USING STORIES TO CHANGE ORGANISATIONS

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USING STORIES TO CHANGE ORGANISATIONS
Paul Bate
Professor of Health Services Management UCL
Medical School
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Stories hold many of the keys to change (1)

• First get peoples attention and then their
  intention Put down that monkey wrench! the
  inciting incident
• Grounded in everyday lived experience the
  being there/been there quality (cf. Ben Watt)
• Able to communicate abstract, intangible and
  complex ideas simply, concretely and meaningfully
  (love, honour, letting go, pain, loss
  leadership)
• Unfreeze, energise and mobilise springboard
  stories (Denning) melting the frozen fires
  within us (Whyte)
• Makes sense in the head the importance of
  framing and frame alignment
• Resonates in the heart tapping in to sentiment
  pools
• Communicates a sense of a better place the pull
  of desire aspirationals desire is the blood
  of a story

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Stories hold many of the keys to change (2)

• Truth value v Fact value the dramatisation
  of reality porkies with a purpose!
• Intensify awareness of the present seeing it as
  it is the nowness of the now (Potter)
• Suggest an attractive imaginary future escapism
  and reverie
• Establish personal credibility, integrity and
  humanity, and disable antagonism
• Stories are how we communicate and remember key
  to spread and sustainabiltiy

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NHS Treatment Centres
Here today gone tomorrow?
Derek Smith CEO - Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust
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FRAMES PERFORM 3 CORE FUNCTIONS

• They focus attention by specifying what
• is in frame and what is out of frame
• They articulate and elaborate the
• elements of the scene so that one meaning
  rather than another is conveyed
• They transform the way in which some objects of
  attention are seen or understood as relating to
  each other
• (Dave Snow, 2004)

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3 CORE FRAMING TASKS
(1) Diagnostic Framing Diagnosis of some
event or aspect of life as
troublesome and in need of repair or change
(problematization), and attributes
blame or responsibility
(attribution) (2) Prognostic Framing
Articulation of a proposed solution to the
problem, a strategy or plan of attack,
and the tactics for carrying it
out (3) Motivational Framing Articulation
of a call to arms or rationale for engaging
in collection action addresses the
free-rider problem
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Different kinds of CorporateTales

• The realist tale
• The impressionist tale
• The uplifting tale
• The confessional tale
• (John Van Maanen Tales of the Field, 1988)

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Uplifting Tales the NHS authentic voices
project

• Hazel Stuteley Rebirth of a
  community on a West
• 
  Cornwall housing estate
• Sean OKelly The
  Modernisation Associates story
• David Shiers A personal
  narrative on early
• Maryanne Freer psychosis
  in young people
• Angela Lennox Rejuvenation of
  St Matthews
• 
  Estate, Leicester
• Sarah Schofield Transformation
  of orthopaedic
  
• 
  services in primary and secondary
• 
  care in Hampshire

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Stories are the key to cultural change

• If you want to change the way people think,
  start by changing the way they talk. Encourage
  them to devise new scripts and participate in new
  language games. Shape intellectual and symbolic
  structures by giving people new topics of
  conversation to debate, gossip and fight about
  give them new stories to tell and retell each
  other. The theory of change is therefore actually
  quite a simple one if you can unfreeze and
  restructure language you can unfreeze and
  restructure thought Stories and storytelling
  are a crucial aspect of organisational life the
  narrative to tie experiences, views and
  interpretations together, something that has
  sequence, logic, flow and direction, that
  represents a coherent version of the emerging
  reality. (Bate, 1994)

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Stories and cultural change

• Stories are not a symptom of culture, culture
  is a symptom of storytelling.
• (Weick and Browning,
  1986 249)

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Storytelling to build community and effect
cultural change

• Change as a journey
• Pettigrews Pioneers
• Bates Pilgrims

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Stories play a crucial role at every stage of the
change journey from conception to implementation

• Building personal awareness and understanding,
  and finding a place for oneself on the change
  journey (personal narrative)
• Becoming aware of alternative perspectives and
  overlapping values, aims and purposes merging
  personal and collective identities and building a
  community of practice (communal narrative)
• Critiquing and stigmatising the present, and
  building a shared felt need and vision for
  change (counter-narrative)
• Translating joint commitments into joint actions
  moving forward together, and, most importantly,
  keeping going (mobilising narrative)

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The dramatisation of change

• Scripting
• Staging
• Performing
• Interpreting

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• All great change leaders are great storytellers
• Luther King
• Kennedy
• Berwick
• Halligan
• Sadler

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References Bate, S. P. (2004), The role of
stories and storytelling in organisational change
efforts, Intervention. Journal of Culture,
Organisation and Management, 1(1), pp. 27-43.
Conger, J. A. (1998), The necessary art of
persuasion, Harvard Business Review, May,
reprint number 98304. Denning, S. (2004),
Telling tales, Harvard Business Review, May,
pp. 1-7. Hunt, S. A., Benford, R. D. (1997),
Dramaturgy and methodology, In G Miller R.
Dingwall (eds.) Context and methodology in
qualitative research. McKee, R. (2003),
Storytelling that moves people. A conversation
with a screenwriting coach, Harvard Business
Review, June, pp. 51-55. Watt, B. (1996),
Patient, the true story of a rare illness,
London Viking.