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I pointed to this paper, How stories affect human action in organisations, last week, as it came by way of a regular mailing from the Plexus Institute. I’ve had a chance to read it and it posits a number of interesting points.
My reading of the paper follows the development of these key ideas:
- Organizations are not “things” but rather relational processes.
- Human beings use story to represent and understand the patterns of experience.
- Stories only represent partial versions of reality and so narrative interpretation is subject to power dynamics.
- Powerful storyteller can make people “captives” in the story; this is the process of mythmaking.
- “Organisations, in fact the ‘organising via relating, exist in order to ‘do something’. Hence somehow, the individuals in the organisation need to ‘act’…if our identity is clear and we are actively interconnected in interdependent processes that when information comes available, action can emerge. The information sharing happens in interactive processes between individuals (either inside or outside the ‘organisation’).”
- “In the language of Gover (1996) ‘our identities are being constitutes and reconstituted with their physical, cultural and historical contexts’. The roots of narratives and identity, he claims, ‘merge, inextricably embedded and nurtured in the soil of human action’.”
- Narratives that resonate with an individual’s experience create meaningful and sustained emergent action.
- If people in organisations don’t pay attention to the Individual Intention, the likelihood of the vortices of the narratives in those organisation resonating with the vortex of the Individual Intention is purely one of chance. It is due to individuals themselves to actively spend the time to understand other people�’s Individual Intention.
- By consciously working on understanding Individual Intention and consciously work on fuzzifying the narrative the complex responsive process of interaction between the people will move to the attractor at the critical point. This can only happen in self-organised process of interactions where meaning can start to flow.
All of this is interesting stuff, especially the deep connection between narrative and action. Organizations as relational processes, as arenas for the practice of storytelling and mythmaking (with it’s attendant careful attention to compassion) and all of this as a propellant to emergent action. It’s a lucid thread.
For my money the last point is the most interesting and an example of it cropped up for me in an Open Space meeting I facilitated last weekend.
I was working as part of a team developing a transportation demand management plan for a city in British Columbia, basically coming up with a strategy to get people out of their cars. As part of the process we convened a 1.5 day Open Space meeting with the intention that the participants would begin to work on citizen-based initiatives to get the message out.
These people didn’t know each other, and so Day One was taken up with a lot of conversation about the “typical” issues. The day was essentially about getting to know each other, testing out ideas and theories, exploring the stories and myths about the issue and basically sussing out the power relationships, the allies and the opponents. There was very little new content, but the day was a rich field of developing and dissolving structure, process and relationships, coalescing around stories. Because we were in Open Space and the agenda was driven by deeppersonall passion and responsibility, the process of group-forming was accelerated. By the end of the day there was one story that emerged to invite action. Someone mentioned that in the veryneighborhoodd in which we were meeting, the world’s first curbside blue box program had been initiated. Whether or not this was an observable fact, it became the story upon which we hung the potential for citizen action in Day Two.
Day Two was a two-hour action planning session, and I opened with that story and my interpretation of the fact that we simply don’t know when and how smallinitiativess will blossom. And so the invitation for action planning was to start something small that could change everything.
Within two hours there were three major initiatives sketched out. One involved closing a street down for a one-day festival promoting biking, walking and bussing. One was a project to havecoporationss sponsor evening busses into town from the suburbs on weekend nights to encourage teenagers to stay out of their cars. The third idea was the formation of a website and the coordination of letter writing and lobbying campaigns to align actions on specific issues. All of these ideas had champions, follow-up meeting dates and committees or teams of people committed to working.
I found the way this Open Space event evolved to be right in line with a few of the paragraphs from Smits’ paper:
From time to time (the) tribe (gathered) in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. (�…) The meeting went on until finally it seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet, after that, everybody seemed to know what to do (�…). Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.
— David Bohm, On Dialogue (quoted in Jaworski, 1998: 109)
In this quote Bohm describes how dialogue as a way of people interacting manages to let meaning emerge because of people understanding each other’s Individual Intentions. Effective action could emerge. Note that the course of action was not decided by someone outside the process or decided via a compromise! It was emergent because the process allowed the Group Intention to move to the Edge of Incoherence.
This is exactly what happened, with people saying in the closing circle that they were very surprised at how quickly the action plans came together. This echoes my experience of using an Open Space action planning process we call “non-convergence,” so-called because it eschews voting, preserves the diversity and complexity of the Day One converstions and keeps the space open for subtle pattern and meaning-making by those motivated enough to initiate action.
Smits’ paper gives me a nice theoretical frame to understand that process.
