Becoming Storywise to Organizational Change
INTRODUCTION
The Center for Narrative Studies offers organizations a
unique perspective on how to understand and interpret change and transition.
When companies plan for change and forget transition, they risk
greater upheaval than necessary. Transition is all about how to manage the change process,
how to understand the different stories people assign to it.
What can help organizations better map change is firstly to become
aware of what stories the leadership is inviting members into - regarding what needs to be
different.
The Center for Narrative Studies has been involved with the
religious Congregation of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an international community of
missionary priests and religious who are in the middle of a dramatic restructuring.
Five USA provinces are joining their resources and leadership into one super-province. The
Center is working with them to help preserve their unique traditions and stories for the
future.
Recently, the Center attended one of the 6 meetings held nation-wide
by the Order to discern leadership choices and to hear the five leading candidates for
Provincial expound their vision for the future for this new province. As a witness to the
proceedings, your Storywise correspondent presents this record of what was shared.
It is not a verbatim report but strives to be true to the substance of each presentation.
Putting the proceedings down as a text allows readers to take a Storywise perspective
on how each leader puts a story to change.
You don't have to be involved in a church to follow this
plot.
While obviously rooted in the discourse of church and mission, these
documents can also be studied as demonstration texts of how any organization, public or
private, profit or non-profit, goes about reinventing itself. The stories of change that
we are recruited into will have major implications for what the changes will be.
The aim of bringing narrative process to organizational change is to
help the agents of the change, both leaders and their constituents,
make more conscious choices ...
