Big Story Conference: ‘Mapping Quantum Storytelling’ SUMMARIES

Title:Mapping Quantum Storytelling Fractal Patterns Before and Beneath Triple Bottom Line’s and Veterans Administration’s Stupid Narratives
Author: David Boje
Summary: We live in organizations addicted to stupid narratives. My purpose is to develop intelligent action understandings of how to care for organizations addicted to stupid elevator pitch narratives and one-sided stories by mapping quantum storytelling “Tamara-land” forces ignored beneath and between them both (Boje, 1995). Tamara-land is the everyday activity of people in organizations chasing stories spatially distributed in different rooms, hallways, buildings that are temporally simultaneous, with materialities that are agential to the telling.  For example, in this conference the immersive theater into Tamara-land is done in SteelCase open office spaces, as audience decides which actors to follow as they exit each scene. You cannot chase them all, and cannot be everywhere at once in this spacetimemattering. Quantum Storytelling does not search for simpleton word or text messaging tag lines to explain open office. Quantum Storytelling uncovers deep behavior patterns of the spacetimemattering. “Quantum storytelling includes nondiscursive and behavioral aspects embodied in the storyteller’s life, in their living story behavioral-performative agentiality” (Ibid: p. 114) and in non-human’s materialism featured in Karen Barad’s (2007) and Anete Strand’s (2011) material storytelling work. Quantum storytelling of Tamara-land mapping at macro scale traces the interplay of people, planet, and profit (aka Triple Bottom Line, 3BL), but does not reduce it to stupidly imagined profitability metrics. I will critique 3BL for not proposing any method to measure people and planet first, and by default reducing all P’s to just bottom line profitability measures. The consequence is that a runaway, maximizing fractal, known in socioeconomic work as the Taylor-Fayol-Weber rationality or 'TFW virus' of greed capitalism (Worley, Zardet, Bonnet, & Savall, 2015: 23-24; Savall & Peron, 2015) attains stupid functional-structuralism (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). In quantum storytelling fractal work its ‘TFW fractal’ profiteering that is destroying both planet and people, at an ever-accelerating rate (Boje & Henderson, 2014; Boje, 2015; Henderson & Boje, 2015). I will also do a quantum storytelling mapping of U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) stupid fractal narrative. VA is implementing a Cyborg-TFW fractal in its Polytrauma wards serving veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries (Poly-TBI). Its time to map the techno-digital-Skinnerian-Teaching/Learning-Machine-TFW fractal, and its addictive consequences on veterans. My point is that Quantum Storytelling Mapping has to account for the spacetimemattering TFW fractal runaway downward spiral patterning while searching for a quantum-counterforce, such as a socioeconomic Mandelbrot fractal that actually sets limits on runaway fractal appetite. Both the 3BL and the VA fractal narratives spiral more and more materials, energy, people into the addictive TFW fractal virus pattern, without limit.See pdf full paper

 Title: Quantum Storytelling and Ensemble Leadership

Authors: Grace Ann Rosile (presenter) and David M. Boje

Summary: What if we took storytelling seriously? What if we recognized the quantum ways in which stories shape materiality, and how materiality shapes stories? How would we view history, and especially the nature of organizations, organizing, and leadership, differently? In this paper we propose the “Ensemble Leadership Theory” (ELT) as a model of leadership able to be accurately viewed and best understood through quantum storytelling and antenarrative. We support our quantum perspective with evidence from archeological re-interpretations of history in pre-hispanic Mesoamerica (Joyce, 2010; Arthur, 2009), an area not far from the location of this conference. We tell the story of a housing crisis and political collapse triggered by the influence of dead leaders—not in our generation, but in the pre-hispanic southwest. We draw implications for today. 
Quantum storytelling is dynamic, complex, unfinished, non-hierarchical, and materiality-oriented. These same aspects are key features of ELT. These quantum storytelling qualities are necessary to understanding the rhizomatic and heterarchical nature of ELT’s fluid post-structuralist structures. We end up with a leadership perspective very different from traditional, hierarchical, systems-oriented, predominantly linear grand-narratives of traditional leadership. We employ antenarrative to recover the before-the-story dynamism of becoming, in this Ensemble approach.
We begin our exploration with a brief definition of Ensemble Leadership Theory as comprising four (4) main qualities: collectivist, relational, dynamic, and heterarchic (Rosile, Boje, and Nez, forthcoming in 2016). We unpack the meaning of each of these terms in subsequent sections of the paper. Finally, we demonstrate how quantum storytelling and antenarrative approaches provide a dynamic reinterpretation of leadership and social upheaval in an ancient culture. We conclude that the quantum aspects of materiality, collectivism, dynamism, are essential to creating an antenarrative of leadership more suited to a quantum world. 

