"Storying the unstoried" Experiences of organisational change: How can team interventions using story disruption change sensemaking?

Galpin, Kay

Abstract

A series of interventions based on storytelling and restorying were used to explore how two teams made sense of their experiences during organisational changes. Seven monthly collaborative interventions were run with each team, facilitating the telling, and retelling of stories about their change experiences to recognise different perspectives and possibilities for the future (Boje, 2014). These were run in person and latterly online from March to September 2020. This empirical material was supplemented through storied conversational interviews (Boje and Rosile, 2020) which invited a different perspective on the collective experiences. Taking a relational and constructionist onto-epistemological position and adopting an interpretive perspective, stories generated in interventions were traced using a framework based on the Unstoryability model of Boje (2014). This was used to understand how the teams collectively developed stories and re-stories about their experiences of change. Reflexive thematic analysis was then used to offer a reading of the material generated across interventions and interviews that complemented these stories (Braun and Clarke, 2022). Six themes were generated; teams storied their own change performances, and social connections within each team were a self-sustaining force that helped teams to make sense of change and to generate other possibilities. Change was reconstructed as appreciative and polyvocal, but the need to be “professional” influenced the teams’ decisions about appropriate organisational audiences. Temporality was disrupted to make different sense of team experiences through restorying, and different possibilities for their futures were imagined. This research makes a methodological contribution through using a novel, participative restorying intervention enhanced by creative methods. Its knowledge contribution to the narrative practice change literature is that it provides empirical evidence that restorying supports collective sensemaking and is a mechanism to imagine future change possibilities. This offers the possibility of a more positive perspective on the organisational change process that disrupts the binary of change agent – change recipient, evidencing that change can be instigated and imagined in a more distributed way. Previously “unstoried” change experiences potentially suppressed by a managerial or “professional” view of change can be illuminated. This has implications for practice because organisations and employees might benefit from the creation of relational spaces during organisational change where change can be explored, and future possibilities generated in mutual enquiry through restorying interventions.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 28, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9982745
• Award Date: Apr 28, 2023