presentation on narrative and complexity for NLx - Are you looking ...

Lorraine Mancey
Trinity College
PhD Organisational learning in
development organisations looking at
the use of narratives as a
methodological tool to get a handle on
how complexity might be a useful
framework ….

What is narrative ?

“A narrative is a re<strong>presentation</strong>
of past events in any
medium…narratives can be
oral, written, filmed or drawn”

“Its difficult to break through the complexity of the
issues”
“The attitude here is that training is a waste of time”
“the organisation is not keeping pace with change”
“There’s not a good culture here, its very male
dominated”
“personalisation of the issues just doesn’t happen”
“It’s a time factor – there just isn’t the time”
“You’re spread very thinly and you’re not doing
anything right

• In the same organisation…
• In the same department…
• In the same team…
• Different stories…
• Different explanations for successes/failures
• Different viewpoints
• Different life experiences
• Different ways of engaging with a project…

“We are an organisation in flux”
“We are an organisational culture
cast in stone”
“Nothing can change here”
“Everything changes all the time its
hard to keep up”

Sensemaking !

What is sensemaking ?
• Sensemaking is the process of creating
situational awareness and understanding in
situations of high complexity or uncertainty in
order to make decisions.
• It is "a motivated, continuous effort to
understand connections (which can be among
people, places, and events) in order to anticipate
their trajectories and act effectively"

• Different meanings arise from different understandings of
any given situation
• It is through language organized into discourse,
narratives and stories that we come to experience our
world
• Organisations can be understood as a feature of an
unfolding story set within a wider narrative which is used
to give sense and meaning to our world
• A sensemaking perspective sees organisations as
narratively constructed from networks of conversations –
within this there are different potential meanings that
emerge through sensemaking

Sensemaking: The key players

BRENDA DERVIN
• Currently a professor of communication at Ohio State University, is an influential
figure in the communication and library and information science fields. Her research
about information seeking and information use led to the development of the Sense-
Making approach
• The central idea of sense-making is “how people make sense of
their worlds”
• Sense-making allows a listener (researcher, reference librarian, etc.)
to see how a person views a situation
• As a person moves through time-space, she develops her unique
point of view from personal experiences and observations and at
some point, she comes to a stopping place, or gap, where sense
runs out, and then needs to bridge the gap in some way

KARL WEICK
Karl Weick is the Rensis Likert College Professor of Organizational Behavior
and Psychology at Michigan University and considered a founding father of
sensemaking
Sensemaking is the mental process of interpreting and
constructing the reality around us. We are sensemaking
pretty much all the time as we go about our daily lives. It
is the process by which people reduce the complexity of
their environment to a level from which they can make
sense of it
Sensible interpretations and reliable organisational
action is more likely in an organisational culture that
values storytelling as a means of ensuring effective
communication

DAVID SNOWDEN
• Dave Snowden is Director of the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity which
focuses on the development of the theory and practice of social complexity. The
Centre spun off from IBM in July 2004 to allow it greater freedom to explore new
transdiciplinary and participatory approaches to research
• Story can convey a message in culturally diverse situations without
loss of meaning or integrity
• Stories bridge the gap between written and oral cultures
• Stories flow naturally from us, its how we make sense of our worlds,
you don’t need experts to show you how to do it
• The most powerful stories are usually negative

To Focus On Sensemaking is to portray
organizing as the experience of being
thrown together into an ongoing,
unknowable, unpredictable streaming of
experience in search of answers to the
question:
“What’s the story?”

Sensemaking organizes flux
Sensemaking starts with chaos
Sensemaking is about action
Action and talk are treated as cycles rather than linear
Sensemaking is about plausibility
Its not about ‘truth’ or getting it right
It is instead a continual redrafting of an emerging story,
incorporating more and more of the observed data
People may get better stories but they will never get THE story
There is no one story!
Generating dialogue, negotiations, experiences enriches the
experience and allows for innovation

Narrative as a sensemaking tool
• Brings together diverse and different info
• Interaction helps explanatory patterns to
emerge
• Plays important role in coherence
• The unexpected & surprises are cues for
attention
• Empowers the local actors
• Democratic concept
(adapted from Guijt)

Narrative: The Key Players

DAVID BOJE
David M. Boje is an endowed Bank of America professor of management at New Mexico State
University (NMSU) in Las Cruces. He has published over 100 journal articles and ten books to date
• Narrations are part of everyday communication and organisational life
• An organisation can be understood as socially constructed verbal systems
• An organisation is a collective storytelling system
• A story is an exchange between two or more persons during which a past or
anticipated experience was being referenced, recounted, interpreted or
challenged
• Narratives are the ground on which the struggle for power is waged
Narrative is used to challenge or reproduce power relations

BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA:
Barbara Czarniawska, holds a Science Research Chair at Gothenburg Research Institute, Sweden. She is also a
Titular Professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels; Fellow at Center for
Cultural Sociology, Yale University; and Visiting Professor at Management Centre, University of Leicester. Her
research takes a constructionist perspective on organizing, most recently in the field of big city management and
finance. She applies narratology to organization studies.
Organisations are “nets of collective actions”
where meanings are constructed through
exchanges with people…learning occurs by
becoming a member of a net.
Ie. Adopting a set of shared meanings and
practices to provide members with a sense of
shared reality

STEVE DENNING
From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank where he
spearheaded the organizational knowledge sharing program. In November 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one
of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos) He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe,
Asia and Australia on knowledge management and organizational storytelling.
• Story transforms organisational culture
• In a bureaucratic hierarchy narrative/stories are a
tool for intellectual freedom.
Story becomes the tool of the disempowered

• “TRANSFORMATION”
• “INTERVENTION”
• “CHANGE STRATEGY”
• “VISION”
• “COACHING”
• “CULTURE CHANGE PROGRAMME”
All Imply That Something Is Planned And Done To Organisational
Members…
IE. The language itself reinforces the inertia it is attempting to
overthrow!

So Why Use Narrative?
• Organisational stories are found in the members living
experiences to be fragmented; non linear, incoherent,
collective, and un-plotted
• Within a story, there are a number of ongoing
relationships all of which contribute to a diverse pattern
of learning within the organization.
• Stories in organisation are self-deconstructing; flowing;
emerging and networking
• Stories provide scripts that members use to organise
their behaviours
• Stories are used as oral cultural memory

Stories are convenient and easy to collect
Stories reduce complexity of “messy realities”
Stories get to the heart of peoples meaning by explaining the nature
of an individuals reality
Each member of the organisation has a voice in the narrative
Some voices are loud articulate and powerful
Others are silent, unheard or ignored
Storytelling is a symbolic form through which organisational
members construct shared meaning of an organisational reality
Stories tell us there is not one reality but many – there are many
voices – we are involved in polyphonic organisations

Experience in the
external world leads
to internal storytelling
…produce
knowledge reinforcing
storytelling that
explains experience
Storytelling/
knowledge
generating
spiral
Storytelling leads to
testing the external
world as one acts
on a story
This testing leads to new
experiences which if they
confirm the predictions
in the story…

DEVELOPMENT
IS …
SURVIVAL
ADAPTATION LEARNING

Development is envisioned within the
complexity framework as an…
UNCERTAIN, OPEN ENDED and LONG
TERM PROCESS
Driven by a large number of
LOCAL INTERACTIONS
that generate SELF ORGANIZED stable patterns
capable of ADAPTATION

Create contexts that
allow learning and
innovation to flourish

Learning and new knowledge occur as staff
draw lessons from their activities
How they use knowledge to adapt to
policies, programmes and strategies
Learning = whether and how knowledge is
translated into operational reality

So what can narrative offer us
that’s different?
• Helps us understand how particular meanings in organisations or
development have become dominant
• Storytelling workshops have helped in development intervention, of
introducing voices that were previously unheard
• Its not an “off the peg - one size fits all” approach
• Offers a window into seeing how people make sense of their world
• Bridges the gap between the organisation’s story and that
experienced by its members
• Links past, future and present, allows for “what if’s”
(innovation platforms)

Where have stories been used?
•Knowledge mapping exercises and strategies
•Stories provide scripts that members use to organise their behaviours
•Change programmes and initiatives
•Documenting key incidents in an organisations history
•Induction of new members
•Handover procedures
•Merger, acquisition and partnerships to increase trust telling anecdotes
that show organisations’ value system
•In orally based cultures with no strong documentation culture
•In short : Stories in organisations can help managers understand their
organisational realities, help them develop new insights, stimulate critical thought
and enable problem solving in an innovative way

Paradigm shifts…
With the shift towards cultural sensibilities that a
complexity / narrative / sensemaking approach
offers…
- Offers a voice to Indigenous culture
- Looks at development from a local level
- Facilitates ‘Bottom up learning’
- Gives a local voice to international policy
- Tacit knowledge
- Power shift

Points for discussion
• Capacity building
• Time = Series of short, discrete cycles
• Blueprint development (one size fits all)
• Traditional planning approaches
• Need for reflection, learning, change
• Communication and Viewpoints of
partners
• Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring is only piles of data unless you do something with it…

A complexity view implies more attention to metamonitoring:
asking what people know and what
that means.

If organisations are seen as complex adaptive systems –
…perhaps the greatest contribution of narrative is the
development and exchange of practical wisdom and
experience through the facilitation of an equal playing
field whereby all involved can contribute and the nature
of that organisation is defined by all those who talk to
each other
– through stories narrative becomes an instrument to
construct meaning and impart knowledge – it is
essentially the basis of human experience
-In narrative we recognise and cherish our differences
and allow space for transformation for others, ourselves
and our connections with one another