How Organizational Change Can Become Grounded in Primordial Temporality?

David Michael Boje

January 6, 2024

I am writing something I present below called Topper, to present to group of Cabrini doctoral students in an hour for Anton Shufutinsky’s class on Saturday.  Grace Ann doing an hour on CIW and SEAM.  This is a collection of three essays written in preparation of a hour I will present in a two-hour program for Cabrini University’s Organizational Development Ph.D. students.  The third part written first, then second part, and this AM the first part.

            I will start with the answer to the question in the title and work backwards unpacking a primordial notion of time that can revolutionize change management. It’s not clock-time, and not getting into the ‘now-time.’  It is a world-time covered over by clock-time and the sequence of nows so common to narrative and most story practices.

In the last section (#437, those numbers in the margin) of Being and Time, Heidegger, gives his answer to the title’s question:  To be “grounded in temporality” in a “primordial way” of how temporality temporalizes the constitution of Being, you must prepare your existent Being-in-the-world (437). 

The stakes of the answer to the title’s question, are quite high.  Organization change that is primordial can help with the problem of the ways world Anthropocene is being made uninhabitable by human, animal, plant, and most cellular life by the onslaught of organizations using clock-time and the linear time of the sequence of now, that covers over primordial time by levelling it off. Let us start the answer to the question.

For the answer to the question of the title, students of Anton Shufutinsky get some hints. Please begin your study with Shufutinsky, Svane, and Boje (2024) introduction of grounded theory and to antenarrative (on line here). Then Shufutinsky and Burrell (2024) for most advanced work on antenarrative.

What is antenarrative? (antenarrative.com) Antenarrative is a word I invented in the 2001 book, Narrative Methods for Organizational & Communication Research to get at process dynamics of organizational storytelling. First, ANTE (is short for antecedent, what comes BEFORE). Second, ANTE means a BET. It in the 2001 book as 'BEFORE-narrative' and a 'BET on the future’ a prospective sensemaking (2008), but just the ordinary rut of retrospective sensemaking (Weick, 1995).

"Antenarrative is defined as ‘the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper narrative can be constituted’" (Boje, 2001: 1).


Antenarrative is defined as the already there processes that are pre-constitutive of 'narrative' and 'living story':  Beneath, Before, Bets, Being, Becoming, Between, and Beyond.

From 2001 book to now, the seven process took shape. Now there are 7 B's I will introduce to you. 
LOOK INSIDE:Read Introduction to my book then you will know the complete answer!.

In what follows, my purpose is to bring about your understanding of what primordial time can do to radicalize organization change towards ‘care.’

To be ‘grounding’ in seven antenarrative processes is to notice ways of not ‘abstracting.’  Hegel used abstractions of formal dialectical logic in reifying his thinking (consciousness) about time and space, and the manifestation of spirit into time. What Hegel failed to do, and what organizational change that is grounded in the primordial can do:

1.     Observe the reifying thinking of time and space by organizations.

2.     Focus attention on “the Being of care” that can be cultivated in world-time (437).

3.     Observe ways organizations keeps falling from authentic-primordial-temporality into the sequence of nows of clock time and datability.

4.      Notice organization’s emptiest of formal-ontological abstractions, Hegel’s negation of a negation, which leaves both time and spirit totally unexamined (435).

5.     Make time to be authentically in-time, unlevelled, un-reified which is to say, the qualitative time, not just the quantitative time of the clock, and its moving pointers.

6.     In the True Storytelling book (Larsen, Bruun, & Boje), the 7 antenarrative processes of changing organizations, are all about moving from abstracting to grounding, and from linear rehistoricizing to futuring that is ahead of itself.

7.     Notice the “abstractness of consuming” time by clock time, and most ordinary time sensemaking, which prevents any authentic intuitive-becoming from becoming manifest (431).

8.     Hegel’s dialectical is all about ‘punctuality’ in a negation of space to a multiplicity of points, Being-out-of-time itself, displaced by yet another abstractness, the dialectical logic of the negation of negations in his version of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (430) {See Hegel’s space & time entry in Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science).

In sum, the locus of time of organization systems is primarily linear clock time, the sequence of nows, now-past, now-not-yet, and so on.

