Storytelling in Management Practice

Dynamics and Implications

Stefanie Reissner, Victoria Pagan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136160899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Since the early 2000s, storytelling as a means of managerial communication has been increasingly advocated, with a focus on the management practices of leadership, change and organizational culture. Most research on storytelling in management practice derives from practitioner experience, but little is known about the specific dynamics behind storytelling as a tool for managerial communication.

This book derives from one of the first research studies into storytelling in management practice, which sought to evaluate the assumed, but not necessarily proven, effectiveness of storytelling as a management tool. Building on existing theories of narrative and storytelling in organizations, the book explores how managers use storytelling in their daily practice, revealing that it can be employed both, purposively - like a tool, and perceptively - spontaneously and intuitively. The book explains that storytelling has different functions in management practice at different levels of the organization, such as:

• Creating direction for the organization
• Translating strategic messages into operational ones and supporting the professional development of staff
• Shaping the organization's social fabric through the sharing of personal stories

Aided by a wealth of interviews and case studies, Storytelling in Management Practice reveals an analysis of the dynamic relationship between story, storyteller, audience and organizational context. As such, it will be useful for students and researchers working across a variety of sub-disciplines, including: leadership, organizational behaviour and business communication.

1Introduction

Introduction

Until recently, storytelling was about as welcome in the workplace as a crayon doodle on a napkin. It was considered too imprecise and trite for professional dialogue. Not so anymore. Like the personal computer – once considered a toy and unworthy of a place on any serious leader’s desk – storytelling has come of age.

(Paul Smith, Lead With a Story, 2012: 2–3)

Storytelling in management practice has evidently enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years as managers have sought to organize both business processes and professional relationships through more symbolic means (e.g. Deetz 2001). This has become particularly important in the twenty-first century, where instant, constant and concise communication impacts on both business and social practice. In this context, managers grapple with balancing the efficiency imperative (i.e. the achievement of business goals) with quality interpersonal interactions between organizational actors, leadership and organizational setting (e.g. Ward et al. 2001; Brown et al. 2005; Denning 2005; Maxwell and Dickmann 2007; Mackesy Davies 2012). The quality and depth of communication and personal interaction in organizations seems to have declined in line with the available quantity, potentially jeopardizing the cohesion of the organization and the achievement of its goals (e.g. Lovely 2006; Wortmann 2006). Research participant Patrick, an employee, commented on this phenomenon as follows:

Communication is always an issue. How do you get your messages to the right people at the right times and make them actually listen to it? I’ve yet to come up with anybody who’s actually come up with the definitive solution other than just keep trying the different routes and making sure you identify the right groups of people. If somebody did come up with the magic solution to organizational communication, I think they’d make a fortune.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the aforementioned patterns of high speed and low content communication practice, the ancient art of storytelling has seen a revival in management, consultancy and wider organizational practice (e.g. Allan et al. 2002; Gargiulo 2002; Brown et al. 2005; Denning 2005; Smith 2012). The language and imagery of storytelling with characters, a storyline and a plot seems to be a welcome antidote to micro-messages and other abbreviated communication that increasingly dominate both organizations and the interactions therein (e.g. Wortmann 2006). Storytelling is seen as a way to ‘engage an audience in order to argue, persuade, [and] mobilize others to action’ (Riessmann 2008: 10), which in the context of storytelling in management practice translates into organizational actors being persuaded to act towards the achievement of clearly defined business results (e.g. Ward et al. 2001).

In addition to such an engagement mechanism (see also Gargiulo 2002; Blair 2006; Kotter 2006), storytelling in management practice has been promoted as a tool for achieving whole-scale change for the better (e.g. Armstrong 1992; Neu-hauser 1993; Parkin 2004). Gabriel (2008: 283) considers the following functions of storytelling, which may provide the basis for the application of storytelling as a tool in management, consultancy and wider organizational practice:

• Features of organizational politics, attempts at control and resistance;
• Rhetorical performances aimed at influencing hearts and minds;
• Means of sharing, disseminating, and contesting knowledge and learning;
• Ways of constructing individual and group identities.

Practitioners have used storytelling in the development of case studies to transfer good/best practice (e.g. Post 2001; Fröhlich and Karandikar 2002), to support organizational transformation in terms of developing a new and shared story among disparate organizational actors (e.g. Page 2008) and to collect the core competencies and capabilities of the organization in the form of stories from organizational actors (e.g. Langford 2001). The resulting publications disseminated through practitioner-oriented journals or books offer a positive picture of the effectiveness of storytelling to achieve a variety of management/leadership goals in organizations, as we will demonstrate in the following chapter of this book.

