadership and organizational culture

Literature Polanyi, M. (1985). Implizites Wissen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Thier, K. & Erlach, C. (2013). Der Storytelling-Prozess. Narrative Methoden zur Reflexion und Prävention von Teamkonflikten. In: Konfliktdynamik – Verhandeln, Vermitteln und Führen in Organisationen, Heft 4/2013, S. 272–281. Thier, K. & Erlach, C. (2016). Mit Storytelling zur Seele des Unternehmens. In: Marketing review. St. Gallen, 1/2016, S. 10–17.

Case Study: Storytelling for Urban Development in Bad Bergzabern Karin Thier

Interview with Susanne Schultz, Head of Urban Development in Bad Bergzabern Bad Bergzabern (https://www.bad-bergzabern.de/stadtportrait.html) is a small town in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate—and one of the first German towns to actively use storytelling in its urban development. Susanne Schultz has been in charge of this development for three years. She is a psychotherapist and has previously also worked as city manager in other German towns like Neustadt, Kaiserslautern, and Herxheim. In this interview she told us how she has applied storytelling to craft the image of Bad Bergzabern and what she considers the greatest successes and key takeaways of the process. Mrs. Schultz, where do you see the connection between urban development and working with stories? In general, many things we do in city management have a lot to do with planning. That’s mostly up to city planners, architects, construction experts, and business developers. In addition to these planning concerns, soft factors like communication and image are crucial, for example when there are conflicts with properties. These require a psychological-communicative competence and storytelling is a great opportunity here because people’s thoughts are not abstract: They think in images and metaphors. Similarly, people move and change through stories, and in the city I work with thousands of stories each day. An example are stories about the history of the city. Historically, cities have often been seen as entities like Athena, usually female entities, in the stories that are told about them. And even today, we still talk about cities this way: how they are doing, how they age, how they appear to us. Cities then have a female, motherly quality. And it is often female figures like wine princesses (i.e., a type of beauty pageant, translator’s note) that represent cities. There is already a lot of storytelling in cities— even if we don’t call it that or don’t always consciously work with it. In which areas can storytelling play a part in city management? For starters, storytelling can help us in team-building and conflict management processes to understand the communicative background of a city: Who tells which # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_21

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story? Who is responsibility for what, and why? Who gets along with whom, or who doesn’t get along? Next, storytelling can be applied very well to the development of visions and perspectives. I always find it important that city marketing and image development have a historical foundation because that way they have a deeper impact. And with storytelling we can cover a lot: Where do we come from? How did we use to solve conflicts, etc.? Where do we stand right now? A metaphorical image like the hero’s journey—Where do we go from here?—can support the creation of a narrative and easily accessible vision for the future. For the external communication of cities, storytelling of course also plays a huge role. Tourists love stories about cities! When there is something to visit, it’s not just some building, but also a story that tells them who used to live there and what exactly happened here. Bringing this back into the consciousness of city managers and actively shaping these stories are parts of storytelling in city management. It is important to get this into our heads: We are still writing and forming city stories today. We have to decide which old stories we pick up, which new ones we create, who our heroes are today, etc. Storytelling is excellent for this. What characterizes a successful storytelling campaign? Can you give us any examples from other cities? I don’t know any other city that already consciously talks about storytelling and does something with it. I mostly know storytelling as a pure marketing tool to promote a positive image. But storytelling itself is actually a kind of story that brings everything together and we should expand on this for city management in the future. To me, a successful storytelling campaign is generally a campaign that succeeds in getting locals from schools, clubs, politics involved in the storytelling process, for example what we did in Bad Bergzabern where we developed a story together with many citizens and volunteers that we performed with local actors—for which we also got the elementary school involved to make the children of the town part of its storytelling from early on. This is all about sustainability and a lasting impact for image development, and this is what eventually led to its success because people hand down the story. Are there any stories you think are particularly suitable? I believe that stories with a historical foundation work especially well even though some people might at first think that they are a little stale. They are great anchors because I can extract a form of meaning from them that I often miss in modern image and marketing campaigns. Those often follow some kind of trend and that leads to a homogenization of cities because everybody is jumping on the same bandwagon. Everybody is writing a similar slogan. This rarely results in identification or a distinct local profile. But storytelling is definitely also a great solution to find answers to current political issues. That would be a good way to get out of our polarization. Storytelling always offers a chance to understand others. Do you also see limits or risks when city managers work with stories? One danger I see is that storytelling is often not yet taken seriously enough. It is not everywhere accepted as a robust and working strategy. Storytelling is too often still compared to a much too technocratic approach. For a restoration project there is

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usually a demand for numbers, but this overlooks the fact that those numbers can also be found through storytelling—by working with the owners and understanding them and their stories. Often storytelling is not yet seen as an opportunity here. Success is quantified with numbers and there is too little appreciation for the methods and strategies behind them. It would be nice if for example a university were to take a closer look at the work with storytelling and its results, like how we did it in Bad Bergzabern, and then publish their findings. That would help us immensely with winning over more people for storytelling. Another factor is that working with storytelling takes time. Eventually it saves time, but first we need to explain why anyone should allocate time and resources to it, and that’s not always easy. We often hear: less talk, more facts, and faster please! There is often no understanding of how a thorough analysis of a city’s stories and their origins kick-starts an important process with which we can assess the soft, moldable image factors like leisure, culture, and citizens’ involvement. Hard image factors like infrastructure, public transportation, financial resources, or location alone can change little here. Why did you decide to work with storytelling in Bad Bergzabern and how did you do it? It was a possibility to quickly step into action. There had been four earlier consultations in Bad Bergzabern, but none of them had yielded any lasting results. So I decided to begin in places where people could meet regardless of contentious questions and where this had already worked in the town’s history. I asked myself how the citizens had made it through rough times or where people had gathered in a positive capacity and it had also boosted the local economy. The topic “market” came up almost immediately. Bad Bergzabern had received its town charter through market rights, and the market had always been a place for exchange. This is where people lived, worked, and offered their goods for sale. The market was an ideal point of departure. I had the idea for the first after-hours market in southern Palatinate, something that did not yet exist in the region. This way, I wanted to build a bridge between the town’s history and today’s needs for shared activities, commerce, and community. Could you please describe the storytelling process in more detail? We definitely wanted the concept of the market to push for a new image. It should also get a specific name and so I was searching for an identifiable figure with a historical connection to the town. In Palatinate you can find a lot of names in local legends and eventually we discovered the “Hamecker” for Bad Bergzabern. On the market there was a Hamecker stone statue whose origin was unknown. At the same time we created an image work group which was a creative gathering of motivated citizens who wanted to actively shape the town’s image. Together with the group, we fleshed out this figure. We collected various stories about this person whose historical origins are a little hazy and we turned him into the ambassador of the town. We also added the “Böhämmer birds.” Those are bramblings that have played a role in the history of the town (author’s note: “Böhämmer” is a vernacular name for bramblings that nest in Scandinavian forests and travel through the area of Bad

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Fig. 1 The Hamecker with his treasure chest (By courtesy of # Frank Cmuchal (2019). All rights reserved)