The contribution you can make to organizational change is to change from organization’s ordinary time fixation on retrospective sensemaking (Henri Bergson to Karl Weick) to prospective sensemaking (Boje, 2001, 2008). This is a change to futuring, in moments of vision, glances at time ahead of itself (aka foresight).

The futural that is “ahead-of-itself” is about the death that awaits us all (425-426). World-time is not clock-time, nor the leveled-off standardized linear sequence of nows (not-yet, just-now, etc.).  Temporality of world-time temporalizes itself but remains covered-up by the counting of the sequence of nows, passing away, already forgotten by retrospective sensemaking narrations (Weick, 1995).  You see “world-time can never die” but public time everyone takes up in Being-with-one-another keeps levelling off the nows, that then belong to everyone, and to --- nobody (425).

How are we fleeing in the face of authentic primordial existence of time? We keep covering up world-time. In organizational change, the ecstatically futural (424), keeps being covered over, falling away from any authentic temporality, fleeing in the face of death.  The retrospective sensemaking of nows take over the definition of the future, pushing prospective sensemaking storytelling aside, burying it in clock time, in Plato’s sequence of nows (423).  World-time gets all covered up by organizations in ordinary time, in clock-time temporality, and in the levelling-off of the sequence of nows (424).

How can we encounter world-time in organizations that is constantly covered up by clock-time?  And add to that the datability of calendar-time.  The university has granted us two hours of datable clock-time, passing away, in the flowing of nows. The two hours will become a former occasion of our meeting one another. Counting the seconds of the two hours is the ontology of counting time using the shadow of the sun or the traveling pointer of the clock (422).

How can we help organizations to understand world-time as primordial time in our change management endeavors? World-time belongs to the temporalizing of temporality (420).

Our potentiality-for-Being authentic primordially is in the anticipatory resoluteness of care, holding the-true (307).  That is the hermeneutical pre-story (see Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative book, chapter on emplotment circle). 

To find and reveal primordial temporality of an organization’s Being-in0the-world as ‘care’ is the primary task of the change agent (231). To get organization’s participants into the primordial state-of-Being in-Care is to engage in the disclosability of the concealment of primordial time being accomplished naively or monstrously.

Primordial time is hidden by many ways in organizations. There are technology devices (see Heidegger’s A Question Concerning Technology).

SECTION TWO: Primordial True Storytelling of Change Management and Survival

We can focus on primordial sections 219-234, 306, 334 (margin numbers) in this source.

See http://pdf-objects.com/files/Heidegger-Martin-Being-and-Time-trans.-Macquarrie-Robinson-Blackwell-1962.pdf

To say ‘True Storytelling’ means to uncover something undisclosed about the entity, so we see it as it is in-itself (219).  True storytelling lets the entity be seen in its uncoveredness of Being-true, as Being-uncovering (ontologically) Being-in-the-world.  This is what we can call the primordial foundation of True Storytelling.

The primordial phenomenon of True Storytelling is a change approach that means Being-uncovering (a verb), go going into the first process of antenarrative, I call the ‘beneath.’ Going beneath the opinion, judgement, idea, or concept of ‘true’ by taking the primordial out of its hiddenness and letting what’s true be seen.  This is seeing the ‘how’ of the uncoveredness’ and telling ‘how’ entities comport themselves in both coveredness and uncoveredness.

For example, a couple New Year’s ago, I had blood in my urine. Shocking. My true storytelling as uncoveredness and Being-uncovering is not the mere telling of the dreaded ‘word’ I dare not speak. Rather, to see and to tell what is happening in a primordial sense “by the existential-ontological foundation of uncovering” something that is Being-in-the-world means to go ‘beneath’ the ‘word’ I dare not speak (220). 

I speak the word ‘cancer’ and enter the worldhood grounded in all sorts of uncoveredness and disclosedness of something I cannot see. Blood tests, biopsies disclosed the facticity of hundreds of billions of cancer cells alive in me.  It is the most primordial phenomenon of True Storytelling (221). It is “the existential Constitution of the ‘there’” I dreaded to recognize and is the primordial disclosedness of something scary (221). 