But is storytelling really a universal remedy for the complex problems that today’s organizations and their leaders are facing? If we are to believe the dominant rhetoric of publications advocating the use of storytelling as a management tool, it is. More critical minds will doubt that something as (at first glance) simple as storytelling can deliver such outcomes on its own without other factors having a role (e.g. Ready 2002). Riessmann (2008: 10), for instance, argues that ‘some individuals and groups narrate their experiences in ways that engage, convince, and move an audience, while other tellings can leave listeners or readers skeptical’. Research participant Lucilla, an independent coach, reflects as follows:

You are bound in a relationship to the story, because you were the story receiver, the story listener. There’s a story, the storyteller and the story listener and they are all bound, so the morals there are what then happens, how does that story impact, where does it go, could it do good in this world, could it bring us together as human beings, or whatever it is we wish to achieve.

Hence, despite an increasing acceptance of storytelling in management and consultancy practice (e.g. Smith 2012), notions of storytelling are not always received well by the wider business community (e.g. Kellaway 2004; Love 2008). It appears that storytelling can be counter-cultural to managers’ selfunderstanding as professionals: the ideal manager remains objective, guided only by fact (rather than fiction) and trusting in quantifiable information (e.g. Allan et al. 2002a; 2002b). Indeed, we have detected a tension between creative notions of storytelling in management practice and the directive ways in which it is used and measured. While the language of storytelling appears to be attractive for twenty-first-century managers (e.g. Smith 2012), there are attempts to squeeze notions of storytelling into the straitjacket of traditional and control-dominated paradigms of management in which managers’ agency and ability to control is assumed (e.g. Parker 2002; O’Reilly and Reed 2011). This is powerfully illustrated by the following quote by Simmons (2006: 58):

Interest in storytelling in business settings has been focused on two primary leverage points … one, get there first with your preferred story or frame so you can create desired conclusions, or, two, re-frame interpretations through a preferred story to alter conclusions so they flow in the ‘right’ direction.

Storytelling in this context appears to be less about encouraging creativity, imagination and interaction as widely associated with storytelling (e.g. Brown et al. 2005; Gargiulo 2005; Maxwell and Dickman 2007) rather than influence, control and potentially even manipulation as suggested by the above quote. Such suggestions do not stand up to closer scrutiny, however. Organizational actors, the typical audience of storytelling in management practice, are not a passive mass of individuals that listens to and accepts the stories that they are being told. Rather, they will discuss, interpret and make sense of what they hear (e.g. Weick 1995; Reissner 2008a) in the context of their previous lived experiences in the organization and the wider professional relationships among organizational actors. Storytelling in management practice, therefore, is not merely a tool through which managers, consultants and other practitioners can exert influence; it is a complex and multi-faceted process, as we will demonstrate throughout this book.

In this introductory chapter, we will identify the rationale for our research and the questions that have guided our investigation into storytelling in management practice. We will attempt to define the concept that we have studied and situate our research in a wider theoretical and practical context. Moreover, we will introduce the research setting, i.e. the main characters – both individual and collective – that have informed our research. We will conclude this chapter by outlining the structure of this book and by inviting you to join the journey of exploration of storytelling in management practice as manifested in our research findings.

Rationale for the research

The starting point of this research into the use of storytelling in management and organizational practice has been the tension between enthusiasm on the part of the practitioner literature which advocates storytelling as an essential communication tool for twenty-first-century leaders (see, for instance, our opening quote by Smith 2012) and more critical voices in relation to such potentially faddish claims (e.g. Kellaway 2004; Gabriel 2008). We have sought to understand empirically how storytelling is being employed in management practice and how it is being received by the audience, thereby extending the current theoretical understanding of the use of storytelling in organizational settings and management practice. Indeed, storytelling in management practice has been subject to little robust empirical examination to date, and a myriad of definitions, conceptualizations and uses circulate among managers, business consultants and other practitioners. It has indeed been a challenge to define the multi-faceted and multi-dimensional concept of storytelling in management and organizational practice in such a way that encompasses the different functions and purposes whilst defining the boundaries of what is a story and what is not.

The content of practitioner publications opens up opportunities for new ways of interaction between managers, their peers and subordinates in twenty-first-century organizations (e.g. Snowden 1999; Ward et al. 2001; Brown et al. 2005), but we are concerned with the loose use of notions of narrative, story and storytelling therein as some writers even regard a snippet of information as a story (e.g. Dickman 2003; see also Mathews and Wacker 2008 for a summary of how the term story is widely used in everyday organizational talk). Salmon and Riessmann (2008: 81–82) express such concerns eloquently as follows: ‘too often in the current wave of popularity of “stories”, … narrative has come to mean anything and everything beyond a few bullet points – a trend that fails to honour the uniqueness and power of the narrative form’.

