SO, ARE STORIES AN INTERESTINGand accidental by-product of your qualitativeresearch or could you – should you – make themcentral to your design and delivery of the work?

Let’s go back a bit and track this emerging trend,when this interest in narrative appeared. We mightthink of it as quite recent, but in academia, it’s beendated back to as early as 1895 (Hevern 2004). In thefirst half of the twentieth century writers like CarlJung, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and VladimirPropp popularized the idea of myth, folklore andarchetypes in society.

Then W.J.T. Mitchell’s book, On Narrative, pub-lished in 1981, was hailed as a landmark event. It’sa collection of articles by leading historians, psycho-analysts, philosophers and literary critics, all of thempreoccupied with what they see as the importanceof narrative.

Until re c e n t l y, these developments had littleimpact upon mainstream management or research

STUART SMITH WOULD LIKE US TO SIT COMFORTABLY ANDLISTEN TO A TALE OF ORGANISATIONAL RESEARCH

WE ALL LOVE A GOOD STORY, AND WE CAN USEthem at work, too. Storytelling is not just for camp-fires and soap operas – park a retail audience downand talk of stories and archetypes, then watch thelight dawn. If a customer or staff member is recog-nised as ‘doing a Fred’, this could mark the firststage in the introduction of cultural change to anorganisation.

But first, to basics: Why narrative? The most obvi-ous benefits come from its adaptability – and theinsights it offers. Many techniques could fall underthe heading of ‘narrative research’. Some are re-workings of familiar qualitative approaches; othersare related to techniques like ethnography, dis-course analysis, social network analysis and streamanalysis. Traditional focus group moderation will ofcourse elicit stories, but the distinction between thisand narrative research is the intentionality underpin-ning the generation and analysis.

STUART SMITH IS AN ASSOCIATE

DIRECTOR AT WOOD HOLMES

GROUP, AND USES NARRATIVE

TECHNIQUES WITH A WIDE RANGE

OF CLIENTS. HE GRADUATED

FROM IMPERIAL COLLEGE WITH

AN MSC IN ENVIRONMENTAL

SCIENCE, AND HIS RESEARCH

INTEREST IN COMPLEXITY THEORY

LED HIM TO DISCOVER NARRATIVE

AND ITS USE AS A TOOL FOR

C H A N G E, S T R AT E G Y A N D R E S E A R C H

IWANNA TELL YOU A S T O RY. . .

thinking, but organisations have become more open to the use of storyand narrative in the context of communication. They are also recognis-ing the wider opportunities provided by narrative in the fields of mar-keting, market research and strategy development.

In the last decade a number of management books have emergedwith titles like Sensemaking in Organisations (Weick 1995), Tell Me AStory (Schank and Morson 1995), The Story Factor (Simmons 2000),The Springboard (Denning 2001) and Organisational Storytelling(Gabriel 2000). A current strand of postmodern academic work, too,views organisations as a pluralistic construction of stories, storytellers,and story performance events in which every story implies its opposite.For example, David Boje (2001) shows the relationship between com-peting storytelling efforts of Nike and the anti-Nike activists. He arguesthat we should not accept any one set of narratives alone as ‘reality’ butrather embrace all viewpoints as part of the totality of Nike.

Mark and Pearson (2001) also apply narrative theory – specificallycross-cultural elemental archetypes – to brand building. They identify aseries of archetypes like Creator; Caregiver; Ruler and Jester, beforetranslating these into a branding context.

You might be thinking this all sounds a bit flaky. Maybe, but the serious business press, too, has begun to highlight the importance ofstorytelling, with articles in the Harvard Business Review (Denning2004, McKee 2003), Wall Street Journal (Bennett 2003) and FinancialTimes (Denning 2004 and Kellaway 2004).

