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Judith and all: Please excuse me in advance the length
of this post. I can’t make a résumé of the ideas involved in the two
articles below. Judith as a writer, artist, and illustrator and as a profound connoisseur of the
work of her father could comment for us her own ideas about some interesting
relationship between narrative and complexity and formalisms versus stories. Rodrigo “Complexity
and Narrative: The co-evolution of stories, science and new insights into human
behavior. People
remember stories, not statistics, and recent research in many disciplines
suggests that the intersection of complexity and narrative may hold powerful
insights into human behavior. Some writers have already begun exploring this
intersection, and two argue that our species should be called Pan Narrans—the storytelling ape—rather than Homo sapiens.
Mathematician Ian Stewart, a science writer who also writes science fiction,
and Jack Cohen, a reproductive scientist who is the Kurt Richardson, managing
editor of E:CO is seeking contributions for a special
issue on Complexity and Narrative that will be dedicated to examining how story
telling and the principles of complexity science illuminate each other. Work on storytelling systems
and storytelling organizations, such as Boje, 1991
ASQ, 1995 AMJ, develops this line of inquiry. A practical approach might ask, “What
can managers learn about the dynamics of their organizations, seen as complex
systems, by studying storytelling among their people?” “The intersection of
these two studies is a fertile field,” Complexity journal seeks
contributions: How to Submit a Paper: Potential contributors are requested to submit an abstract of no more than
1000 words to Ken Baskin (***), David Boje
(***) and Kurt Richardson (***) by 21st September 2005.
The title of each paper should capture its topic, emphasizing the combination
of Complexity and Narrative studies - for example, "Storytelling in
Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems," "Narrating and Ante
narrating Storytelling Organizations," or "A Manager's Guide to
Storytelling in the Complex Organization." Selected contributors will then
be asked to submit a full paper of no more than 5000 words by 21st November Lissack and Richardson expressed his own ideas
about the theme in the following paper written two years ago. In this article
Robert Rosen is cited. Models without Morals: Toward the Ethical Use of Business Models. Michael R. Lissack & Kurt A. Richardson http://lissack.com/ethicalmodels.pdf (Selection) INTERRELATEDNESS,
STORIES, AND EMOTIONS Models, compartmentalization,
and rationality are not the only available truths. There is an alternative
view, where organizations can be viewed as systems of interpretation and constructions
of reality (Berger & Luckmann,
1967). In order to survive, organizations must find ways to interpret events so
as to stabilize their environments and try to make them more predictable;
organizations must also find ways to interpret events so as to be one with the
environment, an environment that they play a role in shaping. A central concern
of organization science is understanding how people construct meaning and
reality, and exploring how that enacted reality provides a context for action.
When managers “enact” the environment, as Weick
(1995) put it they construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many
“objective” features of their surroundings ... they unrandomise
variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own
constraints. Through this process of sense making and reality construction,
people in an organization give meaning to the events and actions of the
organization. Sense making and reality construction take place via stories and emotions
rather than via models and rationalizations, although of course models (albeit
less formal than the grand business models) still play an important part in the
development and _expression_ of these stories and emotions. This alternative
to the more simplistic and formal reductionist models grants more status to
stories and narratives. Unlike formal models and abbreviated metaphors
(especially quantitative models), stories and narratives allow for
considerations of complexity, of interrelationships, and of emotions. A story
narrates a past, present, or future event. All three contain truths and
fictions, thoughts and emotions, and all three overlap. Memories are stories,
stories consist of memories, and both are often expressed through metaphors.
The fusion of memory, metaphor, and story enables the creation of meaning
around, or seeing personal relevance in, a specific affordance or set of
affordances. When we are exposed to metaphors, stories, and memories, we
don’t passively absorb such messages. Instead, we create our own meaning
by mixing information from the context with our own memories, other stimuli
present at the moment, and the metaphors that come to mind as we think about
the attended-to affordance (Zaltman, 2003). As
William Mitchell put it, Metaphors do not exist as words in memory, but as
networks of abstract understandings that constitute part of our mental imagery.
(Mitchell, 1992) Stories are
among the more natural (natural to humans) tools that we have for making sense
of our environment and getting comfortable with both what has already occurred
and what is yet to come. Storytelling is how we make sense. We tell stories to
ourselves and to each other. Without them we can only exchange mere words as
symbols or icons. If we all had precisely the same set of experiences, the mere
sharing of words and icons would be enough. One word would have but one exact meaning.