Bergzabern each winter on their journey south. Until 1908 they were also hunted with blowguns (http://www.boehaemmer-grundschule.de/unser-schulportraet/ boehaemmer/). They are circling the Hamecker and represent some of the local character traits in a humorous way. We also tried to link the Hamecker story to other historical figures of the town like the Duchess Caroline, Patronella, Briar Rose from a neighboring community, and the wine princesses. All of these figures had already been there, but nobody had tried to describe them in more detail. The goal of storytelling was to fill all of them with life. After a few alterations to our initial drafts the Hamecker is now widely accepted as the town mascot. He now presents the “pearls” of the town that he keeps in a treasure chest (see Fig. 1). The pearls are metaphorical representations of the town’s treasures, its perks like clean air, clean water, wine, almonds, roses, herbs. There are so many here in Bad Bergzabern that we did not need to come up with new ones; we only had to collect, group, and present them. The Hamecker, the story with all of its characters, and the treasure chest with the pearls encapsulate the town in its entirety. How have things developed since then? Right now we are trying to further develop the Hamecker as a mascot for the external communication of the town. For example, we are already using the Hamecker and the Böhämmer birds regularly at the Hamecker after-hours market

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Fig. 2 Böhämmer birds (By courtesy of # Frank Cmuchal (2019). All rights reserved)

that is held on every first Friday from April through October. A young local man and children from the Böhämmer Elementary School dress up in special costumes, regale the visitors with the story of the Hamecker, sing the Böhämmer song, and stroll around the market. Thus, the Hamecker story is regularly brought to locals and visitors alike. At some point we would like to write new dialogues and perform those too. Young men have the opportunity to apply for the role of the Hamecker for one year. We already have our third Hamecker now! We also introduced a Hamecker newspaper that we publish once or twice per year. In this newspaper the Hamecker, his story, and the other characters play an active role and explain the recent events in the town’s development (see Fig. 2). What was the biggest challenge for the work with storytelling? To get the administrators to accept the storytelling approach and start thinking like storytellers. The method isn’t really established yet and not everybody can see its value—even though our work with storytelling has brought some undeniable economic boons. The number of investors in the town has for example grown a lot! What has so far been the biggest success of your work with storytelling? That we managed to bring a positive mood into the town. Of course not everywhere and all the time; there are always also skeptics and opponents. That’s also a part of each story. But it is clear that people pick up our story—and we are still at the beginning of the process after all. Now it’s time for the story we developed to really seep into the heads. With the storytelling method we also managed to achieve a lot on a very tight budget. Of course we need to do some media work, but once we have our story, we can use it across different platforms from print to social media. As a town, we still need to become a little more active in this regard, however, to identify and seize all opportunities! Thank you very much, Mrs. Schultz!

Narrative Change Architecture: Making Change Accessible Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Each change process is unique—with its own idiosyncrasies regarding several parameters: organizational culture, situational factors, the concrete focus of the change, the people involved, the surroundings of the organization (e.g., market, societal trends, politics), etc. As such, every change process requires appropriate and coordinated planning. From a narrative perspective, there are nevertheless fundamental assumptions and architectures that may be used as building blocks and methodical approaches in most change processes.

The Change Story When we work narratively, the foundation of all change processes is the construction of a change story. This story is fictional (because it is not yet realized) and delineates the goal and the progression of a change. Because stories are always about transformations (see Chapter “Intermezzo”), a narrative approach is perfectly suited for change processes. Telling a change process right away as a future-oriented story furthermore prevents a very common mistake: setting a goal without considering the path toward that goal. What is frequently overlooked is the beginning of the story: Where are we now? And this also means: What is the mindset of our employees? On what cultural foundation do we start our journey toward the future? For this reason, the change process often remains unfinished—it never turns into a story with which the employees can identify and work toward the goal (see Fig. 1). When we think of the process as a story, there is no way around considering its beginning and the path leading toward its goal. The beginning is the present state of the organization that should be well known: Most managers would probably claim that they are quite aware of this state. And with regard to the “obvious” side of an organization, this might even be true. As we discussed in the Chapter “The Cartography of Narrative Organizations,” however, there is always also an invisible side to the culture of each company that lies underwater in a manner of speaking. This is # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_22

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Fig. 1 The change process is up in the air (# authors)

where we can find the hidden beliefs, assumptions, rules, and perceptions that have a strong effect on the employees’ behavior. Most unsuccessful change projects fail because they are planned without acknowledging this part of a company’s culture. A successful change project requires familiarity with the beginning of the story, and this means knowing these hidden cultural facets. Otherwise, the project is built on an incorrect premise and it might run into invisible obstacles or fight imaginary opponents that are not actually there. Example

Here is an example of the scenario mentioned last: Most managers of a tech company were convinced that the majority of employees were opposed to a new product concept. Therefore, they planned a change project with which they hoped to eliminate these negative “beliefs” and transform them into support and excitement. In the eyes of the executives, achieving this was of paramount importance to the future success of the company. However, the narrative system map (see Chapter “Narrative System Map”) spoke a very different language: A change project based on the managers’ suspicions would have been as futile as Don Quixote’s attempts to slay imaginary giants! Fortunately, before kicking off the project, the managers decided to check if their employees actually disliked the new product concept as they were assuming. And the resulting narrative system map showed that this hypothesis could not have been further from the truth: The employees were completely supportive of the goals of the new product concept—even though they were a little apprehensive about specific aspects that could still benefit from further optimization in their eyes. Based on these findings, management replaced the original goal of the change project with a new one: involving the employees in the development of the individual components of the concept. As a consequence, the company’s plans for the upcoming project were completely different from what they would have been under the original assumptions. ◄

Steps Toward a Narrative Change Architecture

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Narrative change architecture must always take into account the beginning of the story. It needs to be the starting point to each change project.

Steps Toward a Narrative Change Architecture Because a successful change project always takes the shape of a complete story, a change architecture should follow these steps: Step 1: Comprehensive Description of the Beginning of the Change Story (Focusing Especially on the Unknown Components of Company Culture) The recommended method to get such a comprehensive description is the narrative system map (see Chapter “Narrative System Map”). You can find other narrative approaches for this step in Boje (2001 and 2008). A traditional employee survey will hardly yield useful results here. Even though the employees’ behavior is strongly influenced by hidden rules and beliefs, they are usually unable to express them consciously—and classic surveys consequently fail to provide the relevant insights. Step 2: Developing the Change Story Once you know more about the beginning of the change story, it is time to develop it in more detail. The best way to do so is usually a kick-off workshop during which you can for example discuss the results of the narrative system map. One possible structure for the further development of the change story is the hero’s journey (see Chapter “Hero’s Journey”), preferably starting with the “call to adventure” and the “treasure”: the former states why the change process is happening and the latter states its goal. Next, you may focus on the “journey into the unknown” and the “road of trials.” This sequence may already result in a few suggestions for concrete actions that you can refine during the third step. Step 3: Planning Concrete Actions Now it is time to make things concrete! In the example above, this was the purpose of the workshop in which managers and employees from across the entire company got together to develop a “path” toward the new product concept along a timeline. The structure of a narrative change process is equivalent to its non-narrative counterpart, but they differ tremendously with respect to what they focus on— because the narrative version depicts the process as a story told toward the future. This approach necessitates the use of narrative methods (narrative system map, narrative interviews, storylistening workshops) to thoroughly describe the starting point of the process and especially gain access to its invisible components (hidden rules, impressions, beliefs, etc.).