We can learn four facets of Primordial Organizational and Self Change in this example.

1.     DISCLOSEDNESS OF CARE for being alongside entities within-the-world of changes means the uncoveredness of not just facts, opinions, or expert judgments, but  going Beneath (an antenarrative process) to the primordial.  A change agent can enter the realm of the primordial of care.

2.     THROWNESS OF THE BEFORE Dasein means Being-There in an already definitive world (the Before of antenarrative, historicizing) and Being-alongside and ‘Being’ within-the-world of change of what stories are already there, and stories untold. The cancer cells were already there, undiscovered, laying-in-wait, proliferating into hundreds of billions inn colonies, since the 1969-1970 Vietnam War service in the Army.  There was Agent Orange in the soil, the air, the water, and the food. I consumed mass quantities of Agent Orange. That is the a priori hidden beneath, in the Before of my history, and my already there primordial state-of-Being (230).

3.     PROJECTION OF BETS-ON-THE-FUTURE is third antenarrative process. It is all about foresight (232). In organization change we make Bets-on-the-Future towards an entities’ potentiality-for-Being authentic and inauthentic (e.g. denial). This is the true storytelling by prospective sensemaking, and more than that a most primordial true storytelling of existence in-the-midst of change, and what has potential.

4.     FALLING INTO BEING is the fourth antenarrative process. Falling is not just listening to idle talk. Rather, falling is part of primordial, sinking into its hidden, and the fall into untruth. This falling involves an existential analysis, a fall into primordial, into the Being-there of untruth, uncovered and encounterable in the disguise of semblance. It sounds true, it’s like the true, but the true lies in hiddenness. Falling into true storytelling includes the pre0ontological the Being-in-untruth that is part of the pre-condition of organizational change. Uncovering the hidden aspects of Being in-time of untruth, is a kind of robbery from any sort of true storytelling. 

There are three more antenarrative processes. More later.

Let the Parmenides’ “goddess of truth” guide your organizational change efforts (223). Let your true storytelling uncover pathways by your ontological inquiry into both truth and untruth. Most important let care unfold in the primordial within-the0world of change (223).

There is much ‘idle talk’ in organizational change initiatives. Someone else asserts and says what’ true, but in such a way that uncoveredness is preserved, so I stress in first antenarrative process to go Beneath both the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand of opinions, assertions, judgments.  True storytelling is always disclosedness which uncovers ontologically the existential foundation, not just the facticity or Ontical, but the primordial concealment of true and untrue.

The locus of true storytelling does not lie in opinion, judgement, or idle talk. On the contrary, disclosedness of the ontological conditions (226) of my cancer or of what must change, is a primordial encounter with what is in concealment. I cannot see the hundreds of billions of cancer cells in prostate and rapidly escaping into more and more lymph nodes. I cannot see aggressive stage four cancer spreading. The disclosedness is by blood tests for PSAT, by biopsy of each organ, by bone scans, CT scans with iodine and with radioactive substances, and so on. 

THE BECOMING ANTENARRATIVE PROCESS You may have heard about my Little Buddha. A gift from shamanic meditation I received during therapy session. The message of Little Buddha ‘to be friends with all my living cells, including cancer ones.’  I don’t fight cancer. My becoming of care is uncovering a primoradial existence. There are hundreds of billions of cancer cells, and with meds and radiation many cells will leave, but many billions will stay on.

PRIMORDIAL TEMPORALITY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE The existential interpretation of true storytelling of organizational change, as you can now attest, is all about the disclosedness of truth and untruth in the totality of Being-in-the-world which the change agent introduces as Care.

There is opinion, judgement, idle talk, and basic facticity, but also the Disclosability of what is covered and hidden in all that.  Using existential analytic of antenarrative processes, an ontological interoperation of change done with care, is possible.

We have looked at the going Beneath, the Before of already there, the Bets on the Future, and the Being.

The BECOMING ANTENARRATIVE PROCESS Becoming is a primordial temporalizing of temporality that moves from past to present-Being-in-the-world, and from future to present-Being-in-the-world. Becoming in organizational change requires your ontological investigation to work-out an understanding care.

