Introducing Story Domes David Boje

1
Introducing Story DomesDavid Boje Steve
KingSept 1 2007
2
Bini Domes are shaped like spheres

• Dante N. Bini invented a patented method of
  cement dome construction, which produces
  circular, monolithic, reinforced concrete shell
  structures in just an hour or two. Bini domes
  typically range in size from 12 to 40 meters in
  diameter. Over 1,500 Bini-based buildings are in
  use in 23 Countries.

3
Building an architectural dome

• After they are constructed domes are very
  stable, self supporting structures that provide
  highly useful and esthetic space for many
  architectural and industrial applications
• But building a dome is challenging due to
  instability and danger of collapse during the
  building process

4
Bini domes are used for many diverse domestic
and commercial structures
(Story Domes are a Bini-like approach to
organizational narrative work!)
5
What is a Story Dome?

• Domes are a useful metaphor for seeing the
  relation among overarching past-narratives,
  future-antenarratives, now-stories spheres,
  that are needed in organizations for
• Goals, strategies and policies (GSP)
• In many different kinds of large and small
  organizations, GSPs are high-level linguistic
  constructs that inform, control or guide granular
  front/back office business activities, workflows,
  project management, strategies, public relations,
  and critical processes, etc.

6
What is a Narrative Dome?

• Its a beginning middle end narrative, that is
  super-imposed onto everything else, towering above

7
Goal/strategy/policy BME narratives can be
thought of as protective domes for
organizational processes and workflows
GSPs High-level goals, management
controls strategy, policy, consensus

• Granular front/back office workflows
• Business processes
• Production / supply chain
• Project management

8
TWO NARRATIVE DOME TYPES ARE IN NEED OF NEW
SOLUTIONS

• BME Narratives are too petrified, with BMEs
  (beginning, middle, end), too linear, too
  retrospective (past-looking), to ornamental
• Fragmented Narratives take too much detective
  work, to search for an originary BME to guide
  reassembly of an image that may never hav been
• Experts do tersely-tell fragments, letting others
  fill in the blanks (of the assumed narrative
  whole), but that this can lead to a mess

9
Most Narrative work neglects the future story
BME Fragments of retrospection is like being a
DOME HEAD, always replaying the PAST
We need Story work in organizations to
antenarrate the future, not reciting the
petrified past. Antenarratives are bets on the
future.

• In long-standing organizations with strong
  cultures like Disney, Nike, Wal-Mart, and
  McDonald's, even the founding narratives are
  restoried, in each telling, to ante-up new ways
  to antenarrate the future.

10
Story dome type 1 Authoritarian, top-down, BME
Narrating

• Using the dome-building metaphor, some
  goal/strategy/policy constructs are built like
  domes that have rigid bureaucratic struts and
  supports that go up first. These managerial BME
  struts do not necessarily reflect the needs of
  all the stakeholders and contributors

In the over-bureaucratic model, after BME
struts are constructed, But the foundation,
floor, wall,s tiles or bricks is all the
stakeholder Stories Antenarratives that form
the dome shell. Problem they are too often
forced into an architecture that is rigid and
unrepresentative of the commercial and social
ecosystems
11
Traditional dome construction with scaffolding
and temporary supports seems rather risky to us...
12
Beyond BME domes some futuristic antenarrative
structures?
13
Important STORY TYPES are different from
Narrative Dome types

• ANTENARRATIVES - are Forward-looking, travel
  move widely, pick up jettison meaning with each
  context arrival (Boje, 2001)
• Emotive-Ethical Stories - are Now-looking,
  emotion is often an ethical answer to a crisis
  happening now (Boje, 2007)
• Horsesense Stories - are Now-looking, with
  intuitive or energetic relation to others in the
  now (beyond the 5 empiric perceptual senses of
  retrospective narrative sensemaking (Rosile,
  2007)
• CAN STORY DOMES make NARRATIVE work better?

14
1 flat BME cement slab
2 slab is lifted by air (story) pressure while
cement is still wet
3 cement cures to stable self-supporting
structure combining best of BME with story
co-ocnstruction
15
TAMARA

• Tamara is a model of how organizations have
  storytelling going on in-the-now, simultaneously
  in more than one room (Boje, 1995)

• Complex organization has storying going on in
  multiple sites, in hundreds of rooms, buildings,
  global enterprises --gt in different
  nations.Story meaning depends upon your social
  networking, the path history of all the rooms you
  were in, before the present one.