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Creating Interventions and Experiences with Narrative Approaches Change processes with a narrative structure are so successful because the storytelling phase itself is already a powerful intervention. Employees are also able to make entirely new experiences thanks to the approach. Narrating and Listening as Powerful Interventions In our experience, the mere invitation at the beginning of a narrative change process to talk about personal experiences (be it in narrative interviews, in storylistening workshops, or in events with larger groups) already constitutes a meaningful intervention by itself, one that is much more effective than employee surveys or purely procedural kick-off workshops. Simply asking for experiences instead of opinions and concepts communicates to employees that the “organization” or “the higherups” are really serious this time—exactly because they decided to consider the employees’ point of view and no longer act and plan on the basis of management concepts alone. Narrative interviews are particularly impactful in this regard: Most employees have never before been in a situation in which somebody else who is genuinely interested in their experiences listens to them for 45 to 60 min. Even if only 15 to 20 employees get to participate when drawing a narrative system map for a large organization, the underlying message spreads quickly (and of course managers themselves may help spread the message further). We have seen many times how the narrative interview phase already drew out a genuinely positive perception of change. This is nothing we can just take for granted! Especially in large organizations, employees tend to be exhausted by the plethora of change and restructuring processes that remain mostly arcane and fruitless from their perspective because they were planned without ever consulting them. Therefore, employees are often skeptical when it comes to new change projects. And this is not because they are generally opposed to change or lazy like many managers are quick to assume— but because these projects often feel completely detached from their everyday experiences or even contradict them. When employees get the chance to tell their stories, they are therefore more optimistic that this time the changes will make sense to them, precisely because they are based on their personal experiences. If these experiences are nevertheless ignored or not taken seriously enough, however, the disappointment might transform the work with stories into a negative intervention: Employees’ frustration grows exponentially when even the promise of the narrative approach is broken.

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An organization that chooses a narrative approach to its change processes must therefore always be fully aware of what exactly it is doing: The story must be told until its very end. Otherwise the change process might backfire— and things could be worse than before.

Transformation through Experience One of the most widespread misconceptions about the work with stories in change management is the belief that telling stories by itself will automatically result in change. This assumption might lead to requests like this: “Please teach our boss how to be an inspiring storyteller, so he can change the mindset of our employees!” But this is not how it works! "

Even if a manager tells the best story in the world, pure communication can never transform mindsets, beliefs, attitudes, hidden rules, perceptions, etc. All of these are always shaped by experiences and can thus only be transformed with the help of new experiences.

Establishing new stories in an organization means making new experiences possible about which employees may in turn tell new stories. And through communication, organizations can help the storytelling process to settle as a part of their respective cultures—by holding storylistening workshops, sharing experiences on the intranet or in employee meetings, creating new forums for this exchange, etc. However, without new experiences, there can also be no new stories. Example

The following example illustrates what we mean here: The employees of an organization were unwilling to put much effort into an upcoming cultural change project. The narrative system map showed that they had experienced several canceled and unfinished projects in the past which had caused them to internalize the following belief: “Projects are never completed in our company; therefore, it is a waste of time and energy to put effort into a new project.” It should be fairly obvious that neither a bland announcement nor even the most passionate change story had any hope of changing the employees’ mindset: Why would anybody believe that this time the project would be finished? The narrative interviews in this company also brought to light several complaints about the poor organization of the canteen. Together with management, we decided to turn this into a “test project” and address some of the criticisms about the canteen over the course of the next few weeks. And of course we shared our story about this “test project” through all available channels. This provided an “exceptional story” countering the dominant, experience-based narrative in the organization, and it was a first step toward dismantling its foundation. Of course the employees were not suddenly completely convinced that the cultural change project would succeed, but some of their initial resistance was gone. Several employees even got actively involved and encouraged more and

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more of their colleagues to do the same. We proceeded to accompany the cultural change project with an equal amount of storytelling and managed to make it a success in the eyes of most employees. And this was yet another major step toward transforming their original mindset. ◄

Normalizing Change In the past change projects were the exception, and once they were done, a new “normal” was expected to stabilize. Today, however, constant change is the norm. Contemporary methods in management and organizational development like “agile management” are responses to this reality. For the narrative perspective, this state of flux means that new stories and narratives are constantly evolving from older ones. Speaking in the metaphor of the hero’s journey, there is no longer a “return” at the end. Instead, we hear a new “call to adventure” in the moment we discover our treasure (see Chapter “Hero’s Journey”). Change becomes a never-ending story. At the end of this chapter it is important to state once more: “Change” does not always have to mean a sweeping transformation throughout the entirety of an organization. Instead, narrative change processes can take place at each organizational level—in teams, projects groups, departments, divisions, or of course whole companies.

Literature Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational & communication research. London: Sage. Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. London: Sage.

Narrative Strategy Development: Narrating the Path Toward the Future Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

From the narrative perspective, the most important questions managers in organizations need to answer are: What are our shared meaning-making narratives? Do they suit us? How can we work well together on this foundation? And how do we want to keep evolving in the future? System theoretical research has shown time and again that managers cannot simply approach these questions like a control panel (cf. Simon 2007, p. 108). With this obsolete attitude, social systems stay intractable. But they can develop further by eliciting reactions through interventions. In the machine model of organizations (see Chapter “Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of”), leadership is tantamount to the pushing and pulling of levers that is expected to result in unambiguous reactions. Even though the discourses on organizational and systemic theory of the past few decades have sensitized managers to the shortcomings of this model and they might therefore no longer endorse it openly, many organizations remain structured in ways that belie an implicit approval of this leadership style. The consequences are curious attempts to quickly redefine “company culture” or change the “mindset” of employees with top-down communication. Leadership is ultimately the joint responsibility of an organization with all of its subordinate systems (teams, departments, project groups, etc.). Those who are paid as “managers” or “bosses” must not misunderstand their jobs as merely a position in which they exert leadership from high above all by themselves. Instead, their goal must be to make sure that the entire organization is actively searching for answers to the central leadership questions listed above. Experiments on “agile management” and flat hierarchies have confirmed that this is possible without traditional leadership from the higher levels of a hierarchy. It is particularly important that there is somebody (if not everybody) in an organization who feels responsible for assuming leadership. The most pragmatic approach in most cases is probably to nominate a concrete person or group for the task (but once again: They do not have to shoulder the leadership responsibility alone; their job is to give the impulse for the entire organization to take it). It is not hard to see what happens to meaning and future strategy development if a system as a whole fails to accept the responsibilities of leadership: # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_23

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With regard to the shared meaning-making narrative: It might already be beneficial and suitable for the meaning and purpose of an organization. In this case there is no immediate need for action (following the systemic rationale of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). Periodically, however, the organization should make sure that its narrative continues to meet the following criteria: (a) The narrative is still alive and well; it has not withered into an “empty narrative” without any meaning. (b) The narrative is still appropriate for the present situation of the company and resonates with its surroundings. An example for an empty narrative is a company that prides itself on being the biggest innovator in its sector—even though it is in actuality no longer making any innovative products (some journalists have claimed that this has been happening to Apple since Steve Jobs passed away). Meanwhile, an organization seeing itself as “the best combustion engine manufacturer in the world” would not be in resonance with a world in which combustion engines are no longer in high demand (see Chapter “Why the Future Belongs to Narratively Competent Organizations”). Companies can probe the functionality of their meaning-making narrative regularly via narrative interviews with their employees, customers, and the general public. Should the narrative no longer fit, leadership amounts to the responsibility to guide a company through the development of a new, functional replacement. There is of course no quick fix for this—it is always an ongoing process. With regard to the future development of an organization: If a company lacks active engagement with its future narrative, the implicit rule becomes: Just keep going; more of the same! This might have been the implicit mindset at Nokia in 2007. To remain resonant, organizations need to stay vigilant and flexible to changes in their environment when thinking about their own future.

