I’ve been coming across more and more management-consulting firms that use story as a consulting tool.
One firm whose Web site presents its story-driven message in dramatic, flash-animation fashion is Envisioning and Storytelling, a Vancouver British Columbia company that uses story work with resort developers and other clients to create branding.
Given that I started this blog to synthesize and examine certain content areas in my PhD program, I’m interested in any commentary on the intersection between academia and blogging.
One such recent piece appears in Tax Prof Blog, a member of the Law Professor Blogs Network, which reports on a panel titled “Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction” at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, with the program describing the session this way:
One of the most salient developments in the Internet revolution is blogging. Blogging has become a widespread cultural phenomenon and has had important implications for politics, the media and education. This panel considers academic blogging and asks the question whether blogging is a new form of scholarly activity or just a diversion from the pursuit of serious intellectual inquiry.
Lots of fascinating lists and categories in the report. A list of law-blog categories developed by panelist Lawrence B. Slocum could be adapted to just about any academic discipline:
1. Blogs by academics with a focus in the blogger’s academic
discipline.
2. Blogs by academics with a focus outside the blogger’s
academic discipline.
3. Blogs by non-academics with a focus in an academic
discipline.
Slocum went on to list 7 ways in which blogs are important for [legal] scholarship, adapted here for scholarship in general:
1. Internet-time (v. snail mail-time)
2. Open-source revolution
3. Google searches
4. Disintermediation (the declining influence of scholarly intermediaries)
5. Lifting the cone of silence (the waning of the acoustic isolation of the academy)
6. Globalization of the dissemination of scholarship
7. eBayization of scholarship (changing the marketplace of scholarly ideas)
Apparently much discussion in this panel centered on how blogging is harmful for untenured faculty, presumably both because it distracts time from “legitimate” scholarship and because junior, untenured faculty can be harmed in the promotion and job search by saying controversial or unscholarly things in their blogs.
The first exhortation has some legitmacy. As I type this entry, I am aware that I should be working on my dissertation. But I also like the assertion of the panel’s Victor Fleischer that blogs can “serve a very worthwhile pre-scholarship function.”
Storytelling is the centerpiece of my dissertation, for example, and this blog enables me to collect “pre-scholarship” resources and examine the ways that storytelling intersects with other disciplines, especially organizational entry.
As for the danger of blogging for untenured and junior faculty, I guess I feel about that threat the same way I feel about revealing my political and social beliefs on my CV: I wouldn’t want to work for an institution that would question the idea of hiring me based on my expression of beliefs. I suppose if I were up for a job or tenure at a school at which I dearly wanted to teach, I would think twice about antagonizing those pulling the strings. I’ve observed the tenure game nearly firsthand and seen dearly held principles set aside when it was clear tenure would not be granted if those principles were in place.
But I digress. Other positive aspects of blogging cited by the panel include the idea that blogs serve as a “virtual faculty lounge;” they connect one to a community of scholars; they stimulate thinking; they provide the ability for immediate feedback; they are a venue on which to promote one’s scholarship, as well as a way to penetrate mainstream journalism.
The panel warned that blogging is not a substitute for long-form scholarship and that it can be a time drain.
Best plug the drain and get back to work…
David Boje of the University of New Mexico is one of the preeminent scholars studying organizations through their storytelling.
He has produced a nice annotated bibliography on storytelling and consulting.
I admit that I find Boje’s scholarship a bit densely packed and intellectually challenging.
He also issues a rather scathing critique of such well-known approaches to organizational storytelling as that espoused by Steve Denning, describing Denning’s book, The Springboard, this way: “A fairly silly approach to story, as if a leader could just craft one and change the whole organization with it.”
I can see a need to bring together the wisdom of scholars like Boje and Czarniawska with that of applied paractitioners like Denning and Annette Simmons.
Last April, at the conference of Career Masters Institute in Denver, I heard a great entrepreneurial presentation by Laurie Taylor of Origin Institute. Laurie mentioned that her partner, James Fischer, was about to publish in the unusual but emerging genre of the “business novel.”
Any work that uses story to convey business/organizational messages interests me, and I got an advance copy of the book a few months ago — also with the idea that I might use it as a text with my entrepreneurial students.
As a PhD student, I don’t have much time for reading for pleasure, but I’ve just read the prologue and first chapter.
The book, Navigating the Growth Curve: 9 Fundamentals that Build a Profit-Driven, People-Centered, Growth-Smart Company, already appears to have all the intrigue of novel.
Protagonist Peter Logan is thrust into leadership of his brother’s company when his brother dies of a heart attack. But the Prologue sets up intrigue suggesting that foul play could have been behind the brother’s death.
Beginning with the sixth chapter summaries of key points appear in each chapter. The idea, as with much organizational storytelling, is to teach through story
The book is beautifully designed and illustrated. Provocative pull-out quotes tend to suck the reader into the pages to find out what happens next.
