Creating a good organizational story for preserving institutional memory

I have not blogged for a long time now about organizational or institutional storytelling. This has been due to the fact that while organizational storytelling is still one of my interests, it has moved to the periphery of my research at the moment. Currently, I have been thinking more about libraries, library education, library consultants and social media. However, on September 5, 2013, I got the opportunity to apply my interest in organizational storytelling at a meeting of a student club, of which I was one of the founding members, I was assigned the task to tell a newcomer about the student club. However, it was on the next day, after waking up in the quiet of the morning that I reflected on what I did and extracted these key principles.

Principles for creating an organizational story

1. Occasion for storytelling - Linde (2009) argues that for an institution to engage in organizational storytelling, it needs to create an occasion for storytelling. It is at an occasion for storytelling that we engage in what Boje (2008) dubs reflexivity (which in my words simply means reflecting on an organization's past or history). In my circumstance, the trigger for the occasion for organizational storytelling was the occasion of answering a newcomer's question about the organization, the student group. As we undertook the task of socializing the new member, we conveyed to the member the organization's history, something that we never had to do before seriously, on seeing that the club was only 2 years old.

2. Structure the narrative - From a summer course on storytelling I learned how to better create a story structure. One of the most popular means of doing so is by using a timeline. So for my student group, I created a timeline dating back to when we first began to the present. This involved dating the timeline based on the tenure of the leaders of the student club.

3. Identify the main characters or actors- According to Gabriel (2000), all good stories have characters that are portrayed in a particular light. As such, in creating a well-written or oral organizational story, one must always identify main characters. Many such characters end up being the leaders of organizations (Gabriel, 2000). Hence for my case, I identified the leaders of the student group as the main characters. As a group we began to characterise these leaders, developing descriptions of each leader to describe their personalities and idiosyncrasies that they brought to the group or organization, and how they impacted the group or organizational culture of the student club.

4. Identify key events - With the timeline and the leaders plugged into the timeline, the next aspect is to identify key events happening to the student club during the reign or tenure of each of our leaders. 

5. Provide a moral for the story -  This is where I extracted a piece of "wisdom" or advice about the organization based on its past. This "wisdom" is usually a summary in a sentence or few that gives meaning to the organization's past or puts the past in some perspective. Organizational storytelling experts like Gabriel (2000) and Linde (2009) discuss the fact that stories rarely just communicate dry facts, but also opinion or interpretation. From my interpretation and experience, the moral of these stories tend to provide for new members a perspective or lens for understanding the past events and viewing the events meaningfully as well as for use for future reference in interpreting the present and future reality.

This concludes my reflections of what I did as I facilitated the student club in creating and developing its organizational story. I am hoping though, that a year from now, I can use what I have learned to create a course on this topic. (See a previous blog posting about my ideas related to such a course in Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?).

References:

Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. Los Angeles: Sage. 

Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in organizations :Facts, fictions, and fantasies. Oxford ;; New York: Oxford University Press. 

Linde, C. (2009). Working the past :Narrative and institutional memory. Oxford ;; New York: Oxford University Press. 

The potential role of fictional stories in strategic planning

I am back (for a little while) to share some of the progression of my thoughts that have been informed by my comprehensive reading of scholarship in knowledge sharing and storytelling. In this particular post, I would like to focus on some preliminary thoughts on the issue of the role of fictional storytelling in planning.

I have read a few authors that has advocated the use of fictional storytelling in planning. In previous blog posts I mentioned how the education field (see blog post on Drake) and library and information field (see blog post on Nyström and Sjögren (2012)) have seen a place for fictional storytelling in planning for the future. I have also read Bennet and Bennet (2007), who discuss an instance where storytelling has been used in technology planning in institutions such as the United States Military. In this post, I would like to extend on these ideas with a few of my own.

First, I would like to assert a number of propositions, that I believe future researchers can test. Throughout this post, I use the term stories to mean the account of an event or experience:

Proposition 1: In the absence of factual data and statistics, one can use stories of the past as a precedent to plan for future events.

This is not a new idea. Organisational storytelling already points out that experts based their judgements on their prior experiences (Orr, 1996; Denning, 2005). I already observe that this activity is taking place in fields such as law, where lawyers and judges use prior cases to make judgements about what should be done in a present case. Doctors and other health professionals also use this method of referring to historical cases to make judgements about the treatment of patients in the present.  

Proposition 2: Even in the absence of stories in the past, one can use imaginative storytelling to predict the future.

This second proposition is already being used in some fields under names such as scenario planning or thought experiments. Scenario planning is used in the military; thought experiment in philosophy and game theory in economics. Scenario planning and game theory practices use imaginative or fictional storytelling to help reduce uncertainty and consider how an event may unfold if one take certain actions. Thought experiments on the other hand, utilise one's imagination to attempt to experience a phenomenon or phenomena (Brown and Fehige, 2011). It is on this basis that I argue that fictional storytelling can be deployed as a tool to help one contemplate future events, based on projection of the past into the future or speculation about how the present will change.

Conclusion
I conclude this post by suggesting that organisations and institutions can plan for the future through applying fictional storytelling. This is already done in a number of fields. I further argue that we can predict and perhaps even create the future by imagining worst case and best case scenarios. We can ask questions such as:

• What are the worst things that can happen if we take a particular action?
• What bad can happen if we do not address a particular situation?
• If we pursue a particular strategy, what good could come out of it?
• If we address a particular situation, what good could result from it?

