Storytelling and Organizational Commitment

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Storytelling continues to emerge in academic research about organizational life.

A recent issue of Group & Organization Management (Vol. 33, No. 2; find it through an academic library database) features John F. McCarthy’s “Short Stories at Work: Storytelling as an Indicator of Organizational Commitment,” in which he notes that:

Findings here illustrated that storytelling was strongly associated with organizational commitment and indicated that stories continue to play an important role in conveying values and complex messages across organizational boundaries.

Penguin’s “We Tell Stories” Project

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I’m revisiting this entry because I didn’t do a good job of explaining Penguin’s project. That’s because I couldn’t find a good explanation on the site. Here’s one I found by a blogger named “Melissa” at Central Region AA|RF Planners:

Penguin challenged 6 authors to create new forms of story telling for a digital platform. The marketer worked with alternate reality fame company “Six To Start” and had authors reinterpret classic stories. The first is Charles Cummings 21 Steps inspired by John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. Readers can click through the story onscreen while Google Maps traces the characters movements through the streets of London. Readers can follow the next story, Slice, through Twitter and the characters’ blogs. The last story will post April 22.

My original post:

Penguin UK launched its most ambitious digital writing project to date on March 18, We Tell Stories:

In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start, Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.

But somewhere on the internet is a secret seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl who has a habit of getting herself lost. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape her journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will direct readers to the other six stories. The secret seventh story will also offer the chance to win some wonderful prizes in addition to the prizes on offer on We Tell Stories, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library, over £13,000 worth of the greatest books ever written.

Narrative Interior Design?

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The April issue of Domino magazine has a feature enetitled “The Narrative Decorator.” Maybe its my lack of visual sensability, but I couldn’t discern a whole lot of storytelling in the design work of Fawn Galli, the featured decorator. Words/phrases like “dreams,” “favorite memories,” “fantasy,” “storyscapes of fabric, furniture, and paint,” “magical mystery tour,” and “fairy tale” are used in the feature, and Galli is said to “see storytelling opportunities everywhere.”

The storytelling comes across even less well in the web version of the feature.

But perhaps I should just delight in the idea that storytelling is cool enough to be associated with an up-and-coming designer.

Story Prompts from Conversation Questions

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Although Alex Shalman is talking about questions for controlling communication (to make yourself stand out and your conversation partner feel important), the questions he suggests in his Lifehack.org article would work equally well to elicit stories:

  • What do you do when you’re not doing this?
  • What is important to you?
  • How is it that you are so passionate about this topic?
  • How could I accomplish what you have accomplished?
  • Do you remember how you felt when that happened?
  • Can you elaborate a little bit on this topic?
  • Do you remember what was going on in your mind at that time?

Followup to Networking Stories: “Wow! How?” Stories

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In response to yesterday’s entry about elevator speeches/stories, Stephanie West Allen (what would I and this blog do without her?) turned me on to two relevant entries from her blog:

Lessons from Mayberry contains a section on the “Wow! How?” story that aligns with yesterday’s entry. The idea is that if your “elevator speech” begins with an intriguing story-like introduction, your audience will respond with “Wow!” and then inquire about how you do the wonderful thing you do.

Stephanie also notes that her entry, “If Thats Your Elevator Speech, I’ll Take the Stairs,” is one of the most clicked-on entries on her blog.

Patient Stories

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Medical student Clinton Pong, who blogs at Not My Second Opinion writes:

I love stories. One of the things I feel so lucky about as a student doctor is my opportunity to hear the stories of my patients! They give me with small snippets of their lives, bits and pieces that I scribble down onto their character sheets. Then I report to the attending physician and get my experience points in the form of teaching topics. My life may not have a Dungeon Master guiding me along on a quest to rescue a damsel in distress, but I do feel glad that I get the opportunity to play a hero sometimes 🙂

He reminds me of a nice academic journal piece (in the journal Explore) by Victor Sierpina, Mary Jo Krietzer, Elizabeth MacKenzie, and Michelle Sierpina. The piece, about narrative medicine, looks at “coconstruct[ing] with the patient the reality of the medical encounter and the tone and timbre of the healing relationship.”

More lovely snippets from the article:
“… in medicine the quantitative is never the whole story. … It is in narrative that we rediscover our humanity. … narrative medicine uses reflective writing to evoke empathy.”

