STorytelling ORganization Workshops

Building Collective Storytelling Practices of STORY DOMES

In some organizations, collective storytelling practices need to be addressed. The advanced process of Tamara (simultaneous storytelling in various rooms of an organization) is the focus. As this is an advanced workshop, we incorporate storytelling, story listening, story noticing, and story strategy action to analyze the pathways and complexities of collective storytelling practices. This workshop demonstrates how an understanding of Tamara collective practices can move a Storytelling Organization effective collaboration, and more synthetic story action. "Story Domes" is an idea suggested by our friend Steve King, who sees a way to work with the social network (arcology, existiential graphing) basis of antenarratives (the bet that an antenarrative can be transformative of the social as it travels in social network), ”a refusal to admit to the existence of grand narratives, preferring to see instead a 1,000 local stories... “I define postmodernas an incredulity toward metanarratives”” (Boje, 2001, Narrative Methods for Organization and Communication Research, London: Sage). Antenarratives can allow diverse actors to act in concert to achieve mutually valuable and distributive goals. The process of Distributive Consensus Antenarrating (DCA). The idea to explore is how to explore the dynamics of Tamara, as people narrate, story, and antenarrate, so that a locally situated consensual distributive network unfolds. Building a collective 'story dome' is challenging due to instability and danger of collapse during the building process.

STORY DOME and COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING PRACTICES

Source Harry Halpin's slide

STORY DOME

What is the STORY DOME? It is an architectonics (in Bakhtin’s and Kant’s term). It is how the social network of locally situated antenarrators do prospective work, attempting to socially construct convergence. But this is not the grand convergence of a metanarrative (Lyotard), nor is it the BME of narrative coherence.  Antenarratives are smaller bets, much more local travelers. Their strength is in being packets, coalescing with other antenarratives. They stick to one another, merge and assemble, or blend with one another.

See STORY DOME SLIDE SHOW

How a dynamic STORY DOME is socially erected.  When organizations (and story consultants) attempt to construct productive and responsible antenarrative STORY DOMES, many difficulties arise. When antenarratives are constructed in top-down manner (with authroitarian scaffolding), it negates the role of locally emergent stories. Much resistance is generated.

Antenarratives are also being co-constructed (cobbled together, as Steve King remarks), the antenarratives travel, cluster, dropping off and picking up context as they move.

Collapse can occur in from top-down or more bottom-up (affinity groups). The archologies are grass roots, more distributed consensus seeking is not the same as the form of unilateral consensus, where one voice, one logic, one authority reins supreme.

Steve King and David Boje ahve been working together to develop Story Dome as a method of intervention and inquiry. As King says, "It’s an attempt to show how a storydome and an antenarrative story space could work together using Korzybski’s Structural Differential to explore the micro/macro/meta dimensions of organizational discourse." The following image tries to capture the complexity dynamics of Story Dome.

Source: Steve King (Nov 1 2007) seek permission before reproducing.
This is a future-oriented (prospective) image of dialogisms (e.g. antenarrative polyphony) and the reflexivity sensemaking of story space (Ken Baskin's concept). A protectected bottomup story space could thrive so that antenarrative float up and down, stabile in interwoven "dome-like" discursive structures, becoming prospective stories and even (by retrospect) narrative representations as time goes on.

We are not sure the hard-wired world of IT and the positivistic-leaning supply chain worlds are ready for reflexivity. They want to see a path to persistent policies and governance. However, there are creative pockets, areas in organizations, ones where solving challenges and having critical reflexivity in story spaces can be nourished to evadenarrative- representations stuck in rigid models and systems thinking could be potential. In complexity thinking, we can re-story dominant narrative constructions, develop more bottom-up negotiations with top-down business processes and infrastructure.

Suggested time: Full Day
Skill Level: Advanced
Prerequistes: Completion of Storytelling, Listening, Ethics, Living, Noticing, and Shaping Strategic Action workshops

Fees for Clients and their Story Consultants

Half day: $600

Full day: $1200

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Fees for Story Researchers

Professors: $350 Full Day

Doctoral Students: $150 Half Day

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Keynote Lecture: Fee upon request

Story Research, Archiving, Storymaker or longer term projects: Fee upon request

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