A World Scientific Encyclopedia of Business Storytelling

The following sections are included:

• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Contents
• Introduction

How can we be better to implement and create commitment for sustainable changes in (for instance) municipalities, help start ups create stronger teams and also possess complexity as a leader or consultant without getting stress and burn-out? This chapter explores how we can use storytelling to create a commitment to sustainable and ethical changes, and to navigate situations of high complexity. We believe the change-management method True Storytelling has some answers. True Storytelling is more than a change-management method, it is a philosophy inspired from indigenous peoples’ storytelling, quantum physics and arts. This text will introduce the seven principles and seven processes of True Storytelling, its theory and some of the tools used in the Foundation Ethics Module at the True Storytelling Institute. After reading the chapter you will have a basic understanding about the concept.

This chapter uses the seven principles in True Storytelling as a foundation to work with entrepreneurship and startups in the healthcare industry. The chapter is meant as a guide not only to find your own true story but to combine it with the story of your company or startup. It will consist of your own entrepreneurial cases, healthcare entrepreneur cases, and advice for anyone who embarks on the journey of healthcare entrepreneurial projects.

What is the existential phenomenon of True Storytelling? Here, I will assert the first seven processes of True Storytelling are all about an existential-ethics turn. I have been working since the 2001 publication (Narrative Methods book), developing an “antenarrative-process” theory, method, and practice. I will attempt to answer the question (what is true storytelling?) with William James (1907), Mikhail Bakhtin (1929), Walter Benjamin (1936), and most of all, Søren Kierkegaard. By asking the question, “who is storytelling for?” I identify four who-consciousnesses that implicate the seven antenarrative-processes: (1) ego-centric-who, (2) corporate-centric-who, (3) we-centric who, and (4) eco-centric-who. The main contribution of this chapter is to inter-animate four who-consciousnesses, because True Storytelling facilitates conversations inter-animating them. We crisscross the four who-consciousnesses, six additional antenarrative-processes worth exploring, making a total of 13. The value of inter-animating the four ‘who’s is an exploration of an existentialism turn in narrative, and in True Storytelling. To do so, I will take the reader on a journey into the works of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.

This chapter is about realizing an idea by using True Storytelling. I will describe, referring to some of the seven principles, how True Storytelling helped me change the focus of my work. You will learn that the principles are valid although I had not been aware of them at the beginning of my story. The chapter illustrates how the right timing can help a story on its way, and how energy can evolve from collecting and connecting stories that are related to an interest. This could be everything. In my case, it was the Arctic.

This chapter is a review of a set of practical tools and techniques that emerged from a year’s worth of dedicated True Storytelling in practice. The author is a change management practitioner and experienced graduate school instructor whose teaching and operational practice was revolutionized by the application of True Storytelling principles. These insights and tools may be useful for anyone seeking to lead, manage, support, or participate in emotionally charged significant change management processes in their organization.

This chapter will highlight in a convincing way the true value of your business project proposal to both private and public funding. It will help you get ready and understand step by step what you need to go through in order to succeed in gaining finance to your project. In the book True Storytelling, a model for fundraising is presented based on seven principles. This chapter will expand the model and qualify the statements and questions being asked. It will then appear more like a guide for you and your stakeholders to use as you see fit. True Storytelling plays an important part in helping the process along and manifesting your company story. And as a side effect, it will act as a tool to create changes in the organization.

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.

Through the use of an ethnographic narrative analysis, the cultural nature of the proliferation of racism is examined in order to introduce a change management model for an individual utilizing the Seven Principles of True Storytelling. Racism often sets its roots very early in the life of a child through the creation of implicit biases supported through parents, siblings, and the usual mechanisms utilized in the transfer of culture. Examination of this process through the lens of True Storytelling permits an objective view, acknowledging and respecting the stories already there while making room for futuring that creates space for re-storying that is then manifested in the new future. The new (non-racist) story finds support in its journey through a Kierkegaardian view of a “true” self, the use of plot, timing, and effective staging, to include the use of artifacts, ultimately being actualized and sustained with an ongoing process of embodied reflection.

