Organizational talk as a powerful tool for organizational change

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Organizational talk as a powerful tool for
organizational change

• Sarah Lewis

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Planned change

• Plan Do
• Talk Decide Act
• Research Plan Intervene

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Some hidden understandings

• Talk is excluded from the category of events
  known as action
• Talk and action are sequential and separated in
  time
• We are more concerned with what to talk about
  than how to talk about
• The object of talk is to establish the true
  picture on which to base an action plan

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The modernist understanding of language in
organizations

• Talk is separate from action
• Desire to construct the grand narrative
• Is seen as contextless
• Is thought to be neutral/fateless
• Reflects a reified, sequential sense of time
• Based on a believe in an objective world

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The fates of planned change

• Resistance
• Not sustainable
• Not achieving expected outcomes
• Achieving unexpected outcomes
• Change and no change

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The post modern understanding of language

• Language and talk is contextful
• Language and talk are fateful
• Socially constructed world
• Language is action
• The future is created in the present
• Talk creates affordances and constraints

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Different understanding of relation language and
change

• Linear
• Truth
• Static meaning
• Neutral
• Fixed time
• Objective universe

• Circular
• Accounts
• Dynamic meaning
• Fateful
• Possibility time
• Socially constructed multiverse

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Appreciative inquiry principles

• The constructionist principle
• The simultaneity principle
• The poetic principle
• The anticipatory principle
• The positive principle

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Appreciative inquiry language

• Talk as a medium to achieve change
• The placing of attention
• The sense created by talk
• The research question is the intervention and
  is fateful and impactful

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Story telling

• Process in appreciative inquiry
• Tool in coaching
• Aid to creativity
• Aid to reflection
• Symbolic histories
• Aids to learning
• Explorations of emotion
• Working with complexity

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Story telling attention

• Voices
• Positions
• Perspectives
• Authorship and narrators
• Audience
• Context
• Image, feelings, metaphor

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I love this quote

• In the radical post modern antenarrative,
  organizational characters collide rather than
  interact as they come in and out of each others
  theatrical stages
• Boje 2001

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References

• David Cooperrider, et al (2001) Appreciative
  Inquiry. Stipes US.
• David Boje (2001) Narrative Methods for
  organizational and communication research. Sage