As such, we can frame our planning in terms of tragic or epic stories. We can use tragic studies to tell us the dangers that we need to protect ourselves or institutions against. However we can also use epic storytelling to motivate ourselves or organisations to aim for new possibilities, goals and achievement. These are some of my preliminary thoughts on the matter, as informed by some of my readings, some of which I have not explicitly mentioned here. Hopefully, after my comprehensive examinations, I will have more time to develop on these ideas and even conduct some research and experiments to test the validity of my propositions.


References:

Bennet, A., & Bennet, D. (2007). From stories to strategy: Putting organizational learning to work. VINE: The Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 37(4), 404-409. doi:10.1108/03055720710838489


Brown, J. R. & Fehige, Y. (2011). Thought experiments. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/thought-experiment/.

Denning, S. (2005). The leader's guide to storytelling :Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint.

Drake, S. M., Bebbington, J., Laksman, S., Mackie, P., Maynes, N., & Wayne, L. (1992).


Developing an integrated curriculum using the Story Model. Toronto, ON: OISE Press.

Drake, Susan M. (2010) "Enhancing Canadian Teacher Education Using a Story Framework,"The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1(2), Retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cjsotl_rcacea/vol1/iss2/2

Nyström, V., & Sjögren, L. (2012). An evaluation of the benefits and value of libraries. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing.

Orr, J. E. (1996). Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press.

Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?

I found an interesting read on movements towards corporate online storytelling this week in my Twitter feed. In Elliot's (2012) article for The New York Times, I discovered that Coca Cola is about to rebrand their online presence as an online magazine. In doing so, Coca Cola's new Web site is to reflect its marketers recasting 'communications with consumers as storytelling rather than advertising.' I quote:

'Just as attention is being paid to developing content ...for brand storytelling, an appetite also exists for corporate storytelling.'

Storytelling on Coke's Web site will be 'subjective, not objective...favorable to the brands, products and interests of the Coca-Cola Company.'

'Although the content comes “with a point of view,” Mr. Brown acknowledged, “we want to be a credible source.”'

Coca Cola is also not afraid to make mistakes with their online storytelling and magazine type site. The informant Ashley Brown, director for digital communications and social media at the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, states:

“I’m sure we’re going to make mistakes,” he said, “and readers are going to tell us.”

Implication for libraries

I think I am ahead of my time in LIS: advocating online storytelling for library websites when the field's not quite ready for it. Currently there have been moves within library schools to dispense with storytelling courses from LIS curriculum and library education (Sturm, 2010). Further, within LIS, librarians have predominantly seen storytelling as a service to children (Sturm, 2010). This is despite the fact that there is a growing interest in storytelling and the professionalization of storytelling for adults (Sturm, 2010). In fact, there is also growing interest in corporations for corporate storytelling (Greene & Del Negro, 2010). Hence, while business schools are becoming more interested in offering storytelling courses (Marek, 2011), library schools are thinking about getting rid of them altogether.



In my view, there needs to be a course within library schools that will deals with institutional digital storytelling. This is because, in the age of social media and Library 2.0, libraries need to move online and tell their stories. Libraries need to find ways of connecting with their users and potential users in the online world. We need content on our websites and a social media presence that is constantly updated and engaging, reminding our users that we are a channel to credible information sources. Our Websites must now be more like blogs or online magazines, with a constant flow of information. We should not only tell users what we have, but also post commentaries and view points, to represent the information that we have within our collections. In short, we need to take a page from Coca Cola's book on corporate storytelling. If Coca Cola is thinking about becoming a publisher, why not libraries?

Libraries are already telling stories within their walls. We have countless exhibits and exhibitions within our walls and some libraries have taken these and posted them on their websites. However, our practices are all being done without examining the theories of good storytelling, digital storytelling and even the theories of institutional or corporate storytelling. My questions are:

• Are library professionals equipped to tell good stories online and offline? 
• Are library professionals able to recognise what stories are worthy of being told?

Storytelling can be fictional, non-fictional or a mixture of realism with fiction as in the case with life writing or organisational storytelling. Libraries can use parables to tell stories that convey a truth about how libraries work. Libraries can tell stories to workers within the libraries or even to the users and other outsiders of the library.  In fact, I have written 3 blogs posts about how libraries can use storytelling to their advantage (See blog post 1, blog post 2 and blog post 3). However, none of these posts even begin to speak to how libraries can use online storytelling to attract library users and engage them in using the library's online or physical services. This is a gap that I am also studying at current.


At least one LIS scholar, Marek (2011) has begun to develop a body of knowledge on organisational storytelling for libraries, though aimed at library managers and administrators (see my blog post on Kate Marek) Hopefully, I will be able to develop a course after completing my comprehensive examinations and research proposal that will also address this issue. For indeed, from the start of my PhD program, my original interest has always been in using the Web and folklore to design a more engaging experience for library users. And so far, I have felt that my extensive readings have equipped me with the theoretical knowledge to do so.



References:

Elliott, Stuart. (2012, November 11). Coke Revamps Web Site to Tell Its Story. The New York Times. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/media/coke-revamps-web-site-to-tell-its-story.html?_r=0

Greene, E., & Del Negro, J. M. (2010). Storytelling: Art and technique (4th ed.). Santa Barbara, California, Denver, Colorado, Oxford, England: Libraries Unlimited.

Marek, K. (2011). Organizational storytelling for librarians: Using stories for effective leadership. Chicago: American Library Association.

Sturm, B. (2010) Storytelling. In  Bates, M. J., & Maack, M. N. Encyclopedia of library and information sciences (3rd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.