Storytelling as a Leadership Practice for Sensemaking to Drive Change in Times of Turbulence and High Velocity

• In Event: The Use of Digital Communications and Old Fashioned Storytelling

Short Description

This paper explores the relevance of contemporary leaders using storytelling as a sensemaking strategy that translate events into plausible scenarios and images, provides sense-giving, and mobilizes others to take action and thrive in complex, turbulent, and high velocity environments. These constructs are defined, and their relationships explained.

Detailed Abstract

During the First World War, a small group of Allied troops camped in the Alps were sent on a scouting mission. During their trip, it snowed heavily for three days. They lost their tracks. Having run out of food and experiencing extreme cold, they panicked and resigned themselves to die. On the fourth day, unexpectedly, one of the men found a map in his pocket. This brought relief and hope to the group. They resumed their travel and returned safely to the camp. Up on their return, they were amazed to learn that the map they had used was not of the Alps but of the Pyrenees!
In this story told by Basbøll (2012), despite the fact that the map was not an accurate representation of the ‘territory’, it gave the soldiers the confidence to make good decisions. The moral of the story, according to Weick (1995), is that when you are lost, cold, hungry, and panicked, any map will do. This is because, when dealing with ambiguity, individuals “search for meaning, settle for plausibility, and move on” (Weick, 2010, p. 549). From this position, sensemaking is not concerned with accuracy – finding the ‘correct’ answer - but rather about plausibility – creating a more meaningful picture that enables people to act (Ancona, 2012).
Sensemaking is one of the four core leadership capabilities (along with relating, visioning, and inventing) for contemporary complex, uncertain, and dynamic environments (Ancona, 2012). The term was popularised by Weick (1995), as the process of making sense by giving meaning to experience: “Sensemaking is about contextual rationality. It is built out of vague questions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce confusion” (Weick, 1993, p. 636).
According to Maitlis and Christianson (2014), sensemaking is the process that enables individuals to understand and make sense of experiences, events, or issues that are confusing, ambiguous, or unexpected. The genesis of sensemaking, then, is chaos and confusion, as people attempt to answer the question, "what’s the story?" by mapping the context and the ongoing unpredictable experiences thrown at them (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005).
Ultimately, sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is understood explicitly in words that serve as a springboard for action (Weick, et al. 2005). Hence, sensemaking is a critical organizational activity used by senior managers to scan and interpret the environment, make decisions, and drive strategic change (Maitlis, 2005).
Sensegiving – for others – is the process of disseminating new understanding to audiences to influence their ‘sense-making-for-self’. From this perspective, leaders are ‘sensegivers’ (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) who shape how employees understand themselves, their work, and those who they work with, by enabling ‘cognitive shifts’ – a critical leadership meaning-making task (Foldy, Goldman, & Ospina, 2008).
Both sensemaking and sensegiving, then, are critical to leadership effectiveness in contemporary organizations operating in complex and high velocity environments – those characterized by rapid and discontinuous change in response to competition, new technologies and/or regulations, in which information rapidly becomes inaccurate, unavailable, or obsolete (Bourgeois & Eisenhardt, 1988).
High velocity environments are inherently turbulent (Lichtenthaler, 2009) creating unfamiliar and incomprehensible situations (Vogus & Welbourne, 2003). Turbulence refers to “the amount of change and complexity in the environment of an industry” (Kipley, Lewis, & Jewe, 2012, p. 251) created by constantly changing economic conditions (Perrot, 2011). Hypercompetitive environments, where expectations are continuously disrupted, require adaptive sensemaking processes, as conventional sensemaking approaches do not work (Bogner & Barr, 2000).
Related constructs to those mentioned above that are found in the literature include: dynamic environments (Sirmon, Hitt, & Ireland, 2007); reliability-seeking organizations (Vogus & Welbourne, 2003); and clockspeed (Nadkarni & Narayanan, 2007). More recently, the acronym VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), which originated from the US Army has also become popular (Horney, Pasmore, & O’Shea, 2010). The term ‘VUCA world’ is used to describe the new contexts and environments characterized by: volatility – the speed and turbulence of change; uncertainty – the fact that outcomes and familiar actions are less predictable; complexity – the enormousness of interdependencies in globally connected economies and societies; and ambiguity – the multitude of options, and potential outcomes resulting from them (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014).
Generally, sensemaking is a conversational and narrative process (Balogun & Johnson, 2005). It entails multiple communication categories (Watson & Bargiela‐Chiappini, 1998), both written and spoken, and formal and informal (e.g. rumors, gossip, exchange of stories, and negotiations) (Gioia & Thomas, 1996).
Stories express how and why life unfolds (McKee & Fryer, 2003). They assist us to shape our own identities and make sense of others’ actions (Bird, 2007). “In organizations, storytelling is the preferred sense-making currency of human relationships among internal and external stakeholders” (Boje, 1991, p. 106). Storytelling is a powerful way to explicitly or implicitly transfer both information and emotion (Snowden, 2000), and serves multiple organizational purposes such as socializing new employees (Louis, 1980, communicating complex ideas and persuading others to change (Prusak, Groh, Denning, & Brown, 2012), problem solving and conducting action research (Mitroff & Kilmann, 1975), and generating organizational renewal (McWhinney & Batista, 1988).
From this perspective, organizations are collective storytelling systems “in which the performance of stories is a key part of members’ sensemaking and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory” (Boje, 1995, p.1000). A good example is The Walt Disney Company – a storytelling organization par excellence.
Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Herb Kelleher of Southwest, and Anita Roddick of The Body Shop are examples of leaders who used stories to convey who they were, their convictions and values, and to champion their organizations’ products/services (Denning, 2005). Xerox, for example, used stories to challenge conventional wisdom and drive change (Sole & Wilson, 2002).
According to Sonenshein (2010), during times of change, managers tell mixed and ambiguous narratives about how the organization is changing, as an attempt to influence the meanings employees attribute to that change. In response, employees may exaggerate, overstate, or elaborate these narratives to make sense of, accept or resist change.

Participant

• Sebastian Salicru, PTS Consultants