Despite suggestions from some of our interviewees that definitions are unimportant and/or limiting and therefore best avoided, we regard it as important to impose some sort of conceptual boundaries for our exploration of storytelling in management practice. Therefore in the context of this book, we define ‘story’ as an account which demonstrates a move from one position to another (e.g. Bruner 1986). Such an account often derives from experience, either first-hand (i.e. the storyteller’s own experience) or second-hand (i.e. the experience of someone the storyteller knows), but it can also be fictitious (i.e. a pre-fabricated story transferred from one context to another, see Parkin 1998, 2001, 2004; Wacker and Silverman 2003; Smith 2012). The structure of a story can be clear in terms of beginning, middle and end, or it can be implicit in that a story told in a particular situation may only be an element of a bigger story (see Boje’s 2001 notion of ante-narrative). A story is a vehicle by which a storyteller communicates a message to an audience.

Another term frequently used in the extant literature on storytelling in management practice is ‘business narrative’ (see Denning 2005, 2007). We understand this as sounding more sophisticated, yet in management, consultancy and organizational practice it can be perceived as synonymous with ‘story’. We do acknowledge that there has been a long-standing and intense debate as to whether and how story and narrative differ. For instance, Gabriel (2008: 194) has defined narrative as ‘involv[ing] temporal chains of interrelated events or actions, undertaken by characters’ (emphasis original) and story as ‘pithy narratives with plots, characters, and twists that can be full of meaning’ (Gabriel 2008: 282). Therefore we follow Gabriel’s distinction by conceptualizing narratives as bigger, more complex frames of meaning that are constituted by a myriad of stories (see Reissner 2008a), and we focus our discussion in this book on the telling of stories as the potentially more spontaneous, less developed and more insightful type of accounts in a way that is separate from an analysis of the broader narrative.

The main interest of our research has been in storytelling, which we define as a process through which organizational actors share stories mainly in a verbal but also in a written or non-verbal manner. Storytelling involves continuous interaction between organizational actors (e.g. Czarniawska-Joerges 1994; Barge and Little 2002; Ready 2002; Barge 2004; Boje 2008) and is open-ended, creative and engaging. It is helpful to see such story performances as ‘exchange[s] between two or more persons during which a past or anticipated experience [is] being referenced, recounted, interpreted or challenged’ (Boje 1991: 111). Hence, storytelling is a fluid, interactive process that potentially develops a life of its own with the parties involved in the storytelling performance interpreting and passing on to others what they have heard.

There is a tendency among practitioners in particular (and our research participants are no exception) to use the terms story, storytelling and narrative as synonyms. In contrast, we regard it as necessary to distinguish the terms story and storytelling in particular for conceptual reasons, while appreciating that they are dependent on one another. Indeed, story cannot exist without storytelling, and storytelling cannot exist without story. In other words, there is no point in having a story when it is not or cannot be told, and by the same token, storytelling cannot happen without a story to be told. However, as outlined above, story is merely the vehicle for the transmission of information in story form, and storytelling is the process that allows for engagement with the story and for interaction among organizational actors (e.g. Barge 2004). Hence, in our writing, we carry the conceptual distinction between these terms even though our informants may use them as synonyms.

Our qualitative and inductive research has been conceived as a response to the evident tension of storytelling as a natural, perceptive and pervasive form of communication in organizations as demonstrated in the academic literature (e.g. Bruner 1986; Boje 1991; Boyce 1996; Czarniawska 1997; Gabriel 2000; Rhodes and Brown 2005) and storytelling as a management tool as advocated in practitioner publications (e.g. Armstrong 1992; Neuhauser 1993; Clark 2004; Denning 2005, 2007; Gargiulo 2006; Syedain 2007; Smith 2012). On the one hand, we have been intrigued by the possibility that there is a universally valuable means of communication in management and organizational practice with a number of possible positive effects (see also Patrick’s reflections above), and on the other hand, we have been skeptical of the broad-sweep nature of such claims.

Part of the difficulty with the lack of shared understanding as to what storytelling (and associated concepts like story and narrative) mean in management practice, both in terms of their function in the manager’s communication toolbox and how they are received by employees (see also Boyce 1996), is that business managers, management consultants and other practitioners will find it difficult to make an informed decision about the appropriateness and effectiveness of storytelling in their everyday practice. Research participant Percival, a manager in the third sector, expresses his concerns as follows:

If you’re someone who thinks ‘oh let’s just get on with it’, story’s not the way to go. It’s a very participative process and you’ve got to be very confident in your leadership abilities to take people through something different.

Indeed, there is a risk that storytellers wishi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Storytelling in management practice: Definitions, rhetoric, assumptions
• 3. Theoretical foundations and conceptualizations of storytelling in management practice
• 4. Storytelling at the macro level: Constructing the organization
• 5. Storytelling at the meso level: Sensemaking in organizations
• 6. Storytelling at the micro level: Weaving and weakening the organization’s social fabric
• 7. Dynamics of storytelling in management practice
• 8. Conclusion
• Methodological appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index