Managerial Sense-making and Responsible Management - Literature review Example

Storytelling Research: Managerial Sense-making and Responsible Management Using a practical study working with a variety of narratives, demonstrate how storytelling research can inform your understanding of managerial sense-making and responsible management. The main work of stories in managerial sense-making is to work with people, for people, and on people. They affect what people can see as real. Stories breathe. Therefore, a researcher in storytelling research is researching subjects that are alive. According to Woodside (2013, p. 41), storytelling is pervasive through life. Stories retrieve stored and indexed information. Lectures may trigger people to sleep, but stories move them to action. To demonstrate the importance of storytelling research in managerial sense-making, Storytelling Theory is discussed. In this paper, the story becomes an object of study, with a special focus on how individuals make sense of events and actions in their lives. According to Kaufman (2003), storytelling is considered to be one of the oldest and most powerful communication means. An earlier research shows that a story experiences helps people to create sense out of their lives (McClelland 1961, p. 51). These studies demonstrated this by analysing unsolicited narratives written in everyday life. Storytelling is also enjoying increasing popularity in recent years as leaders and managers have sought to organise professional relationships through storytelling and other symbolic means (Deetz 2001). The ancient art of storytelling has seen a revival in management practice (Denning 2005, p. 101). Shankar et al. (2001, p. 429) discusses how stories and storytelling help people make sense of their lives. Simmons (2002, p. 3) presents a statement on stories and why stories are used. According to Simmons, stories are told in order to “get connected”.“People don’t want more information... They want to have faith in you, your success, your goals, in the story you tell. The faith that moves mountains, not facts. ... Faith needs a story to sustain it; a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that the ideas you put forward indeed offer what you promise” (Simmons 2002, p. 3). Managers use stories to help their followers connect with the organisation in order to make a change happen. According to Rouleau (2005), it is the role of managers to influence every stakeholder’s cognition and behaviour through sense-making and sense-giving. Story telling research gives insights into how meaning is constructed through stories. In storytelling research, the story or narrative becomes an object of study, and it focuses on how people or groups make sense of events in their lives. Storytelling research focuses on how individuals and groups in the past made sense of events. The stories above and below the audible range offer researcher’s access to understanding the managerial sense-making. The concepts of storytelling are channeled to storytelling research thus creating the sense on the side of the researcher. Storytelling research lends itself to a qualitative inquiry in order to capture the rich data within stories. Storytelling research is an important learning tool that enable management students understand the managerial sense-making and responsible management. Storytelling research is the heart and soul of student’s managerial sense making and responsible management. In the story telling research, a person digs deeper into the issues of management. Storytelling research digs deep into the experience. Storytelling research packages information previous information about how the management dealt with issues within their organisations through storytelling. It offers a leeway for visualisation. It is also important in visualising knowledge because, the way data and information are framed or presented significantly determines how they are interpreted. Storytelling research indicates a movement towards active learning, which affords management students to breakdown classroom barriers bridging classroom theory with real life. Storytelling research has the potential to transform management student’s practices in managerial sense-making and responsible management. The storytelling researcher experiences the benefits of the research. The researchers experience is greatly enriched by attaining research experience. Research experience allows the student to better understand sense making and jumpstart his/her career as a manager. Through exposure to past and present research studies, many students discover their passion for applying these experiences in real life experiences. Boje (1991, p. 106) defines a storytelling organisation as the “collective storytelling system in which storytelling is an important part of members’ sense-making and a way to allow them to enhance their memories with institutional memory.” In storytelling organisations, narrative-control and story-diffusion are the force and counterforce of self-organising. The organisations that employ storytelling in their settings strike a unique balance between narrative order and story disorder. Stories shape the past events into an experience using coherence to achieve believability. Past prominent leaders have always used storytelling as a leadership tool. Some good examples of great leader-storytellers include J.F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great among others. One of the greatest strategists in history was Napoleon. President Reagan is also considered to a historical masterful storyteller (Erkas and Baron 2007, p. 25). Politicians have also used stories to gain votes and win elections. What makes Napoleon stand out as one of the leaders who had an unparalleled ability was that he used storytelling to rouse his followers. The future leaders should emulate the historical leaders. They should be able to motivate their followers/employees to achieve through the use of stories. Storytelling research borrows from such leaders in order to inform the current leaders. This study will revisit such leaders in order to demonstrate the importance of storytelling in the managerial sense-making and responsible management. Sense-making In a psychological perspective, sense-making is “how people make sense out of their experience in the world” (Duffy 1995, p. 120). There are five concepts that researchers commonly relate to sense-making. These concepts are creativity, curiosity, comprehension, mental modeling, and the verdict. Although creativity is not the same thing as