But we all have divergent experiences, and for each of us those experiences are
woven together in a multitude of ways. We need stories to make sense of it all. As Hartman
(1999) notes, A story is a narrative told around the formalism of the model. It is
neither a deductive consequence of the model nor of the underlying theory. It
is, however, inspired by the underlying theory (if there is one). This is because
the story takes advantage of the vocabulary of the theory (such as “gluon”)
and refers to some of its features (such as its complicated vacuum structure).
Using more general terms, the story fits the model in a larger framework (a
“world picture”) in a non-deductive way. A story is, therefore, an
integral part of a model; it complements the formalism. To put it in a slogan:
a model is an (interpreted) formalism plus a story. Stories are not
a set of labels. If they were, then as the labels were triggered a predefined
set of images would be unfolded by the listener. Every listener would hear and
construct the same story. Children learn that this is not true when they play
“telephone or operator.” Corporate managers, however, tend to
forget this childhood lesson. The children’s game illustrates the new things
that can emerge as stories are told and retold. The corporate chieftains tend
to expect the same meaning to be evoked by their story as they retell it from
audience to audience. The chieftains miss what the children gained. In telling
and retelling the same war stories they often fail to ask their listeners about
the images the story evoked. What matters about a story is what the listeners
do with it, not the smile it brings to the face of the teller in its hundredth
reincarnation. Listeners use the images evoked to create meaning—meaning
that goes on to inform actions. Intuition
enables us to size up a situation quickly. Mental simulation lets us imagine
how a course of action might be carried out. Metaphor draws on experience by
suggesting parallels between the current situation and something else we have
come across. Storytelling helps us consolidate our experiences to make them
available in the future, either to ourselves or to others. The power of a story
is that it allows listeners to recreate an experience in their mind. Too many
details, too fine a point on things, remove the potency of the listener’s
imagination. The power of a good story is in the experience it evokes in its
listener. Most stories are set into a context by their tellers. That context
reinforces images of place and time. By activating the listener’s mental
model for a time and place, many details need not be told and room is created
for the listener’s imagination to roam. In effect, the storyteller has
carved out a canyon and the listener supplies the river of meaning to run
through it. The context set
out by the storyteller will conjure up a new set of “related ideas”
in the minds of each listener. Meaning emerges from the combination of what the
storyteller supplies and what the listener’s mind now adds. Stories
suggest new images, combinations of old and new ideas, and allow listeners to
place themselves in a simulacrum of related action. Meaningful stories are not
made up of isolated words. They too must evoke deeply held values and images.
To offer up isolated words is to evoke a shallow stream of water in a hot
desert. Whatever value there is dries up quickly. Narrative can
be, and often is, an instrument that provokes active thinking and helps us work
through problems. Our need for narrative form is perhaps so strong that we
don’t really believe something is true unless we can see it as a story.
Bringing a collection of events into narrative coherence can be described as a
way of normalizing or naturalizing those events. It renders them plausible,
allowing one to see how they all “belong.” This is a constant theme
in the work of historian Hayden White (1980): The very
distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern
discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in
which “the true” is identified with “the real” only
insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity. FORMALISMS
VERSUS STORIES The richer and
more obviously grounded descriptions that one can obtain about the experience
of being in business, or working within an organization, combined with a
growing cynicism regarding formal representations, have triggered a kind of
narrative turn in management science—a turn still struggling to grow
roots in the North American business literature, while displaying impressive
growth in Europe particularly. Such descriptions of business come from the
inside-out rather than the outside-in view of formal scientific models. In some
circles it is suggested that narrative approaches should be privileged over
more (traditional) scientific approaches, but, as has already been noted,
narratives still depend on models. Just because these hidden, though implied,
models are less formal and come from within the organization, from the workers
themselves, doesn’t necessarily make them better models (although they
are certainly different sorts of models—and they often are presented in a
form that we naturally find easier to grasp). Supporters of
the narrative approach who also deride the more formal scientific approaches
should recognize that many of the business models taught at business schools
result from the standardization, through abstraction, of collections of
organizational stories. Of course, significant detail is lost in the
abstraction process, but the models that underlie our narratives do not exist
separately from the more formal models that result from the application of
formal reductive methods. If business
people were scientists, the interpretive acts that accompany the application
and enactment of models would be recognized and surfaced. Such is the business
of science. But business people are not trained scientists and the
communicative shortcuts used by scientists—formal models—are
treated with undeserved naïve realism. The value of narratives and stories lies
in their appeal to the innate talents of those involved in management and in
managerial communication. We need (as always) to recognize that a little
knowledge can be a dangerous thing and thus to act to offset some of the
dangers. One thing is
certain: A preoccupation with stories and narratives will not necessarily lead
to ethical behavior. By giving up scientific models and chasing stories, |