Restorying the Organization

To facilitate the organization’s re-narration, the connections the existing narrative provides to peoples self-identity have to be recognized (Hermanowicz & Morgan, 1999). Todd (2005) talked about this and said:

Where identity has been entwined with power… changes are experienced not simply as a change of regime, but – for the dominant group – as an overturning of the moral order, an insult to their own integrity and identity, a placing of the undeserving above the deserving. It is a particularly sharp form of dissonance, where the world is not ordered as they had come to expect, and where these expectations were constitutive of their sense of themselves. (p. 440)

Both leader and member who attempt change in an organization will experience resistance. This isn’t a sign that the effort should be abandoned but an indication that the system has been disturbed. It is this disturbance and the chaos that follows that provides the narrative leader his or her best opportunity for change (Wheatley, 1999): to produce new meanings, new cultures, and to formulate new ideology (Atkinson, 2006).