Collective sense making starts with individual stories. Stories influence how we construct our sense of self in relation to others and our social environment, especially within the world of work. The stories we tell ourselves at work, particularly during times of change, impact our relationships and the collaboration with those who are engaged in the same work activities. Stories that we take for granted as "common sense" may not resonate with others, leading to conflict and tensions. This book focuses on the development of collaborative practices at work, and in organisations, through Collaborative Storytelling: from sharing stories to exchanging experiences and building a common narrative collectively. This open access book will be of interest to practitioners and academics working in the fields of adult education, equity and inclusion, human resource management, practice-based studies, organisational studies, qualitative research methods, sensemaking, storytelling, and workplace identity.
Collaboration is key for organizations in the 21st century, yet few business people have been trained to teach this skill. How do you advance ideas in a collaborative way and then communicate them throughout your company? In this practical book, author Gretchen Anderson shows you how to generate ideas with others while gaining buy-in from all levels of your organization. Product managers, designers, marketers, technical leaders, and executives will obtain better insight into how team members work together to make decisions. Through tangible exercises and techniques, you’ll learn how to turn promising ideas into products, services, and solutions that make a real difference in the market. Use a framework to develop ideas into hypotheses to be tested and refined Avoid common pitfalls in the collaboration process Align communication approaches to ensure that collaboration is effective and inclusive Structure events or meetings for different types of collaboration depending on the people involved Practice giving and receiving critiques to foster inclusion without resorting to consensus-based decisions
Michael Fullan and Mark Edwards capture a powerful way forward Today’s challenges have led to a loss of hope at all levels of education leadership. Spirit Work and the Science of Collaboration advocates for the development of two qualities that will bring back hope: "spirit work" and the “science of collaboration”. Built on eight school district cases of success spirit work inspires leaders and community members to join to create a positive powerful culture. The authors delve into new developments in neuroscience to show how spirit and collaboration represent revolutionary potential for education. Readers will find: A lifeline amid overwhelming and exhausting conditions Hope for themselves and the future of education Ideas for building cohesion throughout school communities
This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. Who will wear the shoes is a question long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to recount narratives in a variety of ways so that the precepts of entrepreneurial storytelling can be made accessible to a variety of audiences — academic, practitioner, student, and community member. Entrepreneurship has a long history and tradition but there are disputed ways of doing business storytelling in entrepreneurship that the next four volumes articulate.Volume 2 provides insights into stories fostering the idea of business (and not necessarily business itself). It focuses specifically on history — contributing to the current debates within management and organizational history around the idea of 'the historic turn'. It reflects on the idea of business and beyond; could there be more to history and business storytelling than what has previously been accepted in the field? This book sets out to explore a diverse array of alternative modes and multiple ways of storying organizations. The editors intentionally sought to involve an international network of authors with diverse storytelling accounts of history as a way of helping build out this new storytelling paradigm in a diverse and inclusive ethic. As a result, this volume showcases a broad spectrum of critical storytelling from geographically diverse authors working in universities, small businesses, and public service throughout Brazil, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To reflect these dynamics, and for the stories in this volume to fit together, chapters were organized into three themes: stories of processing history, tales of history-as-method, and narratives of history through a business opportunity.Volume 3 features stories that reflect the exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, and income across the world. These inequalities and power relations remain continuously con-tested, particularly in these trying times, despite being captive to a particular economic ideology built on the premise of exploitation and subjugation. The stories told in this volume tell against the orthodoxy, the colonizer, and the (seemingly) powerful. They are organized as stories of resistance, emancipation, and transformation. They invite us to rethink the multiple ways to (re)structure power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and open up spaces for the marginalized underprivileged voices.Volume 4 is designed to create a new business storytelling paradigm that critically approaches business narratives that have historically privileged a corporate agenda. It explores the various ways that images of the other in business are developed, presented, and accounted for through powerful and dominant narratives. The stories in this volume, collectively, help readers to understand, resist, and provide strategies for change through various analyses of how business narratives come to develop, get written, are legitimized, are challenged, and get changed over time.Volume 5 brings together the practices specific to the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM). SEAM is a method of change management developed through research interventions carried out in more than 2,000 companies and organizations since 1975. This method is systemic, it considers the whole company, and tends to simultaneously increase social and economic performance by focusing mainly on the development of human skills and behaviors, making it possible to reduce dysfunctions and recycle hidden costs into added value.