True Storytelling is arguably one of the best examples of the postmodern narrative because it bonds the writer with the reader. It creates a sense of intellectual adventure that allows the reader to take the writer’s intention and apply it for his or her own ways and reasons. True Storytelling outlines seven principles, which will be elaborated upon. What is missing is how a researcher can effectively use true storytelling. In other words, what methodology supports a blend of story and theory to honor True Storytelling? This work will introduce the layered account autoethnography as a technique that supports each of the Seven Principles of True Storytelling. Following the introduction, there will be a discussion of the pitfalls of Cartesian–Newtonian dualism, and how storytelling bridges this divide. After this initial review, I will define True Storytelling and autoethnography and show how I came to appreciate their relationship. Following this discussion, each of the Seven Principles of True Storytelling will be paired with examples of published autoethnographies.

This chapter suggests a story making framework for reflexive resistance to the performative university. The performative university is defined as a capitalization of space and time. This capitalization is caught using Foucault’s notion of the dispositive. Story making is developed from Hannah Arendt’s work in combination with fragments from the works of Benjamin, Butler, Bakhtin and Sandoval. We argue that a story maker is grounded in concrete socio-material relations and she cannot be located in fixed positions but moves through both academic and societal landscapes in order to change them. The story maker is a framework for developing reflexive resistance to the performative university. Two kinds of reflexive practices are developed. The first kind corresponds to thinking and is a reflexive relationship to oneself. These practices are targeted toward setting people free from the torture and torment of the performative university and exploring and activating the loving, creative, passionate, artful and uncontrollable elements of their research activities. The second kind of reflexive resistance corresponds to action and refers to the activism that emerges when we come together for a cause larger than itself. This kind of story making practice transcends institutional, organizational and regional boundaries and mobilizes affordances across fixed time lines and spaces.

Problem and background: This chapter is written based on a study that has taken place over the last four years and it revolves around the difficulty in creating a framework to come around all aspects about the wish to be sustainable and understand the nature of the UN sustainable goals and these problems as well.

Question: The chapter’s problem statement is as follows: How can we, through an action research process, influence the very complex processes in being sustainable and create stories about that, which shows that our process is sustainable in all 17 goals?

Methods: In these two case studies, we are positioned in the paradigm of hermeneutical phenomenology. We have constructed our methodology based on a plethora of qualitative methods, fieldnotes and several workshops based on the methods of Appreciative Inquiry and future workshop.

Findings: Through our case studies, we have worked together with several co-researchers in workshops and conferences, and based on our interpretations, we have identified aspects which we perceive as important aspects towards building a storytelling model for sustainable processes.

Conclusion: The difficulties in collaboration stem from several aspects, these being relations between the members of different groups’ perceptions and organizational difficulties. For the co-researchers to be able to affect the collaboration they must applicate new insights, as to spread their understandings with their colleagues. Through the externalization of their new insights, the co-researchers might be able to provoke the new practices of the collaboration. We have found that we were able to influence our co-researchers’ collaboration through our disturbances created by active engagement with the co-researchers.

Stories are integral parts of our being and living and have immense power to harm or to heal. The time is right to advance a new process that we call story-bridging, because of where society is now poised, and because of a prevailing culture of vehement separation and polarization, with attendant false-storying. Story-bridging taps into the power of story. It is a process of engaging sensitively and positively with others where there are opposing views (at all levels: individual, community, organization, institution, nation-state), where there have been negative impacts on society, the economy, the environment, and our essential connectedness. Story-bridging is a process of creating, refining and sharing stories in a way that ignites connections and fosters exciting possibilities.

Truly sustainable development can be conceptualized as the sustained attempt to let something or somebody unfold its potential according to its own unique nature. Against the unsustainable paradigms of mass production and overconsumption in today’s world, this chapter presents a series of lesser-known counternarratives of sustainable development which disconnect the world of business from the anxiety of busyness and reconnects it to a broader context of being grounded and connected to the Earth, mindful of the biomechanics of our own bodies and embodying a sensitive mindset of sustainable development. This approach is aligned with the first principle of true storytelling which urges us to be true to ourselves in the sense of caring for and developing a sustainable future, not only for ourselves, but for all living beings.

The following section is included:

• Index