Strategy Development: Shaping the Future with Narratives Strategy development is in essence about the creation of a story for the future of an organization: Where do we want to go and how do we get there? This means that the organization is writing its future narrative with the strategy which can of course happen at each level of an organization and may differ in scope: a major narrative about the future of an entire company or stories for its individual teams, projects, or departments. The latter always need to fit into the major narrative and represent smaller parts of it.

Open and Closed Story Worlds

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Non-narrative thinking usually differentiates between “vision” and “strategy.” A good story about the future combines both: It identifies a treasure (¼ vision; even though “agile” stories are a little open-ended in this regard) and outlines how to get there (¼strategy).

It is important to remember, however, that future stories are always fictional. Nobody can predict the future, and even futurologists and forecasters can merely make educated guesses (cf. Beckert 2016). But this does not mean that the stories cannot have a strong connection to reality. In fact, they need this connection! It should not come as a surprise that pure science fiction cannot build trust in the sustainability of a company. Establishing this connection between the story and reality does of course not require that the future described in the story will come true. Future narratives that feel “realistic” have the following two characteristics: (a) They do not sugarcoat the future; instead, they realistically incorporate steps, challenges, and obstacles on the way toward the future. (b) They start with a realistic depiction of the company’s present situation (including the “unknown” parts of the present; even a well-written future story should begin with a narrative system map). Both of these points might sound straightforward and self-evident, but too many stories about the future of organizations (or their “visions” or “guiding principles”) are detached from reality and therefore destined to fail (see Chapter “Narrative Change Architecture”).

Open and Closed Story Worlds A closer look at the explicit (i.e., consciously formulated) or implicit (i.e., not written down anywhere, but extractable from communications and behaviors) future stories in organizations reveals that many of them take place in a closed, negatively motivated story world. To explain what exactly this means, let us make a brief excursion into screenwriting via Blake Snyder’s classification system of ten major “story types” (Snyder 2005, p. 25) that cover the basic plots of most movies. We are not going to argue here whether or not his simplification is completely accurate, but using four of his ten categories, we can illustrate the key differences between an open and a closed setting: • Monster in the House: This master plot is based on a dangerous creature, i.e., a monster, that enters an enclosed space shared by the story’s protagonists who then have to fight for their lives lest they die. In the end they defeat the monster (or not) and are saved (or not). A prototypical example of this plot is Ridley Scott’s Alien

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(1979) in which a deadly extraterrestrial enters the enclosed space of a spaceship to kill its crew. • Institutionalized: Stories of this type have their protagonists become part of some kind of institution (e.g., an army, a hospital, an office). They have to choose between different behavioral options like falling in line, rebellion, or escape. Depending on their decision, the protagonists ultimately succeed within the institution, leave it behind, or are crushed by it. A good example is Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) in which the protagonist (played by Jack Nicholson) is committed to a psychiatric clinic where he fights against the rules personalized by a sadistic nurse. • Golden Fleece: The protagonists of these stories are unhappy with their lives or with the conditions under which they live alongside their friends, family, or compatriots, and so they give everything to build a brighter future. Eventually, they reach this goal or replace it with a new one. One movie that tells this type of a story is Gabriele Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) in which Will Smith plays a homeless salesman who is toiling away for a better life. • Rites of Passage: This master plot also focuses on the discontent of its protagonists, but often they are not fully aware of its reasons—until an inciting incident forces them to change or make a big decision. All coming-of-age movies follow this plot, for example Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) in which a young man discovers that he was sexually abused by his aunt when he was a child. Closed Story Worlds Many companies write and tell stories about their future that follow the first two master plots, most commonly the “monster” variant. The shape of the “monster” might be some kind of societal or economic development like globalization or digital transformation. In these stories the company and its employees either sink or swim— it is all or nothing. A striking example of such a monster story is a quote by Siemens chairman Joe Kaeser in August 2018: According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, a major German newspaper, he claimed that his company was undergoing a major shift caused by global trends with which it hoped to avoid that aggressive investors would seize control as it had happened a few months earlier with Thyssenkrupp (Busse 2018a, b). This single narrative actually features two monsters: “global trends” and “aggressive investors.” Kaeser presented the change as necessitated by the environment—the monsters act and the company reacts. "

Stories like this take place in a closed world and can only have one of three possible endings: Either the monster dies, the protagonist dies, or both.s

Stories of the “Institutionalized” type also take place in closed story worlds. And just like monster stories they can only ever have a few possible outcomes: adaptation, escape, or death. These future stories are frequently found in companies that seem to have a very precise idea of who they are and what they are doing, which might sound positive at first. But this self-perception comes with the risk of only ever

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seeing the world from one single familiar perspective that has been successful up to a certain point. And this may in turn make a company blind to internal and external changes and weaken its resonance. The company is trapped by its own story, not resonant, and thus unable to react to new challenges. Example

When we first introduced the concept of resonance, we already broached the decline of Nokia since 2007. It is plausible to imagine that Nokia was unable to remain resonant when Apple released their iPhone because the company told itself an “Institutionalized” story: Everything is alright, we know the market and its rules; we are invulnerable. At the time Nokia was indeed the global leader on the cell phone market and had developed new and improved phones for years. These innovations, however, had been driven by a story about cell phones (that could even take pictures!) and not about communication and mobile computing. This cell phone story eventually turned into a trap for Nokia. An interesting footnote in history is the fact that Nokia already had a kind of smartphone in its product lineup: the “Nokia Communicator,” a large flip phone with a screen and keyboard to surf the Internet. Against the iPhone, however, the Communicator failed—even though it was capable of doing almost everything the first generation of iPhones could do. But Nokia had marketed it as a side story to its cell phone main story whereas Apple told its customers the story of an entirely new product as the famous presentation on the launch of the iPhone by Steve Jobs still proves (available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼9hUIxyE2Ns8). ◄ The lesson here should not be misunderstood: Telling the right story about the future is not just a question of good marketing; rather, it is a question about a company’s mindset and culture as well as the resulting sensitivity to its own story. Is the future story of a car company mostly concerned with new cars or with the future of mobility? Is the future story of a publisher about newspapers or about communication and information? A second weakness of the “Institutionalized” master plot is that it makes employees more prone to follow the same pattern in their own stories: “We’ve always done it like this.” – “This has worked for the last ten years, why change something now?” Stories like this often echo through the hallways of their organizations. “Monster in the House” and “Institutionalized” are closed story worlds that only allow for a limited number of possible outcomes to their plots. Both try to motivate employees with fear instead of giving them desirable visions for the future. In crises such stories might work for a while. Companies that hope to positively motivate their employees, however, need different kinds of stories.

