Keywords

Over a decade ago, when we first started working with stories, we were not sure what we were doing, but intuitively knew that we were on the right path.

“What do you mean you work with stories?” has been a frequent question asked, and to be fair, there were times where we felt that this question was asked in all aspects of our lives: at work, social gatherings, and most often in our home.

Although, at times, this question felt frustrating and exhausting, we are grateful to those who asked because it activated our own storytelling about what our purpose is, who we serve, and how we do our work.

It is now clear that we are tinkers and thinkers who are Story Craftivists. What this means in practice is to acknowledge and nurture authentic stories, striving to work for sustainable, inclusive change for individuals and communities. It is also about holding space and witnessing people make sense of their social and material worlds without judgement or giving advice on how their sensemaking should lead to their purpose.

Working with stories activates our minds, bodies, and hearts, and when we are “in the zone,” we are transported into the imaginary landscape of the storyteller. Most often the catalyst into the zone are metaphors and stories where the individual creatively uses voice and their bodies (with any form of art expression) to explain how the story makes them feel while recalling an event, describing their experience, or imagining a situation.

As an audience, this experience is like being pulled by an invisible force that unites two worlds, and this is why we gave ourselves the title of Story Mediators to give words to “being in the middle” of the implicit and explicit, conscious or unconscious, the dominant and peripheral, and the material or symbolic worlds of embodied sensemaking and cognition.

Mentorship Mosaic

It is clear that our work with individual and organisational storytelling was preceded by other scholars and practitioners whose theorisation and methods informed and impacted Collaborative Storytelling, Story Mediation, and Collaborative Story Craft. Scholars such as David Boje and his work on antenarrative (2011), organisational storytelling practices in a Quantum Age (Boje 2008) and his collaboration with Kenneth Jørgensen on “True Storytelling” for sustainable problem-based learning (Jørgensen and Boje 2020). Yannis Gabriel’s work on myths, archetypes, and fantasy in organisation and workplace narratives from a psychotherapist lens (1995, 2004) and Wendelin Küpers, Saku Mantere, and Matt Statler’s work on strategy as storytelling.

Story Mediation and Collaborative Story Craft as a method was also cultivated when Paulo was a student at the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE), a hub for academics and practitioners established by Yrjö Engeström at the University of Helsinki. As well as Adele Clarke’s method “Situational Analysis: grounded theory after the interpretive turn” (2005, Clarke et al. 2017) which influenced Tricia’s positioning. Clarke’s method is also an extension and deep appreciation to Anslem Strauss, a well-known grounded theorist on social worlds. Her work both honours her mentor’s contribution but also shifts the paradigm of grounded theory to encapsulate interpretivism and Foucaultian discourse analysis of narrative, historical, and visual materials.

With a work as craft mindset, we aimed in this book not only to appreciate those that we have elected as our mentors, but also to make our own unique contribution to storytelling as a way to build narratives during organisational change. As written by Henry Mintzberg, theory and methods should be surprising, and this is the whole purpose of scientific contribution (2017, p. 10):

Theory is insightful when it surprises, when it allows us to see profoundly, imaginatively, unconventionally into phenomena we thought we understood… (A professor of mine once said that theories go through three stages: first they’re wrong; then they’re subversive; finally they’re obvious.)

Perhaps, this book is in the “subversive stage,” and we are content with this defiance as we continue to break apart, question, stay curious, and sometimes struggle about what we say and do while taking ownership of our work with purpose, accountability, and self-awareness of the cultural-historical context. As Rollo May, an existential psychologist, once wrote in “The Courage to Create” (1975, p. 8):

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent.

Through this collaborative journey as storytelling practitioners, we discovered that there are no such things as one theory, method, perspective, narration, or story. In fact, this essentialism leads to dubious explanations and destructive practices that isolate individuals or dominant groups and “hardens” creativity, innovation, and the possibilities for change. No one benefits from this narrow view of possibilities, especially those protecting it at any cost.

The centipede was happy quite

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

That worked her mind to such a pitch,

She lay distracted in a ditch

Considering how to run.

