Narrative Leadership Part 1

Narrative leadership seeks to change human organizations by leading their members to write a new story of their organization. This entails an appreciation of the essential nature of narrative within human sociality, its power over social actors, and a commitment to determine the individual and corporate narratives within the scope of its influence.

Narrative

Narratives are stories. In personal terms, they are the stories we tell about ourselves that fix our place in time and link our memories with events. As such, narratives bring coherency to our experiences (Bojea, & Rhodesb, 2005) and help us create meaning (Polkinghorne, 1988).

Narrative also serves to plot (Whitebrook, 2001) our living within the greater structure of stories that we have created about ourselves and the sense derived from them (Denzin, 2000). These stories emanate from our cluster of relationships that are bounded in time and are causal (Whitebrook, 2001). Individually, narrative informs how we know ourselves and our larger society (Denzin, 2000). Corporately, narrative is “the main source of knowledge in the practice of organizing” (Brown & Humphreys, 2002, p. 423).

The narrative of everyday life is a timing of activity in an attempt at making sense of our experiences (Patriotta, 2003, p. 351). It provides rhythm to the social order and through it we live our daily, cognitive moments. The narratives of culture differ in that they require “a general understanding of the stock meanings and their relationships to each other” (Richardson, 1990, p. 127) and is where the social actor understands what is normal and expected. It is through cultural narratives that we “support our social world” (p. 127).

Biographical narrative is the sense that what we as social actors are able to do in creating our own narratives can also be attributed to others. “Social and generational cohesion, as well as social change, depend upon this ability to empathize with the life stories of others” (Richardson, 1990, p. 127). Autobiographical narrative, on the other hand, helps us relate what is past to what is present, organizing the “experience of time into personal historicity” (p. 125). Richardson (1990) stated:

People organize their personal biographies and understand them through the stories they create to explain and justify their life experiences. When people are asked why they do what they do, they provide narrative explanations. It is the way individuals understand their own lives and best understand the lives of others. (p. 126)

The Remembered Self and Narrative

Autobiographical memories then are the essence of the remembered self. They allow us to extend our presence “over time past and into the expected future” (Barclay, 1994, p. 60) through a “perpetually rewritten story” (Bruner, 1994, p. 53) where “one’s remembered self at any particular moment is a gestalt composed and objectified in constructed and reconstructed personal and generic memories” (Barclay, 1994, p. 55).

In forming our self-narratives, autobiographical memories attest to the “known and verifiable events in one’s life [and] satisfy a sense of personal coherence and integrity” (p. 59). In effect, their construction becomes the basis of our personal identity (Fivush & Neisser, 1994) and makes change of our identity perceived differently than change to our identity; where the one is self-orchestrated, the other is imposed by the changing narratives of our work-life (Lundberg, 1999).

Although narrative is fundamental to understanding the world and ourselves, still, we compose it from stories colored by the memory that retains them (Spohn, 2006, p. 17) and relate it as our true self with little consideration that what is true and what is remembered are not necessarily the same. We know our memories as events or even as facts but tell them as stories: stories that, like all literature, have both narrative and plot.