For long, I was torn between problem identification and solution orientation, always trying to escape the either-or mentality. As a teaching coach at the Systemic European Business Academy (ESBA), my approach today is movement-focused – because the stories we tell about ourselves or adopt from others can quickly harden and restrict us.
Only by maintaining the dynamic in dealing with stories can we prevent narratives from becoming dominant and closing the doors to the rooms of possibility.
Movement within the system means we are no longer at the mercy of the stories that shape us. Instead, we can step in and shape them ourselves — playfully, consciously, and again and again.
That system can be an individual. But it can also be an entire organization.
Because companies are more than numbers, facts, PowerPoints, and visions written on walls. They are human systems. They live in the interactions between people — in the moments where values are not simply declared, but lived. Where stories are told, shared, challenged, and reshaped.
And it is through these interactions that the stories that truly shape an organization emerge.
The outside does not exist without the inside, just as the top does not exist without the bottom. Remember this if you want to make changes in your company. You don’t have a machine in front of you that you can turn off and repair, but rather an organism that is constantly in motion. Moments of stability are the exception. Change happens every day.
That’s why culture and our work with it is always something dialogic. And that’s why the narrative approach to organizational development is thoroughly participatory. Story-doing means that we work together to shape and create new realities using stories.
Narrative intelligence ensures that what is lived and danced within an organization resonates with the way the organization exists in the minds of its leaders — and that both are moving in the same direction.
So that, to paraphrase management guru Peter Drucker, the stories don’t eat the facts for breakfast.
Advanced Training in NARRATIVE PRACTICE. For people who want to gain a deeper understanding of how stories shape our work with people and organizations, and how we can engage with them consciously and responsibly.
The shortest way to a good story is a conversation. Half an hour, no strings attached – tell me what it is about.