 

Title: Sociomaterial Fractals in a Quantum Storytelling Frame
Author:  Tonya L. Henderson, D.M.
Summary: This paper describes the theoretical contributions of Fractal Change Management (FCM) in relation to Quantum Storytelling theory and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts, this paper considers the areas of overlap and difference between FCM and its theoretical fellows with special attention given to sociomateriality, storytelling, feminism, and complexity theory. It includes discussion of the experience of refining the language and presentation relevant to the topic for a recent TEDx event as a bridge between scholarship and practice. Next it summarizes works specific to fractal change management, considering the strengths and weaknesses of the method in various contexts, as well as its development over time. Prior studies in the yoga and nonprofit communities are briefly discussed along with ongoing work with software developers. Areas for further study are examined in detail, as a way to establish an antenarrative for this line of inquiry that honors its lineage as well as its contributions to the body of knowledge.  (direct link to Fractal Change Management tools/docs) Link to Tonya's Ted Talk Click here for PDF of Full paper

Title: Ten story metrics for organizations
Author: Mike Bonifer et al TBD
                               "Good stories always beat good spreadsheets."  - Chris Sacca

Title: Entrepreneurial Storytelling of Flux
Author: Rohny Saylors
Summary: The answer to "where does narrative come from" is antenarrative; but how can we begin to build data-theoretic means of explaining antenarrative?  Using Maximum information entropy (maxent) as a theoretical way of explaining the emergence of ante narrative leads to three interesting conclusions. First, there is a theoretical limit to the number of narratives that any one observer is capable of considering at once. Second, that number is dependent upon the linearity of thinking on the part of that observer, with less linearity having the greatest potential to create new narratives. Third, the speed by which a narrative can be transmitted or received is increased by its linearity. The implication of this is that the traditional tradeoff between generalizability, accuracy, and utility is not a zero sum game. As a network of high utility information stabilizes more general meanings accuracy can be transmitted within the bounds of that isolated state. Alternatively, over time such narrative systems will tend toward greater potential for new narrative but with less ability to gain generalizability, accuracy, or utility. Extending this using Boltzmans equation, we see that grand narrative are in flux, even while they pre-form thinking, thus allowing easy transmission of narrative. Further they reduce narrative potential. Using quantum theory as a means of violation of particle number within Boltzman’s equation, quantum Antenarratives are explainable in terms of maxent.

Title: Revealing antenarratives in the autism market
Author: Jillian Saylors
Summary: There are three story character elements that entrepreneurs use to build their grand identity market narrative. There is the end user, the champion, and the economic buyer. And the most wonderful thing about actors, is that they are very versatile, they can be static and rigid, only being one of those character elements. Or they can be dynamic, any composite of those three elements. But in the grand narrative that is the market, it is very clear that a market identity requires all three character elements in order to be.As a beginning entrepreneur autism mommy it has been very interesting deconstructing and reconstructing these elements so that I can identify what the autism market really looks like, and what it could look like.
In the autism market the end user is the individual with autism. For one moment I was excited about applied behavior analysis because I know what it's true end user is, it was suppose to be me. But I was sorely disappointed that when ABA was practiced in my home, I felt like I picked up another therapist. Having looked at the autism market I now understand why they ended up disappointing me. It's because the autism market rigidly holds its identity as an autism market by freezing the autism narrative.

