The Organizational Storytelling Workbook: How to Harness this Powerful Communication and Management Tool

211 Pages·2020·1.847 MB·English

by  David Collins

The Organizational Storytelling
Workbook
This workbook is an interactive guide for leaders and managers to help you tell
compelling stories at work. The Organizational Storytelling Workbook offers:
(a) a critical engagement with academic debates on organizational story-
telling; and
(b) a series of exercises designed to allow users to improve their capability as
organizational storytellers.
The text begins with a chapter which locates organizational storytelling
within a critical account of organizational cultures. This book argues that
managerial accounts of organizational culture offer a limited appreciation of the
ways in which people think, feel and act, and suggests storytelling as a means of
redeeming our understanding of all matters cultural. Having secured this new
appreciation of culture and storytelling the workbook develops a series of
maxims and exercises designed to allow users: (a) to improve their storytelling
practice; and (b) to reassess the cultural assumptions and priorities revealed
through their practice.
Enriched with interactive features to walk managers practically through the
process of improving their storytelling skills, including practical exercises, con-
templative questions and space to respond creatively to the ideas in the book,
this workbook is the perfect companion to any executive or postgraduate
course in storytelling as well as a useful and enjoyable companion to any indi-
vidual manager that wishes to improve their skills.
DavidCollinsisProfessorinManagementatUniversityofNorthumbria,New-
castle and the founder and Managing Director of Gain Insight Ltd, a consulting
organization offering bespoke services on HRM, organizational change/transfor-
mation and the application of narrativestoorganizational problems.An academic
with more than 30 years’ experience, David holds advanced degrees from the
universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and Essex. This is his sixth book. Previous
works published by Taylor & Francis, Routledge include Organizational Change:
SociologicalPerspectives(1998);ManagementFadsandBuzzwords:Critical-PracticalPer-
spectives (2000); Narrating the Management Guru: In Search of Tom Peters (2007);
Stories for Management Success: The Power of Talk in Organizations (2018); and Man-
agementGurus:AResearchOverview(2021).

The Organizational
Storytelling Workbook
How to Harness this Powerful
Communication and Management Tool
David Collins
Firstpublished2021
byRoutledge
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Organizational culture; organized storytelling 8
2 Talking the talk; walking the walk 83
3 Storytelling exercises 101
4 Exploring the storyworld 179

Introduction
This workbook has been designed as a companion to Stories for Management
Success: Putting Stories to Work (Collins, 2018). If you’re not familiar with this
book, don’t worry, I’ll talk about its contents and approach in just a moment.
Indeed, to those who are late to the party, to those who have just arrived, I
offer the reassurance that the workbook you now hold in your hands has been
designed to work on its own terms.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that you shouldn’t buy Stories for Management
Success.Actually Ibelievethatyoushould: It’sa goodbook;Ihadfunwriting it
and I really do think you’ll enjoy it!
What I am saying is this: The workbook you now cradle comfortably in
your hands (and I’ll come back to this in a moment) will help you in your
organizational life (and everything in life is organizational!) even if you haven’t
read my earlier book; even if you have never before considered managerial
work as an activity rooted in, and dependent upon, the practice of storytelling.
* * * *
If you are already familiar with my Stories for Management Success, indeed if
you bought my book, I have two things to say to you. First, thank you!
And, second, please don’t think that the book you now hold in your hands
simply repeats what I have written before. It does not!
This workbook has, of course, been designed as a companion to my earlier
work. Yet it is complementary: The opening discussion, which frames the
activities of the workbook (developed in Chapter 1), and the maxims devel-
oped in Chapter 2 are, for example, genuinely new and, while these chapters
will, necessarily, cover some of the ground traversed in Stories for Management
Success, this text offers new content that has been developed specifically for this
workbook. Thus the account of organizational storytelling offered here, unlike
that developed in Stories for Management Success, will frame our core concerns
within a critical appreciation of ‘culture’. This discussion, as we shall see, (a)
challenges much of what has been written for managers on the nature of ‘cul-
ture’ and on the mechanics of ‘culture change’ while (b) utilising a critical,
sensemaking, account of storytelling to redeem this endeavour.