Narrow Results

How can storytelling help create more inclusive workplaces and bring about consent with things as they really are? This chapter presents our intervention tool, Collaborative Story Craft (CSC), as a way to involve more members in the collective story at the workplace. From our positions as researchers and practitioners, we give an account of the tool’s theoretical framework, specifically schools of sensemaking and social worlds, to describe and connect our method to practice. In this chapter, we also introduce a fictional story to highlight the sensemaking process of using CSC as a meaningful way to include more voices into the collective story.

This chapter presents personal narrative accounts of lived experiences from African American diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practitioners and guides. These narrative accounts are an individual and collective reflection of life events, artifacts revealed during training events toward the achievement of True Storytelling institute (TSI) Train the Trainer certification and completion of Organizational Development modules. The Seven Principles of True Storytelling were the frame-work and methodology used to reveal parallel fractals and artifacts among the participants represented in the chapter. The account of events leading up to and including the training path toward guide certification presented an in-depth and absorptive milieu toward the objective of deconstruction and reconstruction driven by antenarrative interplay as a change process over the grand narrative in the DEI space. The seamless change process evolved through the seven principles and organizational development processes stimulated by David Boje’s 7 B’s and four hearts. The narrative life stories in the context of the seven principles of True Storytelling embody authentic voices of personal experiences integrating natural ways of thinking about aspects of DEI, rehistorizing from the past to the present.