What does this mean to qualitative researchers? The attractions ofnarrative as a research method are obvious. Storytelling is natural andeasy, entertaining and energizing. Stories help us understand complex-ity. Stories can enhance or change perceptions. Stories are easy toremember. They bypass normal defence mechanisms and engage ourfeelings. They are a great tool for exploring ideas, stretching our think-ing, and communicating.

IN BROADENING THE HORIZONS OFQUALITATIVE RESEARCHSPRING 2005

D E P T H

ACCIDENTALBY-PRODUCT

www.aqr.org.uk

PERHAPS THE MOST INTERESTINGthing about stories for organisational re s e a rc h ,though, is that they also persuade. In this way, nar-rative and story research can become much morethan collecting views or opinions, to be analysedand presented back to a client in a conventionalway. It can be about using stories to understand,influence and persuade. It becomes what I like tocall a research intervention – not necessarily whatwe are asked to do in fmcg research, but somethingthat is a realistic objective in organisational researchand management.

Many organisations now supplement their quanti-tative employee research with qualitative work. Thisis usually in the form of focus groups, but by takingthis further and employing narrative techniques theybegin not only to understand but also to influencetheir employees.

But how to do it? The first stage in any narrativeproject is to collect your raw material: the stories.There are several ways of doing this but the princi-ple is to capture the material in as ‘natural’ a way aspossible. It is here that narrative work overlaps withethnography and social anthropology (see PhillyDesai’s Truth, Lies and Videotape, Autumn 2004, InDepth).

Traditional focus group trappings – the discussionguide, the recruiting, the focus group room, thetime allowed – can sometimes be too contrived andunnatural to get individuals to begin telling stories.So in this setting the moderator must overcome this,allowing discussion to range into unexpected areasand prompting stories to emerge. In our experiencenarrative groups require a particularly skilled andself-aware facilitator.

You might also want to play around with theconventions of the business – one technique forenhancing natural language capture is to use‘naïve’ interviewers (adolescents are very good atthis) to ask the questions that trained researcherswould never ask.

PERSUASIVETOOL

STORIES INTHE ROUND

Story FormsSTORY FORMS COME IN MANY SHAPES AND SIZES. THEY HAVEcommonalities, but also key differences in terms of construction,and often contain underlying themes that tellers insert, either con-sciously or sub-consciously, into their stories. Here are some of themost common story forms. Metaphors can serve to reframe problems, by using source mate-rial such as films, children’s books, and cultural icons to generatediscussions. “Good communicators” often find that metaphorsconvey difficult or abstract concepts, while holding conversationsin a metaphorical setting makes the pain of abandoning cherishedbeliefs or unarticulated prejudice much easier to handle.Archetypal characters emerge whenever people tell stories abouttheir situation, becoming more extreme until each represents anaspect of that society, and collectively the culture as a whole.George Lucas used Campbell’s book, “The Hero with a ThousandFaces,” to guide the Star Wars movies, crafting the entire series toconvey archetypal characters and mythic plots. Fables are moral tales designed to create a context in which a

message can be delivered. Take Aesop’s Fables:long, complex stories that are difficult to repeatverbatim, but with a memorable message ormoral. Such stories are handed down to inculcatecommon values. In the Tortoise and the Hare, forexample, the story builds gradually to the pointwhere the message is inevitable, understood andincorporated into the underlying value system ofthe audience. A good storyteller – modern expo-nents include Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly – hasthe ability to weave variation into each retelling ofthe story so as to maintain control over contentand delivery.Myths transcend time and culture, creating andreinforcing themes. Characters often emerge fromsuch stories, or generate them in the first place,hence the mythologies of ancient society that sur-vive today. Myths in or about organisations do not

THE MAIN METHOD WE UTILISE FORstory elicitation is the Anecdote or Story Circle. Thetechnique was originally developed by Snowden atthe Cynefin Centre (Snowden 1999, 2001) and isbased on the natural human ability to tell stories ina group. Sailors call it ‘ditting’ and all cultures havesimilar experiences, whether from the pub, thewater cooler or the campfire (as it happens, in themiddle of Spielberg’s famous movie Jaws (1975) isan excellent example of an ‘anecdote circle’ inaction).

