The human being alone among creatures on earth is a storytelling animal: sees the present rising out of a past, heading into a future; perceives reality in narrative form.” (Novak, 1975)
What impact can storytelling have on organisational development and growth? As I have tried to demonstrate throughout this series of articles, story is perhaps the single most important sense-making currency within organisations. It can shape identity, facilitate the transfer of knowledge, promote employee engagement, transmit values, spark action and bring both coherence and power to the employer branding process.
But storytelling has its dangers, too – and we ignore them at our peril.
In Yiannis Gabriel’s memorable phrase, storytelling can also become “a discursive strategy of dissimulation” that serves the interests of crooks and hoaxers as easily as it serves the interests of leaders and visionaries. The danger here is that story becomes little more than propaganda. Just think of Enron. Why was it voted one of the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ in its heyday? Because, in the words of Jeffrey Madrick: “Enron simply told the best story of the decade – in a decade of tall tales.”
So how do we avoid the dark side of storytelling? That’s a question that brings us back to the crucial importance of ‘authenticity’ – the need to root story in the lived reality of organisational life rather than the wild imaginings of corporate leaders, agency copywriters and market analysts.
And there’s perhaps no better way of doing this than by using the protocols and principles of Appreciative Inquiry to elicit, formulate and articulate the stories that really matter within organisations.
The aim of Appreciative Inquiry is to build organisations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. Significantly, its 4-D model (Discover, Dream, Design and Destiny) is structured around the elicitation of real stories about when the organisation and its people have been most capable, inspired, responsive, pioneering and empowered. The insights yielded by these stories provide clear and concrete ways to bridge the‘best of what is’ with an agreed and collective understanding of ‘what might be’.
In short, storytelling takes us through and beyond conventional categories of analysis – policies, procedures and practices – to reveal opportunities for transformation and growth, a structured vision of the best possible state we can strive to achieve.
Indeed, these stories arguably unearth and embody the most important organisational data of all: the constituents of what makes us and our workplaces effective, generative, engaging and successful (the very same constituents, I suggest, of any relevant and emotionally resonant Employer Brand).
But the real power of Appreciative Inquiry comes from something other than its democratic, collective and positive impulse. To fully understand the secret of its power – why it works and how it drives sense-making within complex organisations – we need to understand that Appreciative Inquiry, and the storytelling process that underpins it, draws on what might be called the Anamorphic Principle.
An anamorphosis is a distorted and apparently deformed image that only appears in its true form when viewed from a certain point or when reflected in a cylindrical mirror, as in the following work by artist Awtar Singh Virdi:
Placing a curved mirror in the centre of an anamorphic visual projection draws apparently fragmented, distorted or deformed elements back (ana-) into a clearly seen shape (morphe) – literally, that which is formed again. As a result, an entity that appears mysterious and confusing when viewed directly becomes clear and coherent when reflected in a mirror or – in some other other versions of anamorphic representation – when viewed from a particular location or perspective.
This is, I think, a perfect analogy for the place of storytelling in Appreciative Inquiry. Story allows us to cut through complexity and confusion to anamorphically perceive and interpret those elements that “give life” to the organisation. We overcome the inherent blindnesses of conventional linear analysis to reveal those elements that defy conventional reductive categorisation – purpose, connection, empowerment, values, feelings, perceptions and implied world views.
Appreciative storytelling, in this sense, becomes a mediating device, operating like a curved mirror that links and re-forms heterogeneous data and experience into something approaching unity and coherence. It transforms the flat plane of conventional Employer Branding practice into a 3-dimensional world that makes the complex visible, understandable and emotionally resonant. It also reveals aspects of organisational reality we might otherwise have ignored or taken for granted.
More importantly from the point of view of Appreciative Inquiry and the need for authenticity, it reveals what is already there. Indeed, the telling of the story becomes itself part of the story being told, an embodiment of – and a way of giving voice to – the values and strengths that matter most to employees.
The result is a process of discovery through perspective: elements that are otherwise concealed or blurred from a ‘normal’ viewpoint are – when viewed from the perspective of story – revealed in a coherent, identifiable and meaningful form. Narrative order and the meaning it produces become emergent properties and self-organising but flexible frames of reference.
In the co-creative, socially constructed and negotiated realm of Appreciative Inquiry, then, story offers an authentic and agreed-upon nexus of meaning. Through Appreciative storytelling, we establish a kind of narrative contract that validates the input and experience of all participants and acknowledges the truth of their collective storymaking. We move beyond what Czarniawska calls ‘petrified narrative’ towards a more collective, inclusive and living process of story.
Yiannis Gabriel is surely right when he says that co-constructed stories become “symbolic landmarks in the cultural life of organizations.” But this misses something of the evolving and responsive nature of such stories, particularly when they emerge from the process of Appreciative Inquiry. Here, they work anamorphically to embody and shape meaning and then reflect it outwards as a living schema that guides behaviour, galvanises collective endeavour and promotes what David Cooperrider defines as the essence of appreciative leadership – “the capacity to see the best in the world around us, in our colleagues, and in the groups we are trying to lead.”
And in that, there’s a kind of magic.