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Open Story Worlds The two remaining master plots on the list above are much more suitable for the creation of motivating stories about the future. “Golden Fleece” and “Rites of Passage” afford open story worlds in two ways: On the one hand, they are open because they allow for more than just two or three possible outcomes, and on the other hand, they do not restrict their protagonists’ actions to predefined choices the way “Monster” (fight) and “Institutionalized” plots (adaptation, rebellion, escape) do. Although the protagonists in a “Golden Fleece” story have a goal they want to achieve, this goal is never set in stone. Perhaps they find a new, more worthwhile goal along the way or discover that the true treasure has been inside of them all along—anything can happen! “Rites of Passage” stories are even more open-ended: They do not start out with any concrete goal whatsoever and instead focus on a major change in the lives of their protagonists. The exact nature of this change and its eventual outcome can remain completely open for the longest time. When organizations want to bring open story worlds into their future stories, they need to fundamentally change their attitude toward the future: They can no longer cling to inflexible or rigid forecasts as is often the case in traditional strategy development processes (“In 20XX, our company will look like this.”). The chosen goal is actually a path or a journey. Even if an organization chooses a more conventional goal, the story primarily deals with how to accomplish it. As such, the goal may still change at any point. And it is of course always possible to drop conventional goals altogether and conceive of them as challenges more than anything else. This approach to the future establishes an open-mindedness that is unafraid of uncertainties. Instead, it acknowledges and embraces them. Consequently, the creation of a future story is no longer a one-time activity that is quickly forgotten or no longer scrutinized. "

The creation of an open future story is a continuous endeavor that keeps rewriting the story parallel to other processes happening in an organization. Each step the organization takes also changes its narrative for the future. Or in other words: Writing a future story is never a task that is ever checked off and done—it is a central and permanent component of responsive leadership.

How to Develop an Open Story About the Future Developing a “Golden Fleece” Story Management or a designated project team (we will call it the “storyrunner team”) kicks off the process with a base plot following the “Golden Fleece” blueprint. This base plot consists of a beginning (based on the collective understanding of all aspects of the current organizational identity; see Chapter “Narrative System Map”), a goal as one possible end to the story, and a few likely events and challenges that might occur on the way toward this goal (see Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 The narrative process for the creation of an open future story (# authors)

Fig. 2 The Golden Fleece: a multi-perspective storyline (# Müller 2019)

The team then presents its base plot to the rest of the organization before designated story circles that are formed in the different departments discuss the draft. These circles may rewrite the story, develop selected paths, or possibly even change the goal. Finally, the storyrunner team and the story circles get together to review the various resulting storylines and develop one of them with multiple perspectives (see Fig. 2). After this first round of revisions the storyrunner team sets regular intervals in which the circles revisit the story and make adjustments if necessary. The best frequency for these reviews depends on the timeline for the completion of the selected goal. In our experience, an interval of about six months is often a good choice. The entire company or at least representatives from all major departments should be actively involved in the process to maximize identification with the story. Developing a “Rites of Passage” Story The process is very similar to the creation of a “Golden Fleece” story—with the major difference that the base plot initially remains incomplete (see Fig. 3). The first version of the story only covers the plot until the first transformative event; it does not define an ultimate goal. Such an event might for example be the introduction of

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Fig. 3 Rites of Passage: a completely open storyline (# Müller 2019)

agile processes. In this case, it is quite apparent that at first nobody can say for certain where exactly these processes will eventually lead. The further development of the story follows the pattern of the “Golden Fleece” with its collaboration between storyrunner team and story circles.

Which Story Form Is Right for My Organization? In conclusion, we would like to emphasize the difference between a multiperspective plot and a completely open plot one more time. The former comes with a concrete understanding of the story’s goal or ultimate outcome. In the archaic version of the “Fleece” story, Jason and the Argonauts set out on their journey to claim the namesake. Yet, there may be multiple paths leading to this goal, or the goal might change along the way. Meanwhile, the “Rites of Passage” plot does not have a predetermined goal at all: There simply is a determination to change—and what comes after stays completely open. The “Rites of Passage” process works particularly well for smaller companies or teams and departments in larger ones that wish to write their own future story. Larger organizations usually benefit more from the “Fleece” approach. For an even more detailed introduction to both processes, see Müller 2019. The processes for the creation of future stories we introduced in this chapter might seem very time-consuming—especially in a corporate climate that understands management primarily as the act of checking off items on a to-do list. This perception, however, changes in a narratively competent and thus agile and resonant organization for which working with its own stories has become a central and permanent responsibility, e.g., in the form of the (continued)

Literature

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interplay between storyrunner team and story circles discussed above. Over time the effort to continuously develop new change and adaptation projects becomes smaller and smaller. Initially, the transition to a narrative organization might seem costly, but in the long run it guarantees a substantial reduction of the costs and energy required for successful change.

Literature Beckert, J. (2016). Imagined futures: Fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Busse, C. (2018a). Radikalkur für Siemens. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.08.2018, 74. Jg., 31. Woche, S. 1 Busse, C. (2018b). Ich bin zu alt, um es allen recht zu machen. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.08.2018, 74. Jg., 31. Woche, S. 18 Müller, M. (2019). Developing the future stories of companies: Open and closed story worlds. In J. Chlopczyk & C. Erlach (Eds.), Transforming organizations. Narrative and story-based approaches (pp. 75–88). Heidelberg: Springer. Simon, F. B. (2007). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer. Snyder, B. (2005). Save the cat!. The last book on screenwriting that you’ll ever need. Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books.

Case Study on Future Stories: A Narrative Change Process at the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

Interview with Martina Eisendle and Florian Oberforcher, Vorarlberger Kinderdorf Here is some preliminary information on the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf (English: Children’s Village of Vorarlberg; translator’s note: Vorarlberg is the westernmost state of Austria): The organization is characterized by its professional development, long tenures (20 to 40 years), and an open attitude toward change. All fields in which the organization is active, ranging from preventive to ambulant services, have undergone dynamic and demand-oriented change during the past few decades. The guiding question for all change processes has been: How can the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf with its experiential knowledge and willingness to change design the change process in a way that allows us to stay attractive to employees, clients, employers, and the general public? In the following interview two consultants describe a narrative change process that stood out thanks to a high level of employee participation and a clever combination of narrative methods and dramaturgical elements. Eisendle: The challenge for the organization was that major changes to its staff are imminent. In addition to the executive board and half of senior management, several employees in middle management are about to retire in the following months and years. The second layer of the change comes from the changing political climate in Austria where social welfare is undergoing a general shift that puts poorer segments of the population in a disadvantaged position. This means that the budget is getting smaller and the whole population is less willing to make the necessary money available that would allow families in dire straits to give their children a chance to lead a healthy life. A little more background on the organization: It covers a total of seven professional fields plus administration. The seven professional fields and three administrative departments result in a total of ten groups—some of them with up to 70 employees, some of them with only ten—that needed to be included in the process. Even though all professional fields work under the same umbrella, they do so from different locations all over Vorarlberg, which means that there is little # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_24

