People Change

Like all literature, our stories include the development of a plot, the storyline we communicate, hoping to express how we see ourselves. We form our plot aware that our self is a continual ordering of personal events into a historical unity that includes what we have been with anticipation of what we will be (Polkinghorne, 1988). As is the ebb and flow of life elsewhere, we look for finality in our plot where change to it is gradual and the interpretation of our daily life somewhat stable (Barclay, 1994). It is normal in our context of time and story for what begins to end. After all, the stories we hear and tell as well as the books we read and the theatre we see all have beginnings and endings. So too is the desire for stability within our identity narrative a desire for closure, a certain hoping for order and completion in our lives (Whitebrook, 2001). In the narration, then, of our lived stories we depict events and in their plotting we demonstrate the interconnectedness of those events (Cobly, 2001). In this way we enhance the knowledge of our selves even though we live in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end (Polkinghorne, 1988).

This makes the breadth of our narratives and plot equal to the depth of our memories and that held the closest, our identity, the least negotiable. It is likely then that one cannot change the story of another. Instead, change in another’s narrative must come at the hand of its author. People change then is not something that leader’s do but something they provide the means for by telling another story, giving, as it were, people opportunity to see themselves differently. As such narrative leadership seeks to change human organizations by leading their members to write a new story of their organization.