Title: The Fulfillments of Panda Express’s Mission and Values in Its Macro and Micro Storytelling
Author: Yianni Liang
Summary: Purpose: This is a case study about Panda Express. The purpose of this study is to examine the fulfillment of Panda’s mission statement and values statement in the organizational storytelling at macro level and minor level and provide a close look at the enhancement function of the organizational culture to the fulfillment of the organizational mission and values expressed in the organizational storytelling.
Design/Methodology/Approach: This study employs qualitative methodologies including participant observation, interviews, and a field survey. The study first inspects the fulfillment of the organization’s mission and values in the organization macro storytelling. Then it explores the permeation of the mission and values in the storytelling of micro local/regional store level. Through comparing the macro storytelling and the micro storytelling, the study presents the fulfillment of the organization’s mission and value in the business and provide individual concerns and thinking regarding the storytelling of the organization. The study also discusses the organizational culture works to enhance the fulfillment of the mission and values in business operation of the organization and then improve the penetration of the fulfillment of mission and values in organizational micro storytelling.   
Findings: Heterogeneity of the fulfillments of Panda Express’s mission and values at its macro level and micro level storytelling and the implication of the heterogeneity in organizational culture.  
Research Limitation/Implication: This study is limited to the storytelling references and methodologies. It contributes a specific vision to the administrations of organization to examine the fulfillment of the organization’s mission and values in the organizational storytelling and daily business operations and the inter-impaction between the fulfillment of the mission and value and the organizational culture.     
Keywords: Organization Mission and Value, Organizational culture, Participant Observation, Interview, Field Survey, Storytelling, Grand Narrative and Microstoria

Title: Recreating stories on the stage of improv
Author: Andres Marquez-Lara
Summary: The world is made up of stories. They shape how we make sense and interact with ourselves, others and the world. The stories we enact provide us with “scripts” that help us interact with others and ourselves. While these social and cultural “scripts” provide us with some guidance (i.e. Your answer to “Who are you and what do you do?”), these scripts can also prevent us from connecting with others, and discovering who they are. This is especially relevant when working with groups of people who have been stigmatized. (i.e. People diagnosed with mental illness, homeless, veterans, etc). On the stage of improv, we can help groups of people explore their own scripts, how they impact others, and more importantly help them improvise new lines in the stage of life!

Title: SEAM Storytelling
Author: Amandine Savall
Summary: The ISEOR-SEAM research center, created by Henri Savall in 1975, has experimented an intervention-research method for 40 years to help 1’800 organizations to develop their socio-economic performance. SEAM interventions are carried out within real-life organizations to implement organizational changes. These interventions are based on three forces of change, called “trihedral”, in order to get a bigger impact. The effectiveness of change is also based on repeating the process with different loops of implementing a set of management tools, the DPIE process itself (diagnosis, project, implementation, evaluation), and new strategic decisions to be made by the management team. In fact, every aspect of SEAM is a sub-process of the process, aimed at collecting storytelling (e.g. Through the diagnosis interviews, the focus group sessions, and other individual and collective interactive training sessions). For instance, one of the socioeconomic aspects of SEAM is to enhance and improve the 3Cs “communication-coordination-cooperation” between people at work. Also, there is a need for more material storytelling through taking notes, keeping tracks, and formalizing the changes in order to have more embodied management and humane practices. Socioeconomic accounting also helps to make figures more materialized, thus useful to make better decisions within the organization.See Slides of presentation PDF

Title: Pragmatic implications of systems theory
Author: Hank Strevel
Summary: Ironically, this paper begins with a theoretical perspective because those of us involved in the quest for an "Übermensch theory" rely by default upon theory to explain various phenomena, including the puzzle put forth in this paper: bridging theory with practice.  Systems theory is used here as an underlying lens through which we elucidate the roles of knowledge and quantum storytelling both independently and interdependently (i.e., intertexuality) in solving this puzzle.  We also propose that a quantum understanding of systems theory enhances our capacity to solve this problem and, accordingly, propose a truncated model of theory in general for practitioners because the abstruse nature of many theories potentially puts them at a tremendous disadvantage when faced with the daunting task of converting the esoteric to plain sense.  Moreover, finding, understanding, and explicating theory is not a prerequisite for the practitioner's purposes, nor is it necessary (though it may be sufficient) to reify a given theory thoroughly so that a practitioner understands its syllogistic or metaphysical components.  Practitioners need but the merest of comprehension of a theory's "logic" or rationale and need only a functional understanding of the theory for their purposes. For example, a shoe salesperson need not be familiar with "Cantor's paradise"   to perform basic arithmetic such as counting change at the cash register.  We conclude that bridging theory with practice comes at the cost of theoretical integrity for the academic yet at great—heretofore bereft—benefit to the practitioner.