First, we ask participants to tell their personal sto-ries; nothing is off limits. We ‘kick start’ the groupby asking an open question – one that doesn’t callfor a yes/no answer – on a relevant topic. The circlesare designed to exploit the natural human need tocommunicate through story and the fact that weoften re q u i re prompts to remember pertinentevents. Memories are contextual, so hearing anoth-er person recount their story triggers recollections ofa similar experience that we would have overlookedotherwise.

Story circles usually comprise 8 to 12 people andmultiple groups are often run simultaneously. Thegroups are very lightly facilitated, taped, transcribedand often video recorded. The light touch facilita-tion required can be difficult if you are an experi-enced moderator, as it requires a certain amount offlexibility and “unlearning”. For example, permittinglong ‘uncomfortable’ pauses, or letting respondentsstray quite a way from the topic, are all actions thatgo against a facilitator’s better instinct.

External observers or scribes note participants’body language and provide different perspectives onthe stories being told. We often combine anecdotecircles with an exercise allowing participants to writedown the themes they hear in others’ stories (this isalso a useful diversionary exercise for when one ortwo individuals are beginning to dominate).

The circles generate a large quantity of materialvery quickly and because of their relaxed (and some-time chaotic!) format participants often forgetwhere they are and begin to open up with extreme-ly rich material, generating deep insight.

TWO AREAS WHERE WE HAVE MOSTrecently used narrative techniques and storytellingare in customer research and community research.In both these areas, while the techniques have beenapplied differently, we have seen at first hand thepower of narrative.

Customer Research: We have been working withcustomers and staff of a major food retailer with aview to developing a customer service strategy. Thebrief called for research to underpin the develop-ment of a strategy and to kick-start the beginning ofcustomer service improvement programme. Thisbridging between research and strategy develop-ment is exactly the area in which a research inter-vention such as narrative excels.

‘Customer service’ is a complex idea that meansmany different things to different people. To under-stand this and to create a change programme simul-taneously, we used some of the narrative techniquesdescribed above. First, we collected stories about‘customer service’ from several demographicallyselected groups of customers and from numerousgroups of customer-facing staff. This was doneusing the anecdote circle approach described earlier.

The stories were then used with a sample of staffto create a set of archetypes in a highly interactive(and fun) workshop, where staff were encouragedto discuss the narratives and extract their own char-acters from the material. Staff used names, we sus-pect, from their own experience to christen theensuing archetypes. So a fairly unfriendly characterwas called ‘Fred’ and another, quiet and ‘put upon’,was called ‘Mary’. Such characters may not exist inreal life but, since the participants created them(instead of say using traditional market segmenta-tions), they seemed to have a higher degree of cul-tural resonance.

These ‘customer service characters’ were thenshown to senior management and other staff, whocould see instantly the kind of customer service cul-ture they wanted (and more importantly didn’twant) and act accordingly. The archetypes thatemerged from the stories were absorbed into the‘shorthand’ narrative language of the organisation.

So when a member of staff or a customer isbehaving in a certain way they are instantly recog-nised as ‘doing a Fred’. This type of study could berepeated in the same way at regular intervals andthe emerging archetypes compared with the originalset. This provides truly innovative way of bench-marking culture change in an organisation.

Community Research: We carry out a wide range

Sailors call it ‘ditting’and all cultures have similar experiences,whether from the pub, the water cooler or the campfire.There’s a good example in ‘Jaws’

TRUE STORIESFINDING THE PLOT

have this same longevity, but their impact on peo-ple’s lives (and on sales and reputation!) can be asstrong. Just as the myth structure of society per-mits acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, sothe myth structure of an organisation can boundits capabilities and perception.Scripts are related closely to myths, developed tocontrol stories and punish deviation. In the post-modern sense, these can be the grand or “meta-narratives” that drive macro level behaviour (Boje2001). Rarely imposed from the top, they developand are reinforced by ordinary people, but tend tostifle innovation, and prevent both insight and self-awareness. Individuals – and communities – find itdifficult to depart from a script and may not evenrealise that they are following one. Narrativeresearch provides the means to reveal and workwith these scripts.