sense-making, sense-making involves creativity. Any form of research triggers curiosity in the researcher. Though curiosity killed the cat, it is an essential characteristic of an information-literate person. Daniel Berlyne, a pioneer in curiosity research, described curiosity as a state of arousal rising from complex stimuli and uncertainty in the environment, leading to exploratory behaviour (Small and Arnone 2010, p. 16). There have been disagreements regarding whether storytelling is an ideal tool or not in managerial sense-making. The disagreeing ends of sense-making through storytelling triggers the mind of the researcher who in the process of research gains understanding of the issue at hand. Thought-provoking questions that are raised by stories in research trigger students’ epistemic curiosity and information exploration. Different groups have recognised stories as an important part in molding behaviour in an organisation. Cognitive psychologists rise in support of stories arguing that human beings understand the world in terms of story-like causal relations (Sloman, 2005). Management researchers have supported storytelling as a way in which ideas are made memorable (Heath and Heath, 2007). Critics of storytelling are many. According to Denning (2001, p. xviii), there is much academic hostility to storytelling. Stories provide continuity of events, conveying a sense of where people have come from, their history and their heritage. Denning (2001) recognises the immediateness and uniqueness of stories. Stories celebrate how previous generations dealt with challenges and dilemmas in their lives. Sense-making might mean the same thing as comprehension. In sense-making, a person understands things or events that are more complex. Comprehension is reflective by nature and the storytelling researcher only becomes aware of the sense made in retrospect. Managerial sense-making that is learned from storytelling research is rich. Sense-making is considered to be an ongoing process – an ongoing and flowing activity. Therefore, stories may have been told 100 years ago, but a researcher is always presented with an opportunity to extract sense from it. The story of the IBM’s guard who denied her chairman entry happened a long time ago. Nevertheless, the employees of IBM continue draw sense out of this incident. Further research into other events of managerial storytelling influences more understanding of managerial sense making and responsible management. Research helps the researcher to comprehend the issues more clearly. Being a thinking process, sense-making uses unconscious and conscious anticipations, assumptions and retrospective accounts like narratives to inform understanding of how one can cope with irritations and uncertainties. So through storytelling research, the researcher has been able to fit experiences and processes into an interpretative scheme of meaning. Through storytelling research, one creates a frame of references that have been developed throughout the research. Research has provided a frame of references that is relevant in informing managerial sense-making. The managerial field is full of evidence of managers who have transformed their organisations through stories of value – stories that knit the human resources within the organisation. Boje (1991) argues that storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human relationship. Research Storytelling research, just like any other research, rests on the epistemological assumption that human beings make sense of the unsystematic experience by the imposition of story structure (Bell 2002, p. 207). Storytelling research involves selecting the elements of experience, which are to be attended, and those chosen elements are patterned in a way that reflects the stories available to researchers. Stories are common phenomena in the society. Nevertheless, stories differ widely. Stories differ on how they make sense to the world. The important role of differentiating these stories lies with the research. Storytelling research explores different aspects such as; the shape of the stories, sequence of causation, the variety of roles available, and the intellect of what comprises a climax or an ending (Bell 2002, p. 207). A key to understanding the dynamics of managerial sense-making is to examine different stories and understand the underlying assumptions that they embody. This makes storytelling research a valuable tool for the researcher to understand managerial sense-making and responsible management. According to Carr (1986), present events are comprehended as sprouting out of past occurrences and pointing to future results. The past events are told using stories in order to point to future outcomes. In its fullest sense, storytelling research goes beyond simply telling stories, to an analytic examination of the underlying insights and assumptions that stories illustrate. The principles underlying storytelling research shapes the engagement between researcher and research participants. Storytelling researchers make sense of managerial issues according to the stories available to them – stories that are constantly being restructured in the light of new events. Storytelling research involves working with available stories while bearing in mind that these rest on deeper stories of which people are often unaware. What makes storytelling research more important than the telling of stories itself is that it goes beyond specific storytelling to explore the assumptions inherent in the shaping of those stories. Research allows researchers to draw the complexity and richness of the story. When researchers take people’s stories and explore them further, they seem to be imposing meaning on participants’ lived experience. Great storytelling research gives the researchers a good experience. One relevant story that is dominant in storytelling research is Stephen Denning’s story about how he transformed the World Bank through storytelling. Denning (2001, p. xiii) states that, “time after time, when faced with the challenge of persuading managers or front-line staff in a large company to get enthusiastic about a major transformation, I found that the only thing that seemed to work was storytelling. Stories capture a wide spectrum of issues – both positive and negative and provide understanding to the investigator. Most of the stories told in the managerial circles are real life stories in real life settings; therefore, they offer greater understanding than theories. Denning started by telling a little story he had heard from a Danish colleague. Denning’s