Title: Autoethnography and spacetimematching: a Persian management scholar
Author: Bahareh Javadizadeh
Summary: The present study applies a therapeutic modality known as sandtray to help 10 graduate students at New Mexico State University (NMSU) reflect on themselves. A shallow, rectangular sandtray, measuring 28.5 inches by 19.5 inches and 3 inches deep, half-filled with sand, is the basic instrument. The basic element of every sandtray is sand which is the basic element of the earth that connects people to their soul. I will introduce the sandtray therapy as a simple, non-verbal method in which small toys are representatives of real phenomena—namely, deep personal issues. Further, I will bring together various approaches toward sandtray therapy as presented by different researchers, along with a personal disclosure of my own experience using this method and by providing photographs of my sandtray. My experience was in accordance with Carl Jung who explained that sandtray figures are characterized in a way which corresponds to the four essential phenomenological functions or personality types identified as: thinking, feeling, intuitive, and sensate. In the last part of this paper, I will discuss the ways in which my sandtray represents my background as a person coming from Persia along with a Persian culture living in the United States while adapting myself to a new life.

Title: Entangling Organizations – Intra-active ways of reworking the organizational scenography for the processes of becoming of the changed relationalities of (dis)ability
Author: Anete M. Camille Strand
Summary: The paper accounts for the process of becoming of a specific communicative practice of a department of the Municipality of Aalborg in Denmark. Across a period of a few months a group of members of the department and an action researcher met and across this period a model emerged that reconfigured the intraply of all relevant areas of the organization involved in citizen care.
The offset of the becoming of the model was taken from a quantum approach to organizational development and change coined as ‘Organizational scenography’ as part of the methodology of material storytelling.
An apparatus of the various significant constituents of citizens-care were developed over the course of the project and a renewed material-discursive practice emerged as the ‘modus operandi’ of the organization. See pdf of full paper
 

Title: Antenarrative and Counternarrative Inquiry into Wal-Mart’s Greenwashing tactics and Social Responsibility Flaws
Author: David Perez
Summary: This article will provide insight into antenarrative experiences from my point of view as an ex-hourly and salaried employee of Wal-Mart. I will compare those experiences to Heidegger and David Boje’s antenarrative model. “Antenarratives means noticing multiple bets on the future, and multiple now-choices before the narrative managerial, administered order of a standardized, mechanical time, and global spatial colonizing occurs as the only antenarrative potentiality” (Boje, 2009:2). Antenarratives will be defined here by utilizing my case examples and comparing them to the before, between, bet, beneath and becoming from David Boje’s model,  that occurs in the everyday happenings of a hierarchical company. I provide examples of antenarrative stories that I tie in to Boje and Heidegger’s model. I will also provide counternarrative solutions (Boje, 2014)  to the case studies and provide feedback to the fore-having, fore-structure, fore-telling, fore-conception and fore-caring (Boje, 2009:2). My cases will explore antenarrative and counternarrative inquiry to Wal-Mart’s Greenwashing tactics and social responsibility flaws, supposedly upheld in their culture and policies.
Keywords: Narrative, antenarrative, counternarrative, social materiality, living story, between, bet, beneath, before, becoming, fractal, fore-structure, fore-telling, fore-conception, fore-having, fore-caring and liminal space