The BETEWEEN ANTENARRATIVE PROCESS Beneath is all about the who’s in-between going Beneath and grounding in relation to Being, and in-between the Before and the Bets in relation to Being. Between is a relational process of primordially of identifying the who is storytelling what, when, where, why, and how.  We are always storytelling to a who. I focus on four who’s.

1.     EGO WHO The ego we are telling stories to. The ego an organization is telling stories to.

2.     FAMILY WHO The family who we are telling stories to. We belong to lots of family groups, work-groups, teams, departments, etc. Each is a who to which we adapt our storytelling. The family groups become the they and enters our identity as the they-self we keep talking to in internal dialogue.

3.     CORPORATE WHO The corporate who everyone is telling stories to, is a focus of organizational change initiatives. The corporate-who becomes a they and enters our identity as the they-self (a topic for another day).

4.     ECO WHO  The eco (ecological) who we are telling stories to, and the stories the ecological in its geo-history, biology, plant life, animal life, and cellular life is telling to us.

The point for organizational change, is to look at, and to analyze, and to restory the conversational storytelling of the Between-the-four-who’s.

By going beneath, before, bets, Being, becoming, and between the who’s, we are already engaged in the 7^th antenarrative process, called the Beyond.

The BEYOND ANTENARRATIVE PROCESS To go into grounding from going Beneath abstraction etc., is all about reflection, and is an uncovering and Disclosability process. Engaging change clients in reflexivity events is part of doing True Storytelling.  In this way going Beyond is a self-reflection process.  In my cancer example, I was holding-my-self-for-guilt (306).  I had been found guilty of having cancer, and my entire worldhood changed. I restoried guilt with the help of Little Buddha into caring for all my cells. Caring is beyond guilt, to acceptance of life primordial. 

The temporality of everydayness of change management. Change management is within a primordial totality, articulated in conversational storytelling interventions (a topic for another time).

Living in the temporality of everydayness of cancer, in that primordial totality of cancer cell’s articulated demands means a change in diet, new meds, radiation, surgery (if required), and a definition of caring for my-self, Being-in-the-world of the survivor.

SECTION THREE:

Topper Storytelling

What is a Topper?  It is a Top, that goes on top of a pickup bed. My bed is 6.5 feet by somewhat less than 6 feet wide.  A Topper lets you go camping if you set it all up just right.

This Topper is part of the theme of next meet up, is the meaning and practices of time in Heidegger, how they differ from Hegel’s theory of sequence of now punctuality.  Rather we try to sort what is primordial time of the temporalizing of temporality.

You can read up on last sections 404 to 437 of Being in Time, online, if you have the time (pun intended). 

Sabina and I are each preparing for the session and hope it will be a fun exploration.

We can focus on this chapter: Temporality and Within-time-ness as the source.

See http://pdf-objects.com/files/Heidegger-Martin-Being-and-Time-trans.-Macquarrie-Robinson-Blackwell-1962.pdf

I am working on a pickup camper Topper, and it es teaching me the relation of time, truth, technology, and thinking.  If I take a Hegel notion of time, as sequence of nows (now-past, now-now, now-not-yet, now-will-have-been, and so on. Then there is a leveling in of time int o bunch of nows, that have punctuality and quite abstract, and not at all primordial in any existential-ontological way.  Of course this has everything to do with my exploration of the 7 B’s of antenarrative. 

If I am Hegelian, the temporalizing of the Topper-camper, runs its course in time, as a series of now-problems to solve.  Where to find a used Topper because new ones are $3,000 to $6,000.  Now, I found one that is quite old and tattered, missing a back window, for $250 on Facebook Marketplace. As luck would have it, it was located just a couple miles away and I did not have to drive to Albuquerque or El Paso.

Now I had to solve so many now-problems, how to clean it, how to get a new rear window without spending more than the Topper cost.  The solutions to problem after problem, become possible, and fall into time. In location and n movements of stuff taking over my shop. Now I am at Home Depot, and next now, I am at Lowe’s, and several tripes to Harbor Freight for more tools, and odds and ends needed for the build that is not-yet-now.  Each morning I draw a set of plans and sketches for the days, and get only a small way, as more problems unanticipated, arise, and arise.