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personal contact between them due to the organization’s decentralized structure. The heads of the various professional fields get a lot of autonomy in their decisionmaking and hold monthly meetings. Meanwhile, the executive board initiates and supports various events for all professional fields to maintain a shared sense of belonging, for example regular employee breakfasts, induction days for new employees, employee trips, and a yearly gala with an award ceremony. The organization originally had the wish to get all employees together on the same day for some kind of workshop to gather ideas for the future. Our suggestion was that it might actually be more meaningful to choose a more proactive process with as much employee involvement as possible and with a storytelling approach. Oberforcher: There’s always the question how much you can do in a single day. In my experience, organizations would love to cram the whole world into that day— that sure would be convenient. But that’s of course impossible and doesn’t make much sense either, and it might even lead to disillusion and demotivate the employees. That’s why our concept has always been to make such a day the highlight or final touch of a process. On that day all participants can make real experiences together. And topics can be approached as a group—topics that have emerged in the preceding process. Eisendle: We installed a supervision team in the organization, and together we came to the conclusion that it would make sense to think about where the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf came from before looking into the future. This was our first question for the development of our change process that was meant to carry us to that one day together with all employees. The second question was: “Who are we?” And only then did we want to ask the question about the future: “Where are we going?” Once we had decided that the path toward this big day was very important to us, we soon had the idea to develop the concept for this “day for us” together with the employees. In each professional field we activated two employees for this purpose. They had previously represented their respective fields in a workshop during which we had collected ideas and demands for the “day for us.” This means that we worked alongside all fields from the very beginning, which fit very well into the culture of the organization even though there was always only a short time and little room for this on an average day. The idea of the collective therefore quickly won over the organization. During these one-and-a-half creative workshop days we developed a first working concept. Together we had the idea to learn things during this preliminary process and make them visible to everyone on the final day by collecting stories. Oberforcher: This is why we wanted to collect as many stories as possible during the preliminary process. And for the stories it was always important that they conveyed the employees’ personal experiences to give a better individual impression of what makes their professional field special. So we were looking for stories that talked about these special qualities via personal experiences. Whatever this might mean for each employee.

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When we had the opportunity to meet 70 employees all at once at a large event, we immediately wanted to take advantage of the situation. We were thinking about a suitable format to get the stories about the question what makes their field special from each of these 70 employees in our very limited time, only about three hours. So we did a story storming in which we asked the employees over two rounds to tell one another their stories in groups of six. In the end, these groups gave us their tablecloths on which the participants had written down the stories with their names, bullet points, and titles. In addition, we added “harvest questions” to the stories, like for example: What makes the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf or the field special? What did we learn about our history? At the very end we asked a few employees to retell their stories to the entire group of 70 and recorded them. Eisendle: That workshop with 70 people was incredibly powerful. The employees were very enthusiastic about this first workshop with such a large scope, and the executive board received a lot of very positive feedback and decided to make the same team process available to all employees, so they could experience it for themselves. Therefore, we repeated the story storming many times with groups of all sizes. In small groups everybody was able to hear all of the stories; in larger groups with more than 50 people everybody listened to at least 12 stories on that day. In order to allow enough time for the team process, the organization moved the main event back by half a year. The organization was very keen to leave no employee behind, get everybody involved, and let them feel the positive atmosphere. Thanks to the workshops, all employees first had the opportunity to tell, exchange, and of course listen to a lot of stories within their own fields. The quality of these stories differs of course, but they all developed a strong energy. Oberforcher: I also found interesting about this narrative process how it works with an open end and no defined goals. The exciting thing was that we always had our eyes on that big day and we knew that we would incorporate the stories somehow. But for the longest time we didn’t know how exactly we would design that day. Because this part of the plan, to bring the stories with us on that day, was one of the few creative parts that was in our hands. Many other parts had stayed with the teams and the organization, and they would design them there. Of course we were asking ourselves all the time what we could do with the stories. More or less, we could only answer like this: “Well, we’ll see when we get there. At some point we will surely get an idea what we can do with them.” And that’s exactly how it came. Ideas were crystallizing all the time and then they changed again. But we and the organization were very brave and had faith that all would be well in the end. Because with each workshop in which the participants told their stories and with each new experience we got a better idea of what exactly we were finding with these stories and how it might help us with the larger, superordinate process. I think that was an important point: that we did not specify the goal for the final day from the very beginning and by doing so basically tried to anticipate some aggregation and analysis of the stories—but instead decided to wait and see what kind of ideas we might get by collecting the stories.

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So the entire planning process for the big day with the organizational team and the open end was like a laboratory that we planted into the system. At the meta-level we could nicely render the many waves visible that our process was making, and the reflection of what had happened regarding the various topics was always fascinating for the next step. Eisendle: The organizational team was a new element that we introduced. They only had very few models at their disposal about how to tackle the situation. There was no culture for that yet. So it became a strong intervention that made a huge impact and also evoked all kinds of emotions. Communication was key: What is being communicated and how? Who is excited about what? When somebody shared a positive experience, just like it had happened during the first storytelling workshop, that made the strongest impression. Those experiences touched people. We completely failed with documents, graphics, presentations, with talking, statements, questions, and all that paperwork. The employees only got a real feeling for one another when they were working together with the shared stories in the workshop. It’s a completely different form of learning when a positive experience is being created for the employees. Oberforcher: I have a nice example to illustrate the learning effect in the organization team: Two points on the agenda for the final day were planned to have two teams with questions facilitate an exchange between the participants on that day—one of them with a speed-dating format and one with a staging activity. The team preparing the staging activity discussed their suggestions with the supervision team, according to the cultural norm, and got the feedback to phrase their questions broader to reach more different groups of people: Maybe cut this question, or maybe ask it like this instead, and so on. The team’s presentation of the concrete questions thus kicked off a discussion that in turn led to the coordination of the questions between the supervision group and the organization team. The speed-dating team decided, without really announcing that decision, that they wouldn’t tell anybody what they would ask and also that nobody would even see their questions until the final moment. And they really did it that way: Only a few hours before the game, even though we were the moderators, did we receive secret envelopes that contained the questions. Nobody, not even the moderators, had any idea what questions they would ask until it was already time for the activity. This example was almost like a learning curve itself because the second team acted in a completely different way from the first team, and this showed different forms of learning. Eisendle: During the preparations we regularly met with the organization team. Our task was to orchestrate the entire dramaturgy of the “day for us” which was now the name for the day with all employees. We needed to make sure to get the central message through between structure and chaos on that day. What was your idea regarding how to design this “day for us”? Oberforcher: Previously, we had been in all ten professional fields to collect stories. Many were now of course wondering what we would do with the stories and what we had yielded from them. This is why our first idea to kick off the “day for us” was to take up this yield.