Title: Bike sharing from a quantum storytelling perspective
Author: Jamie Lakey
Summary: I am a bike-sharing activist at New Mexico State University (NMSU). I am using quantum storytelling practices to encourage the university governing entities to support and fund a bike-share program. Quantum storytelling is defined as “the interplay of quantum understandings with storytelling processes” including their counter-narratives (Boje, 2014: 100).  Bike-sharing at NMSU would allow student, faculty and staff an opportunity to change their sociomaterial practices: use bicycles on campus for easier maneuverability. The bike-share quantum storytelling will promote sustainability, decrease congestion, offers possibility for revenue and improves the health of the users.  This is because quantum storytelling focuses on the spacetimemattering aspects of actual process of bike-share implementation and operation (Boje & Henderson, 2014).  Quantum storytelling also helps make explicit what Heidegger (1962) calls fore-having, fore-structuring, fore-conception, fore-telling, and fore-caring (as developed Boje, Svane, & Gergerich, in review). The reason why quantum storytelling is so helpful is it devolves antenarrative preview of the way to operational zero bike sharing through visual media including pictures documents five year plan maps of campus bikes themselves riders. Finally, in my presentation the plan is to show embodied practices that stem from quantum storytelling.
Keywords: quantum storytelling, antenarrative, bike-sharing See Full Paper PDF

Title: Sande Leadership:Sustainable Education and Professional Development
 Author: Wanda Tisby Cousar, DM
Summary: In this paper, Sande Leadership will be introduced as an approach to getting leaders beyond the dominant narrative to a balance between authentic-self and stakeholder needs. Gender roles, ethics, norms and values, and political skills have become dominant narratives for various industries and their leadership addressed by the Sande Leadership model. The model is an area of opportunity that addresses Management Social Sustainability. Leadership development in management education will be the focus in the classroom and leadership professional development will be the focus in organizations. In both industries policy development for sustainable practice will be explored in the development of business scorecards used to measure sustainable practice in organizations. See Full Proceedings Paper

Title: Testimonios: Conduits for communication and preparation
Author:  Cynthia Cortez
Summary: A testimonio reveals the bridges and connections created by collective learning.  For many Xicanas, the first learning occurs in their home.  Studies show that the familia encourages life lessons through daily chores, conversation about school and education, consejos de abuelas y abuelos, sibling interaction, and by watching parents or elders negotiate and interact with the dominant society and among other family members.  This research in home learning practices provides valuable data in understanding the successes and failures of Xicana/os in higher education.  Ultimately, testimonio presents a unique method, process, and product that uncovers the many daily challenges that Xicanas confront.

Title: Quantum Storytelling Network Analysis of Xiaomi’s Supply Chain Management

Author: Ruoqing Zhang
Summary: Purpose– to construct a quantum storytelling mapping of Xiaomi’s supply chain network. And to illustrate how Xiaomi achieves fast supply chain management from a perspective of quantum storytelling. Quantum storytelling is defined here as the assemblage of actors-actants-meaning in dynamic configurations. As such the purpose is to show the supply chain, as an ontological entity with Being-in-the-world of spacetimemattering (Henderson & Boje, 2014; Henderson & Boje, 2015).
Methodology/Approach— the study collects data from the Internet, and uses qualitative methodology to map the quantum storytelling contours, discuss, and analyze the supply chain management of the company.
Findings— Xiaomi’s supply chain strategy has four characteristics. The first finding is its product positioning, which focus on high quality with lower price, and customer positioning, which target at people fever for hardware and user experience. The second finding is its initiative “Hunger Marketing”, which dramatically increases Xiaomi’s brand recognition. The third finding is that Xiaomi’s profit mainly draws from derivative products and value added service rather than from making smartphones. The last is its unique supply chain management strategy. Xiaomi’s adopts what so called “C2B preorder, e-commerce transaction channel flattening, fast supply chain response, and zero inventory” strategy, which helps it achieve lowest costs and maximum profit. My presentation will map these four characteristics using quantum storytelling conceptions.
Practical implication— Xiaomi sets an example as a supply chain model innovator with divergent thinking for traditional enterprises to adapt themselves to the era of Internet. Can it be that quantum storytelling mapping explains some of the supply chain existential qualities, its meaningfulness to participants, its assemblage of actors and actants in the chain?
Originality/Value— this paper has three originalities. It has been the first English paper to comprehensively analyze Xiaomi’s supply chain management. In addition, the research is creatively implemented by qualitative technique of quantum storytelling mapping in supply chain. Lastly, it contributes to making Xiaomi acquaintance to more qualitative and storytelling researchers. 
Keywords: Quantum Storytelling, Network Analysis, Xiaomi, MI