(Mrs. Edward Craster 1871; quoted by Mintzberg 2017)

Metaphors and storytelling invoke curiosity, being present, and actively listening, especially when they come through authentic narration. Metaphors and stories can provide courage and perseverance during uncertainty, times of difficulty, and entering the unknown.

In Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book “The Hero of a thousand faces” (2008), he describes a pattern called the Hero’s Journey based on his research of archetypes, myths, and stories from various cultures in the world.

The Hero’s Journey is a metaphor-archetype where the hero leaves the comfort of the status quo because of a call to action. There are several stages that Campbell uses to describe venturing into the supernatural unknown where the hero encounters a mentor who guides the hero through obstacles. The hero triumphs victoriously before coming back from this mysterious adventure with powers to bestow onto his community.

Within this metaphor-archetype, we found that the hero and the mentor being singular felt limiting and isolating, especially when it comes to Collaborative Storytelling. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her article “When the Hero is the problem”, we can find strength in numbers rather than giving over our powers to one individual, endowed with the responsibility to protect the status quo.

She writes about the possibilities of collective action for positive social change which comes from people connecting more deeply to others rather than rising above them (April 2nd, 2019):

…that’s what we get, over and over, and in the course of getting them [heroes] we don’t get much of a picture of how change happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” is a line of Bertold Brecht’s I’ve gone to dozens of times, but now I’m more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.

Questioning the hero as central to the story and inviting others to share their experiences in the story helps address “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973) like global inequity, climate change, and political divisiveness that affects all aspects of society, including the workplace. Collective problems and sustainable change can only be created and acted upon collectively.

We broke the hero and mentor mould by crafting the concept “Mentorship Mosaic.” Mentorship Mosaic is the process of drawing from various lived experiences where a mentor, human and non-human, was encountered to help make meaningful sense, retrospectively, of events based on one’s identity, social relationships, and cultural-historical context. This means that a mentor does not always narrate advice or support. A lesson does not need to be delivered directly from a mentor figure as it can be formed from feelings invoked by a process, such as reading a book of an author you will never meet in an old historical library.

To build Mentorship Mosaic is to acknowledge that although we live in a story, we do not encounter one single mentor for the whole journey. Every mentor is a master of his or her own craft, and it would be unrealistic and even unfair to expect that our mentors would be responsible to be a reference to our unique embodied experiences throughout all the cycles of our journey.

As we build on Joseph Campbell’s work, we consider the Hero’s and Heroine’s journey as interdependent cycles within our own life story. This reminds us that for each cycle we have encountered different mentors. The lessons acquired from those mentors were not only timely and contextual, but they were directed at particular areas that needed to be developed in the hero within us.

Through Metaphorical Tourism, we can revisit those past cycles and reconnect with the stories that made a person, an event, or an entity become a mentor. This process validates the lessons and honours the mentors. And yet, revisiting past cycles also identifies the area in which the mentor could help us. That area is one tile to the Mentorship Mosaic that we, as heroes of our own story, are building throughout the cycles of our journey. To those of us who have had the opportunity to build a relationship with “human mentors”, building a Mentorship Mosaic also allows us to identify the humanity in them. This craft mindset also releases our past mentors from being a reference point to all areas and phases of our story.

To craft a Mentorship Mosaic is to be able to see the lessons and stories that we have embodied and by doing that, making sense of how we can mentor ourselves and others.

Crafting Stories Through Empathy and Collective Courage

When we engage with Collaborative Storytelling, we have an exercise which we frequently use to get to know a new group. This exercise is called “sharing the ice cream” as a way to sweeten the common metaphor of “breaking the ice”. This exercise consists of four simple questions:

My name is…

I am more than (primary identity seen by others). I am also…

My expectation for today is…

If I could choose a superpower, it would be…

We shared this exercise at the end of the book as an invitation: to consider a craft mindset of tinker and thinker, to become a mindful storyteller and maybe a Story Craftivist. Think about your responses. Where do they take you? Do they nurture the roots of your authentic story? Do they connect with your lifestyle and sense of responsibility in the world? Or do they take you in a Metaphorical Tourism to the future that you aspire to witness? As our paths have crossed, this exercise is also a reminder that this is just a continuation of a story and the beginning of a new cycle.