The article talks about courses that teach “the use of personal illness narratives to ensure that the humanity of both provider and patient remains central in the clinical encounter.” Writing medical narratives, the authors write, helps medical students ask themselves, “What did I learn from that? Why do I believe what I do? What do I think about this?”

“Why is narrative an effective antidote to isolation, callousness, and numbness?” the authors ask. “Because it serves as a lifeline to experiencing our own humanity, as well as a bridge that connects us with others, breaking through barriers built by professional roles, judgments, biases, assumptions, stress, and time pressures.”

Physicians, the authors assert, need “the ability to listen to the narratives of the patient, grasp and honor their meaning, and be moved to act on the patient’s behalf. This is narrative competence, that is, the competence that human beings need to absorb, interpret, and respond to stories.”

Networking Stories

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I heartily agree with Chris King, who writes the following about storytelling and networking:

When we are meeting people at a Networking event, we are usually asked, “What do you do?” If we answer with a label (“I’m a consultant, lawyer, website designer, etc.) the reaction is blah. But, if we put our answer into a story form, “I help small business owners who are struggling to establish a professional presence on the Internet,” your questioner will be interested in hearing the story of how you do that.

I write about the same concept, which I call the Elevator Story, here.

Another Job Successfully Landed Through Social Media

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Add new grad Andrew Cafourek (above) to the contingent of those who have secured jobs through social media. I wrote about some others here.

In his blog, Andrew C., he details how it happened:

A few weeks ago, I was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and saw a post on people who were “on the move” in the social media industry. I thought, well what is wrong with a little bit of self-promotion? So I left a comment, which you are free to go check out for yourself, basically saying “Hey, I haven’t been on the move…but I would like to be!” And as a result of this, Lisa Young from Outrider reached out to me with some information about the company and the industry as a whole..then I spent a day and a half pouring through Google and every other internet tool I could think of to absorb as much information as I could about the company. Well over the past few weeks, about 97.4 emails, and dozens of hours spent researching different aspects of the company and industry I decided that I really wanted to come on board with the firm and so…here I go!

Folktales as Root of Personal Storytelling

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folktales.jpgLimor of Limor’s Storytelling Agora asserts that personal stories should start with folktales: “Starting with folktales is important just like starting with classical music or classical dance – it is both the basics and the top,” she writes.

Limor offers a couple of interesting exercises for “cystallizing” personal stories as folktales and folktales into personal stories.

I’m not that much into folktales, but Limor is convincing as she describes participants’ typical reaction to these exercises:

People noticed the ‘ancient’ story was more powerful. When it goes through the process of crystallization and detachment from a personal perspective, there is more space for others to enter with their own thoughts.

Another thing people noticed was the deficit in details that are ‘personal’ to the specific event in favor of deep symbols. The ‘ancient’ story had descriptions in it and they were important for creating visual images but the symbols stayed the same through the entire process.

I think another point that was evident was our natural feel for deep structures in stories. My way to elicit this natural feel during the above process is to create time limits. You can see them mentioned beside each step.

Above all they could see how folktales we usualy glance through in the hunt for a ‘great’ story are great stories. There is a strong tendancy to use personal stories as if they are more relevant, more engaging for the audience. After you practice the above excercise and it’s next step described underneath several times, any story becomes personal and you can use folktales easily as if you were telling something that happened to you yesterday.

A couple of other things I like about Limor’s blog are the Proverb-generated Story exercise and her definition of storytelling.

Both can be found in the extend entry to this post.

Proverb-generated story:

Choose a proverb. Say – ’dead men tell no tales’ – and ask your group to generate stories with the proverb embedded in them. The only rules are:

It has to be a full story – beginning, developed middle section, end.

The proverb cannot be the first sentence.

Limor’s definition: So what is storytelling?

Many people will give you many answers but for me the answer is one: storytelling is an artform that exists in the world since the times people started gathering to share more than food and shelter. It is a dynamic oral act of communication where ideas are shared within a group through a messanger who has the ability to combine text, voice and gesture expression in order to recreate a story in the imagination of his/her listeners which is the only place where the story actually exists. Storytelling resonates with the basic human need to create order and balance in the world and it is an act of partnership between story (a being), storyteller and listener. Storytelling feeds on this partnership and does not really happen if all three components are not present in one place, since each act of telling is dependant on the ongoing influence of listener on teller on story and so on again and again from the first beat to the last beat of a story. Story in the case of storytelling is not only text but the combined power of all the components of a storytelling event as it has happened before and will happen in the future. Storytellers are people who can create this event to it’s fullest, no less.