I encounter the relation of time, truth, technology, and my own thinking about Topper. One truth is no way Grace Ann is going to go camping on Topper. Another truth, the costs are skyrocketing to repair and prepare, and make any progress. Another truth, I am at limits and beyond limits of my technical competency but push on anyway. Time is the trught of the Topper, in space that neither precedes time nor follows it. But the spatializing of the space of topper, where to put the bed, the toilet that is not-yet, but is an idea, or was, until yesterday, when I took all day to begin the build of a compost toilet with urine separator and stumble my way through it.  I am excited this morning, waiting for enough daylight to get back to the build. A whole series of problems to solve, what fun.

Topper is making a transition from idea, to purchase of a mess, to sorting the mess, to measuring and remeasuring, cutting, and recutting, using every type of technology at my disposal. With each decision the Topper, is the Hegelian negation of space after space, which can be used in fewer options, choice by choice.  Space and truth are in this relationship to technology and to time, and the evolution of my Enthinkment.

In Hegel, time is punctuality and space is given in thinking, only as space that gets negated in thinking. The negation of the negation of Hegel, is central to Jean Paul Sartre’s dialectic materialism critique.  That is another topic. Here the negation of negation is Hegelian punctuality. It is series of nows, a now not yet, a now, just now no longer, and so on.  When time is treated as the punctuality of nows, something about time, goes missing in action. The Toper now-here, after one week, in punctuality that is Hegel-time is very complicated.

The Topper now-hear, today, grows in actuality of distinct materially. The camper bed is laminate of foam board, with carpet on one side, and some stiffer material such as plastic board or 1/8^th inch laminate sheet cut to fit. A high strength quick dry #M spray glue does the job. Bu then as I talk to Grace Ann, the possibility of two camping, means an expandable bed to 50 to 56 inches width by 80 inches length becomes possible to contemplate.  But, she suggest keeping it low, just above wheel-well bumps.  Then I m thinking the ‘now’ and space is time, in Hegel’s intuited becoming. I am rethinking many particularities. Then the question, if the bed is bigger, for two, then how to get to the toilet (which does not yet exist)? Where will it be, in what space?

In Hegel, time reveals itself int ‘intuited becoming’ (principle 5 of True Storytelling & 5^th of the B’s).  But the Topper is in transition after transition from nasty, dirty, broken Topper a nothing to what was idea (Principle 1, the Beath), to the the Before of already there in Topper’s history, to the Bets on the future I am making, to the Being-in-the-world (Principe 4 of True Storytelling (TIME), onto to Becoming (principle 5), then Principle 6 the scenography of artefacts (I call Between in antenarrative) and racing to principle 7 (reflection). But this is way too Hegelian, a sequence of nows.

I hope you see the problem of moving out of Hegelian Time in to ontological time of the primordial.

Time reveals herself in ‘intuited becoming’ from the nothing of my broken Topper now installed on V10 F250 Ford pickup bed, here and now. “The Being of time is the ‘now’” (#431) according to Hegel. So many nows, no longer, and more nows not yet, not even in intuited-becoming, such a sequence of nows is the abyss.

Hegel’s way of time and punctuality is levelling off all the nows, and nows becomes too privileged, taking on airs, as they already dissolve, diffuse, an dare pulverized (#431). Nows are so monstrous, covering up primordial with that sequence of past-present-future, so linear, and far too abstract for an ontologist.

Each day I watch YouTube to get some ideas on how to solve yesterday’s arising problems. How to make a urine separator from 5-gallon buckets, how to make a separator from a cut off a second bucket, how to make the laminate walls, etc. I tried the cassette toilets and the blue swirling additive. They work, but not in way that Grace Ann would approve.

Topper does actualize historically in-time. And I do experience the levelling off of the nows, as they begin to look alike, and are so abstract. But as I construct the Topper, and concretize the solutions, there is this existential unveiling of temporalizing of temporality (#436). The two temporalities seem to be intertwined.

I seek the ontologically primordial, the World-time within not only the horizon of history, but the horizon of the future, within-time.

