PURPOSE TODAY:
To understand the storytelling happening in and around organizations
To experience the three types of storytelling AS organization
Today we play some storytelling games to learn processes of communication
Purpose: How storytelling and games co-exist
1. Story Interruptus Game
2. Zip - Zap - Zop
3. Walking Game
4. Switching places, non-verbal request game
5. Passing balloons game
6. An exercise in the 90 second elevator pitch narrative in pairs, you meet up at the Gare de Lille-Flanders, five years from now. Each of you in the pair, has 90 seconds to tell the other, the 3 goals you have accomplished in those 5 years. After each has shared, then switch partners, and repeat the telling, but only in 85 seconds, and then in 80 etc., until you have told them to everyone in the room.
Questions for DIscussion?
"Organizations as Storytelling Networks: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm," Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 36, 1991: 106-126.* http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/Boje_Storytelling_ASQ_1991.pdf
Discussion questions
a. What is the storytelling organization?
b. What is terse telling?
c. What various futures are in this storytelling by executives, customers, suppliers, holding company, etc.?
Boje, D. M. 1995. "Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney as 'Tamara-land.'" Academy of Management Journal. 38(4): 997-1035. see pdf of article
Starter questions
1. What is Tamara storytelling?
2. How was Disney stuck in the past narrative?
3. What happened to move out of the past, into different future?
A. What past is already present in the moving present of the Office Supply firm?
B. What future is already present in the moving present of the Office Supply firm?
VIDEO: What is Organizational Communication?
The interactants of a storytelling interaction, are not simultaneously present. In Tamara-land, the storytelling is happening differently in different rooms of a building, and you are as a person, not everywhere at once, and must rely on hallway conversations, to sort out what happened. The action in a focus group in Office Supply case is influenced by the futures and the pasts that are opening up in the moving present, such as, the holding company in the UK about to broker a sale of the Office Supply with two other regional supply companies to make a national Office Supply. Such an anticipated sale has ripple effects with customers, vendors, sales force, executives, management. The point is not all the interaction is in the face-to-face, so the terse telling overflows in connections to other times, places, pressures, agencies, and ideologies.
We will keep it simple and ask about five W's:
1. Whys - are the pressures of class, gender, race? What do female and male observers see differently?
2. Whens - are how times vary by position in the storytelling? E.g. Walt's time, Eisner's time, Doug's time, etc.
3. Wheres - are the places, global and local, near and far, where the stuff of the story comes from.
4. Whos - are the actors, agencies, actants in the storytelling scenes, and those behind the scenes? The agencies, are not just in face-to-face interaction, but are dispatching or articulators beyond the face-to-face, yet affecting it.
5. Whats - are the optics (ideologies) that give different meaning, such as the premodern, the modern systems, and the postmodern optics of DIsney, the bureaucratic vs. the salesmen cultural optics at Office Supply.
For more background see Bruno Latour's actor (actant) network theory (Reassembling the Social, 2005).
Main Practical Points
Merci beaucoup
for more storytelling resources see http://peaceaware.com/vita/
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