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For preparation we thus listened once more to all recorded stories and took a look at the “harvest” of the individual workshops; that was a first consolidation of what we had heard, the questions that had been answered, the magical moments, and so on. We made a large wall that we then clustered. Several values emerged that kept appearing across all stories and were thus particularly common. Ultimately, we extracted 18 terms from the stories and their yield. We deliberated this wall with the individual elements and the 18 value clusters with the supervision team, which means an extension to the executive board. The resulting values were things like “humanity,” “being appreciated as a human being in the organization,” “courage,” “appreciation itself,” “trust,” “feeling connected.” We didn’t want to stop at the condensation to individual terms, so our idea was to use the stories to add depth or context to all of the values and translate them into something special with the stories. To make them accessible with the stories? Oberforcher: Exactly. That was our design concept for the first part of the “day for us” that was under the question: “Where do we come from?” We wanted to make available to all employees what he had heard in the different professional fields with the stories that we had arranged by fields. We also wanted to condense them without sticking to those words alone because it is not enough to just say that our organization recognizes “trust” as a value. We neatly wrote the titles of all stories that we had collected on semi-transparent cards, so we had 210 story titles. We hung them to gas-filled balloons at the beginning of the exhibition. Eisendle: The balloons were colored in the hues of the different professional fields as we found them in the corporate identity of the organization. The number of balloons in the room exactly matched the number of stories. That means that when the participants entered the room, they were greeted by a room full of chairs and behind each chair was a card with a story on a balloon. That was our “story forest” (see Fig. 1). Oberforcher: The first activity for all 200 people was then to change the arrangement of the room. This is something we did several times on that day. Everybody should take one balloon and one chair. All balloons were brought into the center and the chairs were placed in a circle with three rows. This way we made the first setting that created a cloud of 210 stories in the middle to which everybody had carried and contributed one story. Eisendle: That made for a very nice aesthetic. We also had a tape for some musical accompaniment. We had prepared pillars from black cardboard on which we wrote the 18 values that we had extracted from the stories. And we placed those pillars as an exhibition in the center of the room. Meanwhile, we talked a little bit about what we had collected during this journey, how we had gone into the professional fields, and which values we had discovered in the organization. We had also nominated storytellers because we wanted to create a space for the employees in which they could listen to one another. The guiding question “where are we from” should be made tangible with the stories—with stories that make the various values more concrete and personally relatable.

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Fig. 1 The “story forest” with the collected stories (# Florian Oberforcher; courtesy of Florian Oberforcher)

Oberforcher: In the moment when we had really gotten through with these values, we immediately dissolved the moment by having the storytellers tell one story from each professional field. We thus created a set of ten narratives that brought the 18 values and their contexts together. Each story took up to three minutes, so that everybody was only listening for 30 min. We simply asked one storyteller after another to step into the center and symbolically bring a balloon in the color of their field, so everybody knew where the person had come from. And then they shared their story and that way a collective narrative emerged from the stories. Our band concluded the first part of the day by performing a spontaneous musical number based on the ten stories they had heard. At this point further words would probably just have ruined everything. So that was the first part of the “day for us” that was answering the question where we are from, what makes us unique and what is important to us, what should stay the same in the face of all the changes. After a break we transitioned into the second part. We left the story cloud in the center. All 200 participants rearranged the chairs together into a circle with two rows in which two people were facing each other. And then we switched into the “chirping” activity, Vorarlberger Kinderdorf chirping, emulating a speed-dating setting during which the participants had short “dates” for several rounds and talked about the questions that nobody had known up to this point. That was really incredible because you can hardly stop 200 people who really want to share their thoughts. They could have done it without any questions.

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Eisendle: We knew that there were certain things that the different professional fields in the organization handled differently. The entire preliminary process had shown us repeatedly that there were also unanswered questions and critical topics. The organization has a strong culture of appreciation; it values its individual members and joint development. People are allowed to criticize; everybody can give their opinion. The day was a perfect framework for us and a possibility to give the employees a space in which they were heard and in which we picked them up where they were with their concerns. So at the end of the second part we gave everybody a picture frame and asked two questions: “What did we achieve so far that we can now leave behind?” This was supposed to mean: What can we stop doing now, even though it was important and we really appreciated it, and put into the museum to say goodbye? The second question was: “What do we need to do in the future, which changes should happen in the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf?” A lot of people wrote something down—even the managers and executives. And they were really thinking about what they were writing down. A voice arose in the room where I could really see the people think. They were really thinking about the procedure and were taking it seriously. And I believe that this was one of the few moments when they were collectively able to do that. The entire organization was contemplating. Not within their individual fields—but for the whole organization. Oberforcher: So we got a lot of frames with two responses that everybody anonymously put into a basket. During the lunch break we hung those frames onto a gallery wall which created one big picture. After lunch everybody was back in the room. Our story cloud was still at the center of the room and the circle of chairs around it. One of the two activities for the afternoon was: funny family constellations. That was a little bit inspired by that video from Denmark, “We Are Denmark.” It’s about categorizing people based on societal groups within a physical space: young people, old ones, all nurses, and so on. The video then showed what these people have in common by asking them several questions. So we cleared the center that represented where the different professional fields mix and mingle, and each field carried the balloons in their respective color into a corner of the room. Then the fields briefly introduced themselves and we moderated and explained that there are also very different views and perspectives that everybody can have of themselves and that those can be revealed with questions. The first question we asked was who in the room was a firstborn. These people should take a balloon and move from their corner into the center. Additionally, when leaving the center again, the participants should not return to their original corners but join another color. With each new round the room thus became more colorful. And you recorded this? This video can be used to convey the message? Oberforcher: Exactly. This is a kind of experiment that is done on video. We made it through several rounds of questions with fewer or more people in the center each time. The final question that we had picked spontaneously the night before was: “Who has ever been a child?” One reason why this was great is that it brought attention to the clients of the organization, if you will. And of course it is also a question that everybody answered with yes, so everybody went into the center. Then

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we also invited everybody to exchange their balloon for a different color to go one step further with the colorfulness and symbolically make everyone leave their own field for a moment. What happened next? Oberforcher: After we had started with the question “where are we from” and looked at the question “where are we now” in the middle, it was important to us to look ahead now: Where are we going? So this was our question for the final part. For this we played a question game to turn everybody’s eyes toward the future. We wanted to hear questions about the future of the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf from all employees. So we handed a moderation card and pen to everybody with the invitation to write down one question that came to mind and that was important for the future of the organization. “When I think about the future, what question do I ask myself?” Everybody then exchanged their cards for several rounds to evaluate them with points, so that we could filter the most pressing and relevant questions of the 200 at the end. That was the third part of our exhibition so to speak. We basically have one exhibition about the stories, the values, and the distinct features, one exhibition with the museum and things that should be changed or kept. And we have a third exhibition with the yield of questions for the future that need to be taken care of or answered. Eisendle: In addition, we also have an evaluation of the important questions. This means that we now actually have a collective development of important questions that need to be addressed by the organization. This gives us a solid foundation to further develop the process. Because that day was not yet the end of the process. We don’t yet have a format or design or ideas for what we want to do next. We only know that the remaining change process should someday result in another day just like this one. Thank you very much for these great insights into your change project and all the best for the rest of the process!