The authentic and inauthentic exist in existential-ontological manner of Topper-time, Topper-truth, Topper-technology, and Topper-thinking.  Topper arises and falls away yet is veiled in ontological problematics (#437).

Topper, you see, has not yet been enkindled, because preparations are made for each particularity, existent and Being-in-the-world, so very non-conceptually (Beneath of antenarrative), lots of disclosures add to my understanding of Topper Being-at-all-possible to an existential-ontological constitution of something called ‘ecstatical projection’ of Being in some primordial way of temporalizing that gets interpreted in primordial time!

But just what is ecstatical?  Now we must venture into that other book, History of the Concept of Time.  It is the story of Heidegger moving away from Husserl’s categories (sensible & categorical consciousness) and substituting a new category of intetntio and intentum (see pp. 37-41). And moving from Husserl bracketing out the world of time with consciousness, to a Being-in-the-world of primordial. It is a new form of thinking we call Enthinkment of existent Being-in-the-world that is antenarratively Beneath the concepts, empirics, and fact measurements of time (clock time).

The time-truth-thinking-technology relies on the essay questions concerning technology. See https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Question%20Concerning%20Technology.pdf for what is enframing.

Why is this relevant to today?  In the geological period of time, the Anthropocene, our technologies threaten to destroy the Biosphere that supports Anthropos (that includes us, animals, plants, and so on). The Earth system is in peril, from the danger of technology devices that conceal something important about Aristotle’s fourfold causes and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (e.g. entropy). Bringing the concealment into uncealment, is the point of not just my Topper story, but the plight of the Anthropocene (see Sven-Olov Wallinstein, 2005) at https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:217475/FULLTEXT01.pdf

He gives an answer to the question, what is ecstatical?

“The theme of historicity is central in Heidegger, and it traverses the whole of his work, from the early reflections on the concept of time, through the analysis of ecstatic-horizontal temporality in the ’20s, up to the expanded and reworked concept of history that appears after the “turning” and that guides the attempt to think being itself as history” (p. 143).

The Topper is an anticipatory resoluteness of myself, a caring for something ecsatically futural (#424-5 in Being & Time).  You see, the now by now of Hegel, fails to recognize the authentic futurity I intend in Bets on The Future (3^rd principle of True Storytelling, called Plot).  All the levelled-off sequence of nows (#425) keeps concealing the futural and the already there in the many pasts.

I hope you enjoyed the Topper storytelling about Time, Technology, Truth, and Thinking (aka Enthinkment).

It’s time to get back to working on Topper. I have lots of Primordial Time to uncover.

Following summary from Antenarrative.com

References

Boje, David Michael. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational & communication research. Narrative Methods for Organizational & Communication Research, 1-160. See intro. https://www.amazon.com/Narrative-Organizational-Communication-Research-Management/dp/0761965874/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197396585&sr=1-1&asin=0761965874&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Boje, David M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. London: Sage.

Hegel (1830). Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science. Third and Final Edition, by G.W.F. Hegel 1830; Translated by William Wallace, first published 1873.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/introduction.pdf

Heidegger, Martin   Being and Time. https://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Heidegger-BeingAndTime.pdf

Heidegger, Martin   A Question Concerning Technology. https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Question%20Concerning%20Technology.pdf

Larsen, Jens, David M. Boje, and Lena Bruun. True storytelling: seven principles for an ethical and sustainable change-management strategy. Routledge, 2020.

Shufutinsky, A., & Burrell, D. N. (2024). Storytelling When the Source of the Story Is Unavailable: The Multi-Bystander Interpretive Storytelling Approach. In A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling Set 2: Methodologies and Big Data Analysis of Business Storytelling Volume 5: Business Storytelling and Grounding Methodology (pp. 79-115).

Shufutinsky, A., Svane, M. S., & Boje, D. M. (2024). Introduction to Grounding Methodology in Business Storytelling. In A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling Set 2: Methodologies and Big Data Analysis of Business Storytelling Volume 5: Business Storytelling and Grounding Methodology (pp. 1-11). https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811280962_0001

Weick, Karl E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). London: Sage.