H AVING COLLECTED THE RAWmaterial, how it is used or analysed is, of course,dependent on the research objectives. There arenumerous analysis techniques for narrative but anyanalyst will always unconsciously or consciouslyweave their own stories and worldviews into thematerial collected.

To overcome this in organisational research weoften use the storytellers themselves (members ofthe client organisation), or another client group, toanalyse the stories with us. In this way we allowthem to make sense of the material in the way theywant to rather than us impose our worldview.Applying this to consumer research might meangenerating stories, then engaging re s p o n d e n t sthemselves in a second analytic stage of the group.

Boje (2001) provides eight analysis options for theanalysis of storytelling in complex organisations –interesting stuff, though some of these approachesare more practical than others. In addition there areother techniques related to text analysis, semiotics,and anthropology (Chandler 2001, Pople 2004).

One of the techniques we utilise a lot is ArchetypeExtraction, a valuable source of pattern identifica-tion and understanding. We have used archetypes(see box) to provide measures of employee and cus-tomer satisfaction and they can also provide inter-esting perspectives on brands.

To ‘extract’ archetypes, we work with clientgroups to examine the story material produced andidentify the themes in it. In a workshop we facilitatethe clustering of themes into 5-7 groups. At the endof this we ask them to personalise the clusters witharchetypes (or characters). The characters should, ifpossible, use names that the group recognises orrelates to – from literature, popular culture or fromthe organisation concerned.

Once named, these ‘archetypes’ can then be usedfor several purposes. For example, they provide a setof very strong markers of culture and one that realis-es it has too many “Harvard MBAs”, “Vi c t o rMeldrews” or “Cinderellas” may want to addressthis. Archetypes can also be drawn up as cartoonsand used in staff training.

Bennett J., (18 July 2003), Storytelling and Diversity, Wall Street JournalCampbell Joseph, (2004), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, PrincetonUniversity PressBoje, D.M., (2001), Narrative Methods for Organizational &Communication Research, Sage PublicationsChandler, D., (November 2001), Semiotics: The Basics, Routledge,ISBN0415265940Denning, S., (May 2004), Telling Tales, Harvard Business ReviewDenning, S., (2001), The Springboard – How Storytelling Ignites Action inKnowledge Era Organisations, Butterworth Heinemann Denning, S., (24 May 2004), Storytelling is a Fundamental Skill ofManagement, Financial TimesGabriel, Y., (2000), Storytelling in Organisations: Facts, Fictions andFantasies, Oxford University Press, OxfordHaggarty, B., (2004), Memories and Breath: Professional Storytelling inEngland & Wales, CRTDS. Report available at www.sfs.org.uk Hevern, V., (8 March 2004), Narrative Psychology: bibliography andresources, http://web.leymoyne.edu/~hevern/narpsych.htmlKellaway, L., (10 May 2004), Once Upon a Time We Had Managers,Financial Times Mark, M. & Pearson, C.S., (2001), The Hero and the Outlaw: BuildingExtraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes, McGraw Hill Mitchell, W.J.T., (December 1981), On Narrative, University of ChicagoPress, ISBN0226532178McKee, Robert, (June 2003), Storytelling That Moves People AConversation with Screenwriter Coach, Harvard Business Review, page 51Pople, I., (March 2004), Investigating English Language: An Introductionto Text and Discourse Analysis, Nelson Thornes, ISBN: 0748733574Schank, C.R. & Morson, G. S., (19995), Tell Me a Story: Narrative andIntelligence (rethinking Theory), Northwestern University Press Simmons, A., (2000), The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, andPersuasion Through the Art of Storytelling, PerseusSnowden, D.J., (November 1999), The Paradox of Story: simplicity andcomplexity in strategy, Journal of Strategy & Scenario PlanningSnowden, D.J., (July 2001), Narrative Patterns: the perils and possibilitiesof using story in organisations, Knowledge ManagementStewart, T., (7 September 1998), The Cunning Plots of Leadership,Fortune MagazineWeick, K. E., (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publications