Title: Story Vs. Narrative: Fade or Brighten of Failures in Public Record
Author: Nazanin Tourani
Summary: Storytelling helps clarify the concealed or less visible elements of reality in its authentic context. Story analysis read between the lines if written or oral narratives to obtain richer understanding of an event. However, storytelling practice is a double edge sword. Skilled storytellers may employ the power of storytelling to reframe an event in a favorable or undesirable way. In contemporary business world corporations broadly employ expert authors who proficiently apply storytelling practices in corporate public documents. Accordingly, corporate public documents declare desirable corporate image and promising reflection of business activities hence corporate attracts more stockholders and obtains extra resources. In current business world corporates that do not appropriately employ storytelling would fail to take the opportunity to brainwash stockholders, hence suffer from competitive disadvantage. This case study analyses Sears Holdings Corporation public report to explore how Sears business activities are revealed to public stakeholders. This study also proposes hypotheses of the consequences of ineffective storytelling. See PDF of Slides

Title: Storytelling on Consciousness-Based View of Organizing
Author: Marja Turunen
Summary: Several conceptualizations of organizing, and the most widely-used of these rely on the assumption that issues and environment are known and that the internal operations of the firm can be controlled and managed. This view of organizing focuses on planning and streamlining for the known future with a small group of experts, and for the most part clears the experiential ambiguities of organizational stakeholders out of the organizational equation. In this stream ambiguous processes such as consciousness cannot be included. This research stream neglects a topic of consciousness and if studied, it approaches consciousness mostly as an object. This dissertation is based on a storytelling approach - the quantum stream of it – and indicates that consciousness can be included in the organization equation. The move to understand consciousness as an everyday process in organizations rather than a brain function lets us to take consciousness seriously. This paper, an excerpt of my dissertation on consciousness-based view of organizing contributes in storytelling and is based on empirical stories ‘being in the world’. It helps us understand the ways in which we are creators of the consciousness fields which then become actors taking care of us unless we become aware of the heart-of-care which has mostly not been acknowledged scientifically. Consciousness provides momentous information for those interested in strategic leaps, accelerated innovations, in sustainable and ethical ways of working and organizing.
Keywords: organizing, quantum storytelling, organizational consciousness, ambiguity, innovation

Title: The most common decision-making biases in entrepreneurial marketing
Author: Elmira Shahriari
Summary: What are the most common decision-making biases in entrepreneurial marketing? So far no study has been done on Biases in entrepreneurial marketing behavior, this article presents an investigation in this field. In this study decision-making biases are investigated through storytelling qualitative research method. I am in the process of gathering and deeply analyzing the online interviews with marketers. Our main goal is to find out which biases are the marketers mostly involved with.
Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Decision Making Biases, Storytelling See Presentation PowerPoint; See PDF of Full Proceedings Paper

TITLE: MUSICAL PROBLEM SOLVING

Summary: There are five musical instruments on a stage that no one in the audience has ever seen played together before. The instruments are a banjo, a French horn, a trombone, a djembe, and a koto.

We propose to the audience that organizations are like orchestras, in the sense that they want to connect with their audience (customers, employees and other stakeholders) with resonant performances, and the structures that produce them.

The audience is asked to suggest three scenarios that challenge an organization's ability to 'make music,' i.e. that are likely to produce disharmony.

Examples: A merger or acquisition creates culture clashes; a first-mover competitor disrupts the market with an innovation; employee engagement is 25% lower than the industry average.

The musicians who play the instruments take the stage, as the moderator explains that we are going to watch the musicians solve the problems the audience has listed.

The moderate creates the analogies for the musicians:

Merger or acquisition: You have instruments that play different scales, and come from different cultures, how can you make music with them?

First mover disrupts the market: One player begins with a solo, how do you follow and connect with it?

Low employee engagement: Discordant voices produce cacophony. How do you create music collaboratively?

TITLE: The Break: Work-life balance, energy and leadership anno 2015 -  
Reconfiguring contemporary leadership through 2400 years old coaching concept Protreptic and Material Storytelling
Authors: Anete M. Camille Strand and Jens Larsen
Summary: This paper attempts to meet the challenges of this million-dollar question posed at the leadership level of a multinational concern.

The attempt is stemming from ‘bets on the future’ – or what David Boje coins as ‘antenarratives’, (Boje, 2008) emerging through reconfiguring story actions on two different occasions.

