Narrative Organizations: Making Companies Future Proof by Working With Stories

By Christine Erlach, Michael Müller and Karin Thier

This book shows how to work with stories and narrative approaches in almost all fields of action of a company, and demonstrates the added value resulting from a holistic narrative perspective. The authors take thereby a practice-based perspective from the viewpoint of managing directors, the C-suite, organizational developers, corporate communicators and advisers with a rich description of the methods and implementation.

By the employment of these narrative methods, leadership styles, communication, knowledge and change management can be planned in such a way that on the one hand the identity-core of the enterprise remains always apparent and on the other, the organization can develop in an agile fashion into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9783662614211

Book preview

Part IThe Narrative Side of Organizations

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

C. Erlach, M. MüllerNarrative OrganizationsManagement for Professionalshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61421-1_2

Stories: What Organizations Are Made Of

Christine Erlach¹   and Michael Müller²  

(1)

NARRATA Consult, Burscheid, Germany

(2)

Stuttgart Media University, Stuttgart, Germany

Christine Erlach (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Michael Müller

Email: [e-mail]

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 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).

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Fig. 1

Two types of memory (© authors)

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 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).

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Fig. 2

Our brain thinks in stories (© authors)

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 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).

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 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 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 meaning-making, 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. 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