cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Emerging inquiriesmoment, or carefully crafted by individuals before they are told. Theiressential logic is temporal. They generally move from the past to thepresent, and tend to open up possibilities for the future. So, paradoxically,stories are distinct ways of making sense of the past and showing how thepast leads to the future, which in turn affects the present. Hearing a storymay change how we view our current options, and the way we makesense of what has already happened.There’s a difference between telling a story and giving an example. Astory has a plot, and characters and emotional and sensory detail. In astory you can examine both sides of an argument; a manager can tell astory in which a proposed change is simultaneously awful and exciting.This is more engaging and more real than an announcement which says‘The change is coming. Stop moaning and get on with it.’ A story can alsohelp someone to walk in your shoes, to see things from your point ofview. It can help others to see things they are not currently seeing.Leaders can use storytelling to work with their teams to make sense oftheir own past, present and future, or to convey to their teams how theyare making sense of it all. It is a way of communicating without oversimplifying.Instead of being used to convince others of a particularcourse of action, a story can be used to awaken sleeping wisdom and tolead to good conversations about what to do next.Shaw (2002) says of the practice of collective storytelling:The kind of storytelling I am alluding to is not that of completed tales butnarrative-in-the-making. Rather than stating aims, objective, outcomes, rolesas abstract generalities, people use a narrative mode. The starting point isoften ‘the story so far’. Someone recounts and at the same time accounts foror justifies the way they make sense of events and their own participation...As others associate and ‘fill in’ an increasingly complex patterned sensemakingis co-created. This is an absorbing process because a person’s identityin this situation is evolving at the same time. We are not ‘just talking’. Weare acting together to shape ourselves and our world.DialogueDialogue is a central tool for those interested in dealing withcomplexity. Dialogue is different from other forms of communicationsuch as debate or discussion, or ordinary conversation. William Isaacs,who founded the MIT Dialogue Project, has been influential in bringing322