CEO Barry Halton is beginning to think he's not cut out to carry a company from ordinary to extraordinary. After a great start-up, his second company has hit an all-too-familiar wall.Frustrated and discouraged, he runs into an old friend who introduces him to The Collaborative Way(R), a way of working together that not only builds a great place to work but also generates the competitive advantage Barry is looking for.Three years after that chance encounter, the result is a dramatic change in Barry's leadership and in the leadership throughout his company-a tremendous growth in collaboration that's moving the company forward in a powerful and inspiring way.
High Growth Handbook is the playbook for growing your startup into a global brand. Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from small companies into global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, Gil has identified a set of common patterns and created an accessible playbook for scaling high-growth startups, which he has now codified in High Growth Handbook. In this definitive guide, Gil covers key topics, including: · The role of the CEO · Managing a board · Recruiting and overseeing an executive team · Mergers and acquisitions · Initial public offerings · Late-stage funding. Informed by interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal-clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups.
"Working with Stories" is a textbook for people who want to use participatory narrative inquiry (PNI) in their communities and organizations. PNI methods help people discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. Participatory narrative inquiry draws on theory and practice in narrative inquiry, participatory action research, oral history, mixed-methods research, participatory theatre, narrative therapy, sensemaking, complexity theory, and decision support. Its focus is on the exploration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through collaborative sensemaking with stories of lived experience. Contents Introduction Fundamentals of Story Work What Is a Story? What Are Stories For? How Do Stories Work? Stories in Communities and Organizations A Guide to Participatory Narrative Inquiry Introducing Participatory Narrative Inquiry Project Planning Story Collection Group Exercises for Story Collection Narrative Catalysis Narrative Sensemaking Group Exercises for Narrative Sensemaking Narrative Intervention Narrative Return Appendices Example Models and Templates for Group Exercises Further Reading: Your PNI Bookshelf Bibliography Acknowledgements and Biography Glossary Index Reader praise "I wanted to say thanks for making Working with Stories available. It's an amazing piece of work, so simple (not the ideas, but the presentation) and unintimidating." "["Working With Stories"] is very thorough and helpful to me in exploring ways that I might capture the narrative of a project I am involved in." "Your detailed description of [the sensemaking] process is so useful and helpful. It makes seasoned facilitators like me yearn to try out the ideas." "Over the past few months I have been reading, reflecting, and feasting on your experiences working with stories. I am really excited to have found "Working With Stories" because it seems like a rich set of options for our needs." "Your terminology and explanation of participatory narrative inquiry have helped me greatly in understanding what I want from my practice and what I might be capable of achieving in social change." "I have been returning to Working With Stories time and again over the past six months to help support a community project, and my printed copy is underlined, noted and dog-eared."
This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.
Storylistening makes the case for the urgent need to take stories seriously in order to improve public reasoning. Dillon and Craig provide a theory and practice for gathering narrative evidence that will complement and strengthen, not distort, other forms of evidence, including that from science. Focusing on the cognitive and the collective, Dillon and Craig show how stories offer alternative points of view, create and cohere collective identities, function as narrative models, and play a crucial role in anticipation. They explore these four functions in areas of public reasoning where decisions are strongly influenced by contentious knowledge and powerful imaginings: climate change, artificial intelligence, the economy, and nuclear weapons and power. Vivid performative readings of stories from The Ballad of Tam-Lin to The Terminator demonstrate the insights that storylistening can bring and the ways it might be practised. The book provokes a reimagining of what a public humanities might look like, and shows how the structures and practices of public reasoning can evolve to better incorporate narrative evidence. Storylistening aims to create the conditions in which the important task of listening to stories is possible, expected, and becomes endemic. Taking the reader through complex ideas from different disciplines in ways that do not require any prior knowledge, this book is an essential read for policymakers, political scientists, students of literary studies, and anyone interested in the public humanities and the value, importance, and operation of narratives.