The paper thus elaborates on two cases of restorying events; One taking place in the Pyrenees of Europe in October 2015. One taking place in the hallways of the City Hall of a Municipality in Denmark in May 2015. In both cases the ‘bets on the future’ actions were given in a materialized form and drawing on a subtle form of negotiation of core leadership values; which values should matter and which actions should no longer be allowed to matter (as much)? In other words – a negotiation where both senses of the word ‘matter’ played a vital role and where these founding differences were reworked.

The paper is written through loosely connected fragments of text pieces (of different genres) and content  as a manner of being true to the heritage of living story relationality and nonlinearity within a quantum approach to storytelling (Boje 2001) and as a practical highlight of quantum entanglement as an emergence of meaning-mattering, which the reader is very much part of enacting. This means that the following pieces may be read in any different order you may choose. See PDF of Complete Proceedings Paper.

TITLE: Ultraliminal Team Consciousness

Author: DebraPearl Hockenberry
Summary: Many organizations stress team work. They even create events to inspire a culture of working together. Oftentimes, these events create sub-cultures that only enhance the cliques that have developed within the organization. So are we really defining teamwork appropriately, and do we offer tangible experiences to shift the focus of individualistic differences to that of a whole? Quantum storytelling and alchemical exercises can reveal the lack of true team acceptance that is caused by this kind of approach.
Typical team approaches in the U.S. seek to maintain individual stories in order to create a bigger picture for the organization. The use of tai chi, quantum storytelling and joint alchemical exercises stress the wholeness of the organization as one. Using internal revelation as the key element to overcome the differences rather than acceptance of the differences. The internal connection approaches the whole as a changing entity and treats individualistic differences as barriers toward cohesiveness.  These ultraliminal exercises offer a multi-sensory learning tool you can use to bring out the best of creativity, potential and genuine connectedness of your team efforts with a comfortable approach to change.
Author: Debra Pearl Hockenberry

 

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR MAPPING QUANTUM STORYTELLING

Quantum Storytelling is not just words, texts, or human dramatic action. Rather, Quantum Storytelling is the pattern of assemblages of material actants, non-human beings, and humans doing a Quantum version of Storytelling in the inseparability of spacetimemattering (Boje & Henderson, 2014). Newtonian Storytelling is position in 3D space, and linear time events. Quantum Storytelling is a paradigm shift. “The game of storytelling in organizations is changing in the Quantum Age” (Boje, 2014: xxv).
Mapping Quantum Storytelling is observing and interpreting the assemblages of humans, non-human beings, and material entities as they form repeating patterns of convergence and divergence.  Some patterns are fractals (patterns repeating self-sameness across magnifactions in spacetimemattering) such as branching fractals, spiral fractals, Mandelbrot fractals, Sierpinski, and Multifractals, and others just random  (Henderson & Boje, 2015; Boje, 2015).
 

Tamara-land is a Quantum analysis of storytelling organizations, such as Disney, where there is simultaneous storytelling by assemblages of humans distributed in different rooms, hallways, buildings, transport, and trying to map what is happening, what will happen next, and what has happened (Boje, 1995).
John Dewey (1929) made a Quantum Storytelling turn after reading Warner Heisenberg’s (1927) article on the Uncertainty Principle: Observing accurately for momentum, and position is not as accurate to determine, and vice verse. Another American Pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1932) studied Niels Bohr’s Complementarity Principle (the Quantum and the Newtonian must line up) and Mead concluded that quantum time is not same as Newtonian (clock/mechanical) time. In Quantum time, the future arrives to change the present, and that emergence changes how we look at the past (in retrospection). We are always prevising (antenarrating) a prospective sensemaking of the multitude of future possibilities arriving present. When we previse, the Observer Effect, collapses many choices to one, and we change the path of arrival.
William James (1907: 98) “things tell a story” and given the plurality of material things humans carry about, organize, and assemble, the things are telling a story in their pattern. Each organization is many materials that tell many stories, and humans tune into some of them by acts of forensic, science, and detective work. Example: As we observe climate change by one apparatus or another, we change the path of its arrival by our dismissal or our changes.