REFERENCES

For readers wishing to delve further into this area, please visit:www.stevedenning.com – The Steve Denning site is an excellent source ofmaterial on Story in organisations and also includes his daily blog of allthings story related across the globe.www.sfs.org.uk – The Society for Storytelling website. This a good sourceof material on the origins and traditions of oral story telling in particular.The Society Organise National Storytelling Week.

FURTHER INFORMATION

This In Depth introduces readers to how storytelling can impact on organisational research, and we plan a future article that will focus onthis tool in relation to branding and consumers.

FOOTNOTE

Editor Louella Miles Managing Editor Gill Ereaut Designer Ivan BullochPhotography Teena Taylor Printing Greenleaf SMAssociation for Qualitative ResearchDavey House, 31 St. Neots Road, Eaton Ford, St. Neots, Cambridgeshire PE19 7BATelephone: 01480 407227 Fax: 01480 211267 Website: www.aqr.org.uk Email: rosemolloy@aqr.org.uk

I ND E P T H

THE END

of community research across a range of clientgroups. They might be communities facing demoli-tion of their housing; young people in hard to reachgroups, or housing association tenants. In all theseareas the power of narrative in allowing us to under-stand these groups and to create positive socialchange is immense.

All communities are complex and stories andrumours emerge on the community grapevine allthe time. The community’s perspective on its ownhistory will be woven into these stories, along withindividual and collective worldviews. An under-standing of how these dynamics arise, and thenature of the stories being told, allows us to under-stand and therefore engage with the community.

In recent work, narrative research has helped us‘manage’ the grapevine in communities, foster com-munity capacity where there was none before, andwork with the groups categorised ‘hard to reach’.Using techniques such as the anecdote circles aboveand listening skills which are a key part of narrativewe have been able to allow communities, house-holders and others affected by major social changeto genuinely have their say and feel that they havebeen involved and consulted with correctly for thefirst time.

Their stories are collected, analysed and fed intothe planning and policy making process up frontrather than as an after thought, which was oftenthe practice previously. Their stories reflect their per-ceptions of the systems and situations they findthemselves in and provide large signposts as to whyprojects have succeeded or failed. The use of story inthis way has long been practiced in the fields ofsocial and community research. For an excellentoverview of storytelling in this context, it’s worthtaking a look at Ben Haggarty’s (2004) survey of pro-fessional story usage in the UK.

STORIES MATTER. INDEED, THEY’VEalways mattered. It’s just that there has been a ten-dency to not only underestimate their power interms of connecting with different groups but alsoto misjudge how well they enable individuals toflesh out their innermost thoughts and feelings.

In recent years they have started to be taken muchmore seriously, and are emerging as a recognisedpart of a researcher’s toolkit. Storytelling and narra-tive research is a large, emerging area and this arti-cle has only been able to hint at its potential uses.From an agency point of view it could be seen as justanother technique to add to the portfolio – but thiswould sell it short.

Its nature and potency provide us with the toolsetto navigate the complex, post-industrial knowledgeeconomy where, despite our scientific and techno-logical advances, it is the organic and intangibleaspects of life that are becoming increasingly impor-tant.

In a world where dialogue, thinking, leadershipand innovation are critical to our future prosperity,then storytelling – and story analysis – is a skill weshould all master. Storytellers used to be seen assome of the most valuable members of the commu-nity – and maybe it’s time they were again.