Storytelling – The Key To Real Change

All of us involved in some form of major change in our work place will be faced with choices of some sort: this could be about job, home, role, team or challenges to the way we work – or a mixture of all of these. We will make our choices, in all likelihood, depending on how we view our place and our identity in a new and changed organisation. What will be asked of us? Will we be able to face the various demands and the uncomfortable questions? How rational will we be in making these choices? What criteria will we base our decisions upon?

The external trigger for change may be any number or reasons. Whatever the reason there should be a clear vision for the future from senior leadership. At this organisational level it will be a road map: general, theoretical and aspirational.

But the ultimate question on our lips is always reduced to what is personally significant for me: ‘where do I fit in this new world’? At this personal level change is more a psychological process. It is about letting go of one thing and embracing something else. This is where storytelling, as an ancient tradition, has a critical role to play in helping us make sense of where we might fit and what challenges we will need to face.

The historian and moral theorist Alasdair MacIntyre states: “I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”[1] MacIntyre sees man as a storytelling being, living his or her life as a narrative quest.

This theme is picked up by economist and philosopher Michael Sandel in his recent book: ‘Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?’ He argues that to live life is to enact a narrative quest that aspires to unity and coherence. “When confronted with competing paths, I try to figure out which path will best make sense of my life as a whole, and of the things I care about. It involves choice, but the choice issues from interpretation.”[2]. Sandel shows that this narrative is bound up with membership and belonging to the communities of our past, with our achievements and our failures, the interpretation we place on this, and with those people who help us make sense of this narrative.

In deciding what support to offer staff in a period of rapid change we need to acknowledge this narrative conception of the person, which offers a clear contrast with the voluntarist and economic conception of a person as a freely choosing being, unencumbered by their past and circumstances. Organisational charts and implementation plans are one thing: but actively helping staff to see themselves, their skills and future identity within their personal story about the process and emotion of change will better help to embed the change that the leadership is seeking

I have often used structured storytelling in direct work with homeless people both as a way of shaping services but more importantly as a powerful way of helping them understand, shape and sustain their own individual lives. I am repeatedly struck by how they always see this technique as a new opportunity to have their life story better understood by their audience as a way of shaping their futures. It adds richness and content to the formal support planning process, it is not an alternative. David Nixon, a priest and community activist, illustrates how: “The stories which homeless people tell are particular evidence of a way of giving order and meaning to the confusion of human life, where the search for identity and meaning is often sharper, perhaps unique.”[3]

It is at the point of displacement in our lives i.e. when we think we are about to become ‘homeless’ in some way from the places we are familiar with, that stories better capture than business plans the ebb-and-flow of life, illustrating our interdependencies with others, and enabling us to better personalise our strategies of response. It is structured form of gossip.

If we acknowledge this reality and can put some resource into helping staff understand their stories in the context of the change, we may help to make this process of change less painful, and allow them to shape the future in a more purposeful way while still attending to all the necessary ‘structural’ elements required by the change process. To impact on the whole system we need to impact on individuals.

As the scientist Margaret Wheatley observes: “Each being is noticeable as a separate entity, yet it is simultaneously part of a whole system. While we humans observe and count separate selves, and pay a great deal of attention to the differences that seem to divide us, in fact we survive only as we learn how to participate in a web of relationships.”[4] 

Professional coaching is a good way of allowing us to make sense of any change story we are part of, giving us structured time and space to explore those issues identified by Sandel: our membership and belonging to the communities of our past, our achievements and our failures, the interpretation we place on this, and with those people who help us make sense of this narrative. We need to allow ourselves that space to understand and help us survive, as Wheatley observes, in a changing and potentially new web of relationships.

 

Nick Day, Exeter, 7 November 2016

[1] – MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) “After Virtue”. University of Notre Dame Press, p201

[2] – Sandel, Michael J (2009) “Justice: What’s the Right thing to do?” Penguin p222

[3] – Nixon, David (2013), “Stories from the Street: A Theology of Homelessness”. Ashgate

[4] – Wheatley (1999), “Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World”. Berrett-Koehler