Though the book is a paperback, it’s kind of an awkward shape and size — square and rather heavy. Not exactly bathtub reading.
I’ll keep you posted as I read more. Learn more here.
The story is everything.
– Print ad for the Law & Order TV franchise
This just in… Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has announced that — in addition to straying from its tradition 3-ring format (and in fact having NO rings) — it will “have a story line instead of being simply a cavalcade of acts,” writes Glen Collins in the New York Times.
Audiences, says Ringling producer Kenneth Feld, “wanted to connect a story in an emotional way,” Collins reports.
In somewhat of an intersection between story and the job search, Amy Kimme Hea writes in Kairos (Fall 2004) of “A Making: The Job Search & Our Work as Computer Compositionists.” Kimme Hea is a faculty member in Rhetoric, Composition, and Teaching of English program at the University of Arizona. Her reference to herself and her field as one of “computer compositionists” was not one I was familiar with. She found herself frequently asked about the job market and job search for other faculty aspirants in her field.
Kimme Hea writes:
Finding such productive and insightful ways to discuss that making, however, is profoundly difficult — linearity, imposition of the ends justifying the means, and other factors can all conspire to form the most purposeful, logical story about our work and our lives. [Donna] Haraway (1992) urges us to recall that “[l]ives are built; so we had best become good craftspeople with the other worldly actants in the story.”
The “making” refers to Haraway’s assertion that nature “is made through discourses and practices,” and Kimme Hea’s discovery that her job-market success was “about the making and unmaking of my life as an academic interested in composition, technology and critical theory.”
She has thus created a hypertext work that uses her own story as a backdrop to inform and guide others in the faculty job search.
Kimme Hea goes on to describe the sections to which the main page of this work links (I found the grad students section most informative, and while targeted at her own field, relevant to other teaching disciplines).
Kimme Hea writes:
… in the self-reflective section, our work, I juxtapose my own sense of the difference between the marketing for and holding of a computer composition position, addressing concerns about educating one’s colleagues about the work of a computer compositionist and thinking about tenure and promotion issues. In the grad students and faculty mentors sections, I pose framing questions for graduate students interested in computers and composition and offer suggestions to faculty mentors guiding these graduates. While not comprehensive, these sections are intended to be a initial points for graduate student and faculty consideration of computer composition work. The resources section provides links to prompt further exploration of the “making” of a career in computers and composition. These sections develop directly from my own first-year experiences as a new faculty member in the on-going process of making my academic life in computers and composition, one where I hope to contribute to a growing field that is always being made.
In his blog, A Jolly, Socratic Science, Avi Solomon suggests storyboarding your life, writing:
A storyboard is a sequence of images and words drawn together on a page to form a plausible narrative. … A storyboard is an apt metaphor for how we make sense of our own life history. Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.
Solomon has storyboarded both past and future events in his life, as shown in his blog.
I wanted to report about the Web site connected to a new book, 99 Ways to Tell a Story, by Matt Madden, but the site has MADDEN-ingly disappeared. Perhaps it gave away too much and would have hurt book sales?
Here’s the (very cool) concept, as described in promo material for the book:
99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of engrossing one-page comics that tell the same story 99 different ways. Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s 1947 Exercises in Style, a mainstay of creative writing courses, Madden’s project demonstrates the expansive range of possibilities available to all storytellers. Readers are taken on an enlightening tour-sometimes amusing, always surprising -through the world of the story. Writers and artists in every media will find Madden’s collection especially useful, even revelatory. Here is a chance to see the full scope of opportunities available to the storyteller, each applied to a single scenario: varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, formal reimaginings, and radical shuffling of the basic components of the story. Madden’s amazing series of approaches will inspire storytellers to think through and around obstacles that might otherwise prevent them from getting good ideas onto the page. 99 Ways to Tell a Story provides a model that will spark
productive conversations among all types of creative people: novelists, screenwriters, graphic designers, and cartoonists.
The Ryan Group has proclaimed The New Narrative Age, stating that:
This new cultural phenomenon is virtually changing the organization’s fundamental approach to training, learning, knowledge transfer, strategy, change, performance, and competitiveness. Conceptually, the “narrative age” recognizes the implicit value of knowledge (many times untapped knowledge) embedded within the body-organization. The roadblock has been to access this knowledge, aggregate it into a cohesive order, and provide access to it as dynamic learning objects. In essence – we know it’s there – we can’t readily get at it – and if we do, we are unable to translate the knowledge into meaningful sources of learning. What has been missing was an integrated process and associated toolsets to facilitate such an initiative. Our new and innovative toolsets and process models provide you the resources and capabilities to tap and unleash the vast reservoir of knowledge, skills, and abilities embedded in your organization. The toolsets and process models focus on the four key components of building a narrative-based learning organization; how to identify (Signals), collect (Storyteller), map (Self-Organizing Map), and deliver (Lectora) learning that is central in the development of a sustainable business advantage.
Visitors can request a copy of a white paper on the subject.