story was short and it read, “In June 1995, a health worker in Kasama, Zambia logged on to a website at Atlanta’s Centres for Disease Control and got an explanation about how to treat malaria. The simple story that was told by Denning helped the World Bank to take a different direction. Later, similar stories were used to maintain the momentum. Through storytelling research, Denning had gained a lot of understanding managerial sense-making and responsible management such that he has developed into one of the famous writers in the field of managerial sense-making. Managerial sense-making Some organisations do not have histories of democratic governance while others suffer from traumatic conflicts. In such cases, storytelling research may be essential for understanding managerial sense-making. Discoveries about transformations that have been realised through storytelling more engagingly draw the researcher into reflection about the knowledge of how life is lived. Value of a storytelling does not rely solely on the content but also on the ability to access a better understanding of the information. Storytelling increases the curiosity of the researcher as he delves deeper into the issue of managerial sense-making. Previous studies are good sources of information, and therefore they play an important role in helping one understand managerial sense-making and responsible management. In as many times as the researcher finds evidence of managers who have used stories to change their organisation, the more he will understand through visualization. Storytelling research involves interviewing managers and telling them to illustrate the stories that they tell. Through such interviews, the researcher compares and contrasts the managers’ views in order to draw a conclusion and make sense of what has been said and what has been left unsaid. According to Peters (1991, p. 10) the best leaders have always been the best storytellers. These leaders are discussed in storytelling research. Therefore, through exploring the stories they told, the researcher gains much understanding of the issues surrounding managerial sense-making. How stories are influential cannot be understood simply by reading or listening to the story. Rather, stories can only be understood by analysing the way in which the storyteller and the listeners try to interpret the stories (Auvinen and Sintonen 2009, p. ). This cannot be accomplished any other way. It can only be accomplished through researching these stories. It is relevant to study leaders’ stories to gain understanding of the process of influencing people and to understand leadership more holistically. This paper has researched some literature materials and identified a number of stories that have informed my understanding of managerial sense-making and responsible management. The story about an IBM’s who denied his chairman entry into a particular area because he did not have the appropriate security clearance is an informative one. The guard did not get fired; rather, he was praised for her diligence and commitment to maintaining the security of IBM’s building. Through exploring the story, it is possible to gain understanding of managerial sense-making and responsible management. According to Kurtz and Snowden (2003, p. 5), humans use patterns to order the world and make sense of things in a complex situation. One can create a sense out of the above IBM’s case. Through research, various forms of sense-making can be derived from the IBM’s story. Research into such story will help the researcher to create a pattern actively. The guard’s action may seem just like a simple action, but to a storytelling researcher, it is something that can inform and shape the way things are conducted. A conclusion that can be drawn from the IBM story is that all employees within the organisation should emphasize the importance of following the rules and the critical contributions of every employee from bottom to the top of the organisation. References Auvinen, T. and Sintonen, T. 2009. “Storiosis in Finnish high-tech company”, in Standing Conference for Management & Organization Inquiry Proceedings, Orlando, USA. Bell, J. 2002. Narrative Inquiry: More than just telling stories. Tesol Quarterly, 36 (2), 207-213. Boje, D.M. 1991. Consulting and change in the Storytelling organisation. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 4(3), pp. 7-17. Carr, D. 1986. Time, narrative and history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Deetz, S. 2001. Conceptual foundations. In F. M. Jablin & L. L. Putnam (Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research and methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Denning, S. 2005. The leader’s guide to storytelling. Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint. Denning, S. 2001. The Springboard. New York: Routledge Denning, S. 2004. Telling Tales. Harvard Business Review. https://engineering.purdue.edu/MECOM/Assignments/1.1.2010.SPRING.ME290/Telling-Tales-HBR.pdf Duffy, M. 1995. Sense-making in Classroom Conversations: Openness in Research: The Tension between Self and Other, I. Maso et al., eds., Van Gorcum, pp. 119-132. Erkas, E. and Baron, J. 2007. The Importance Importance of Storytelling in Today’s Business: A Case Study. Mater Thesis, University of Galve. Kaufman. B., 2003. Stories that sell, stories that tell. Journal of Business strategy. pp. 11-15. Kurtz, C. & Snowden, D. 2003. The New Dynamics of Strategy: sense making in a complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal. 42 (3), pp. 462-483. McClelland, D. 1961. The achieving society. Princeton: Van Nostrand. Peters, T. 1991. “Get Innovative or Get Dead”, California Management Review, 33 (2), pp. 9–23. Schank, R. & Abelson, R. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structure. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Shankar, A., Elliott, R. and Goulding, C. 2001. Understanding consumption: Contributions from a narrative perspective. Journal of Marketing Management, 17, pp. 429-453. Simmons, A. 2002. The Story Factor. New York: Basic Books. Sloman, S. 2005. Causal models: How we think about the world and its alternatives. New York: Oxford University Press Small, R. and Arnone, M. 2000. Turning Kids on to Research: The Power of Motivation. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited. Woodside, A. 2006. Overcoming the illusion of will and self-fabrication: Going beyond naïve subjective personal introspection to an unconscious/conscious theory of behaviour explanation. Psychology & Marketing, 23, pp. 257-272. Read More