How does the way organizations construct their narratives and metaphors - particularly in relation to time - create their identity and capacity for change?

In my thesis I plan to survey professional in different change consulting disciplines (OD, AI, TQM) to gauge the extent to which organizational narratives change in different types of change processes and whether there are any lessons to be learnt within and across consulting disciplines that can help organizations create their identity and capacity for change in a positive way. Some possible outcomes might be in finding ways to access the governing storylines that might enable those engaged in the change process to generate a break in the narrative or a reframing that allows a healthier perspective.

In conducting this research, I hope to learn something that will help both consultants and organizations change the stories they tell each other that govern their identity and how this then influences their relationships with the outside world. Ideally this research might open up useful insights that would help companies and organizations realize ways in which they create their narrative and metaphors create more positive, healthier, meaningful identities for themselves and their customers. Specifically, I hope to learn whether it is possible to use structured conversations to discover and access the governing narrative of an organization in order for the people intervening to facilitate healthy, organic change congruent with its mission, goals and values. If this is possible, it may lead to greater ease agreement within a system for the need and nature of a change process while reducing resistance to change through better conversations to create a shared future.

The identity of an organization to the outside world is intimately entwined with the conversations that people within the organization have amongst themselves, so the stories people tell each other have great weight in the construction of organizational identity. In other words, organizational identity is socially constructed. There is a great deal of literature about systems needing to ‘unfreeze’ (Lewin) before change can occur and about creating impetus and excitement for change (Kotter)—all of which are done in conversation among groups—so what really needs to happen is a change in the story. Since narratives often become self-fulfilling prophesies, a healthy narrative is a narrative for more productivity.

At its most ambitious level, this thesis will develop a narrative theory of organizational change. This might be especially impactful for organizations that have been subject to turbulent and disruptive change environments. It may also prove useless. Finding and accessing the governing storyline may be helpful in systems with good organizational memory, but for those organizations that have undergone ‘one reorg too many’ and have fractured, incongruent storylines, working with these stories may prove fruitless. In conducting my research I hope to shed light on the question of what kinds of organization would benefit most from this kind of dialogic work and perhaps also generate some possibilities for helping organizations with splintered, incoherent narratives start again with a new story that captures the talents and possibilities of their members.