Epilogue: Five First Steps to Become a Narrative Organization Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

At last the story of this book comes to an end—and it is now time for the story of your journey toward a narrative organization to begin. This is the story that truly matters and our book should only be its prologue. After all, we highlighted in the prologue to this book as well as in the chapter “Rabbit Holes to Narrative Organizations” that the various methodological approaches we introduced in Part II all function as different doors to enter the narrative warren. It ultimately does not matter where exactly you choose to begin—there is no single superior order to the narrative approach that you need to follow rigorously. To us, as we have stated multiple times, the various methods are all possible entry points with which we have made great experiences. And who knows: In time you might even develop your own methods against the backdrop of your shifting perspective from disk to sphere to return one final time to our metaphor of Columbus’s voyage (and if that is the case, we would love to listen to your story!). To make the beginning a little smoother, we have compiled a list of five first steps which you are free to experiment with. There is always a narrative level to all communication—and to become a narrative organization it is first and foremost required to pay closer attention to this level. This does not mean to turn into the world’s “greatest storyteller” who from now on only ever communicates in emotional stories. Storytelling in your external communication is great, but it does only ever represent a small piece in the jigsaw puzzle of becoming a narrative organization. Each organization and company can start with the following first steps:

Step 1: Create Spaces Where Storytelling Becomes Possible Try to convert some of your regular meetings into storytelling meetings. This means that the focus of these meetings shifts from merely exchanging facts or opinions to sharing experiences in narrative form. Everybody tells the others about an experience that stuck with them in the past few weeks, in the project they just finished, or # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1

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during a difficult time. Once everybody has told their story, all participants can talk about these experiences and contemplate what they might learn from the stories. This may sound simple, but everybody who has ever tried it was amazed—by how much knowledge about processes and structures could be gained this way, and by how much better those present during these meetings were able to understand the departments and responsibilities of their colleagues. Method: Chapter: The Storylistening Workshop

Step 2: Hone Your Listening Skills Particularly managers benefit greatly from working on their ability to listen. Because in the management culture that is still dominant today, they often feel pressured to add something to every conversation or always be the person who talks first, reacts without delay, who explains and fixes. Being used to these expectations, it might feel a little strange at first to simply listen—and employees often feel the same way as they usually also have very different expectations of their superiors (which is a form of “leadership culture of those being led”). As a manager, you may for example try to first allow everybody else to share their opinions and insights on a topic during a meeting before you react. But not just in leadership positions we are usually “ready to go”—in school we are already only ever rewarded when we give or share something, never when we are simply listening. Listening thus becomes a skill that we seem to be incentivized to forget from a young age. But we are also able to regain it when we internalize the attitude of the narrative interview. Method: Chapter: Narrative Interviews

Step 3: Learn More About the Present of Your Organization by Taking the Stories of Its Past Seriously Organizations often brush the past aside: “Let the past be and look into the future.” But this is a fairly short-sighted stance. Because knowing the story of “how we became who we are today” means to be familiar with the current organizational culture, including those elements that remain invisible at the surface. And developing an organization into the future always needs to begin with its past—because the past is the only source at the organization’s disposal if it hopes to speak of its own identity or learn something about itself from the stories of others. Without a clear identity, it is impossible to prevail in the present, let alone plan for the future. Methods: Chapter: Learning Histories; Chapter: Narrative System Map; Chapter: Transfer Stories

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Step 4: Develop Visions, Missions, and Strategies in a Narrative Way Whenever we take a look at the visions, mission statements, and strategy papers of organizations, we often encounter walls of facts. As a consequence, these documents remain vague and barely comprehensible to the majority of employees. But a word of caution: Developing them narratively does not mean to simply translate them into stories for communication purposes at a later stage either. Why not develop them as stories to begin with? After all, these three “literary types” in organizations quite explicitly call for a narrative structure! What else is a strategy but a story about where we would like to go from here and on which path? Methods: Chapter: Core Story; Chapter: Narrative Strategy Development

Step 5: Be Curious about the Stories of Others An open ear for the stories that surround the organization complements narrative mission and strategy development: What are our customers saying about us? And what our partners, investors, or the press? And which narratives shape the societal discourse? All of these stories are relevant to organizations. They do not only help with fine-tuning their position, but also with strategy development in general. Methods: Chapter: Narrative Interviews; Chapter: The Storylistening Workshop; Chapter: 90-Second Backstory Enjoy your personal experiments with the rabbit holes to the narrative organization! We are convinced that you will soon begin to feel how much better your organization resonates internally and externally, how it becomes more agile and transformative, and how it can react swiftly to the constant changes in our VUCA world. We look forward to hearing your stories! Christine Erlach & Michael Müller

The Elixir: Seven Classics on the Narrative Perspective Christine Erlach and Michael Müller

If you wish to take a deeper dive into the basics of narrative organizations and narrative thinking, you may of course peruse the lists of monographs and articles we cited in each of the chapters and read those that interest you the most. Should you desire to go even deeper than that, however, we highly recommend the following seven classics that cover the breadths of the theoretical field on which we based this entire book:

David M. Boje (2008): Storytelling Organizations. Sage, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore Management professor David Boje began very early to think about narrative approaches in organizations and developed various methods for the analysis of their stories. In his book Storytelling Organizations, he primarily examines which types of stories exist in organizations and how they contribute to their “sensemaking.” He also delineates very clearly how the narrative perspective helps with managing complexity.

Jerome Bruner (1986): Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London Jerome Bruner (1915–2016) was a psychologist whose work helped shape the “narrative turn” in his discipline. His book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds in particular has garnered much attention in the systemic field and become one of the foundation texts of narrative therapy and consultation. In this book, Bruner describes how people have two different types of thinking: one “argumentative” and one “narrative.” He also shows how social systems and cultures create meaning and visions primarily through narrative thinking. # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Erlach, M. Müller, Narrative Organizations, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1

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Joseph Campbell (2008): The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, Novato Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was a literary scholar and mythologist who compared the myths and legends of various cultures and realized how one narrative pattern kept appearing across all of them: the “hero’s journey” that by now has become a staple not only in cinema but also in organizations. This book provides a thorough introduction to the pattern alongside a large catalogue of examples from many cultures.

Jonathan Gottschall (2012): The Storytelling Animal. How Stories Make Us Human. Mariner Books, Boston, New York In this book, literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall describes how important stories are for humans and why we deserve the moniker “storytelling animal.” Using psychological and neurophysiological research as his foundation, he illustrates how stories and narratives help us navigate a complex world and change ourselves and our environment.

A. Kleiner & G. Roth (1996). Field Manual for a Learning Historian. MIT-COL and Reflection Learning Associates In the 1990s, Art Kleiner and George Roth worked alongside Peter Senge at MIT on organizational learning and change management. They might be the “founding fathers” of storytelling because they were the first to describe a narrative approach to render the hidden knowledge, experiences, and values in the stories of employees visible and also make them usable for organizations in the shape of “learning histories.”

Yuri M. Lotman (1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Yuri Lotman (1922–1993) was a Russian literary scholar and semiotician with a particular interest in narrative theory. He studied the exact nature of story “events” and asked how these events cause the transformations in protagonists and their worlds that are so fundamental to stories. Lotman’s literary and semiotic contributions have become a staple in contemporary narrative theory.

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Michael White (2007). Maps of Narrative Practice. WW Norton, New York Michael White (1948–2008) was an Australian psychotherapist who founded the narrative systemic therapy alongside his New Zealand colleague David Epston. In this book, he describes in detail how changes to the story we are telling about ourselves may lead to changes in our identity and thus to solutions to our problems. Even though the book was written from a therapist’s perspective, almost everything applies equally well to the context of coaching and change processes in organizations. The explanation of the narrative construction of identity and narrative change processes is particularly instructive.