• Complexity pathways of simultaneous story rooms,
  even in organizations with as few as 12 rooms is
  huge (12 factorial is 479,001,600 different
  pathways in social networks).

16
Story Dome is a Co-Constructive Process
17
OVERALL STORY DOME MODEL

• INPUTS MOST ORGANIZATIONS HAVE
• BME Fragmented Narratives (past-looking)
• Antenarratives (forward-looking)
• Emotive-Ethical Horsesense (now-looking)
• SITUATED CONTEXTS
• Tamara (the simultaneous storying going on in
  multiple venues rooms, cities, nations)
• OUTPUTS OF STORY DOME WORK
• Turning events into experience
• Shaping collective memory strategic story
  action
• Building collective story practices

18
A Story Dome is a sphere that inflates, in very
short time, if you know how to do it
19
Dome realities

• Real world (physical) domes can be unstable when
  under construction, with the possibility of
  failure or collapse..
• But when they are completed, domes are generally
  highly stable and self supporting in an organic,
  resilient way.
• The same is true of narrative domes in many
  respects!
• Over-arching policy and consensus BME narratives
  can be unstable and bottom-up collective story
  arrays are hard-to-build initially, but when they
  succeed, they are self-supporting, with a useful
  strategic life.
• Story Domes can be persistently rigid, or they
  can be very flexible, i.e., quickly put up/taken
  down for short term projects

20
There are New Story Dome Patterns, that are
strong, yet supportive
21
Story dome type 2 Grass roots, bottom-up,
Storying

• As an alternative to bureaucratic, top-down
  approaches, a GSP story dome can be built,
  brick-by-brick (story-by-story) from the
  bottom-up... but this is time consuming,
  difficult and prone to failure, due to the
  instabilities that BME narratives (and type 1
  domes) have when under construction

22
Story dome type 3 The Antenarrative Dome

• Unlike the top-down and bottom-up approaches to
  goal/strategy/policy narratives, the
  Antenarrative Story Dome method balances the BME
  top-down needs of the executive suite/BOD with
  the bottom-up storying needs of the staff,
  customers, contractors and other stakeholders.
  Antenarrative Story Domes build GSP content
  quickly and efficiently, enabling the realization
  of a distributive consensual antenarrative (DCA

23
Story Domes Advanced tools and methods

• Story Domes avoid the pitfalls of typical GSP
  doctrines and formal petrified BME narrative
  creation efforts, which include excessive
  time/human/financial resource demands, linearity,
  and the tendency towards GSP failure or
  inefficiency
• With Story Domes, GSP viability is achieved by
  rapid, organic DCA (Distributive Consensus
  Antenarrative) expansion using a number of
  advanced tools and methods
• Bojes Antenarrative Engine (up,down,left,right
  sensemaking) Rosiles HorseSense-making, Story
  Sphere discovery Tobeys Thinklets (cognitive
  neuroscience) Tamara training, etc. See
  workshops at http//storyemergence.org
• Get an Antenarrative Lift Effect

24
Stories Domes can support short- and long- term
organizational GSP needs with rapid, efficient
construction of Distributive Consensual
Antenarratives (DCA)

• A DCA has a unique and useful antenarrative
  cohesion and a holistic, holographic nature
• A DCA is able to unite many story fragments,
  antenarratives as well as BME terse narrative
  constructions into a productive holographic
  whole..
• Whole-in-every-part means theres a unified
  cohesive discourse that all participants resonate
  with.
• Parts-throughout-the-whole means that the
  partshave influence throughout the whole... all
  stakeholders and local/cultural interests are
  represented.

25
A different Story Dome for every organizational
learning and improvement requirement!...

• Because Story Domes are neither fully top-down or
  fully bottom-up..
• ...they can support rapid creation of GSP DCN
  that is accurately suited to the specific needs
  of each organization or ad hoc project..
• Some Story Domes are highly persistent. eg,
  corporate policy embedded social networks
• Other Story Domes are light, ephemeral and
  dynamic (like air-supported structures), which
  enables DCA construction for tactical projects
  and focused near term collaboration (eg, joint
  marketing campaigns, relief efforts, seasonal
  projects, etc.)