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April 12, 2003: Future Stories Smithsonian Associates 2003 |
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[
Introduction ] [
Jumpstart Storytelling ] [
Values ] [
Putting Story to Work ] [
Future
Stories ] [
Springboard
Stories ]
[ Seth Kahan ] [ Alicia Korten ] [ Rob Creekmore ] [ Madelyn Blair ] [ Steve Denning ] [ Paul Costello ] [ Chronology of Storytelling ] [ Golden Fleece Group ] [ Dave's Story ] [ Preparing the story ] |
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| A Tale of Two Worlds Story as a Transformational Tool The Power of Story in Operations & Maintenance A New Hero's Journey Story & Organizational Learning Spreading the Word About Storytelling My work with story in organizations emerged from the coming together of two very different worlds: the world of high tech and the world of transforming human potential. Like many people, my early career – as a telecommunications engineer and manager – was a way of “earning a living.” For many of the 16 years I worked for GTE Corporation, I worried about bits and bytes, |
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| coordinating and managing the telecommunications systems of the different branches of the US military. The issues the agency confronted were often more political than technical, and I began learning and applying innovative approaches to communication and decision-making among the different factions. As one customer once stated: “Our agency only exists because the Army, Navy, and Air Force can’t communicate about their communication requirements!” |
| I recall one such innovative approach to helping the different factions work together and – in the process – improving the agency’s reputation with those factions. Our customer hosted a yearly conference for the different operations and maintenance (O&M) commands at the different military communications sites around the world. The conference was supposed to address important common issues facing the O&M community. But every year came the same boring conference format of endless ‘one-to-many’ Power Point presentations and status briefings, and the O&M conference was becoming more and more unpopular. My colleagues and I had been successfully experimenting within GTE with ‘process action teams’ typically used in total quality management initiatives. We proposed to our customer to reinvent the O&M conference to allow the |  |
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from many cultures and traditions, I came upon the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell studied the stories, myths, and rituals of hundreds of cultures throughout history. He began to notice common patterns, particularly in the stories and rituals used to initiate young people, to help them navigate the journey from being dependent children to becoming responsible adults in the community. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces he outlined the “Hero’s Journey” narrative pattern – the stages, thresholds, roles, and events that occur in this journey from dependency to independence and interdependence. Later, I encountered the work of David Oldfield, |
| who had adapted Campbell’s Hero’s Journey pattern to
create adolescent treatment programs through modern rites of passage.
I adapted Campbell’s and Oldfield’s approaches in reinventing church
confirmation as an in depth rite of passage, following the same stages
and drawing on the same roles and kinds of events that Campbell had
identified, especially the critical role of the mentor.
As my work with reinventing confirmation progressed, GTE Corporation – the company for which I had now worked for 13 years - was itself entering on a collective “Hero’s Journey.” Because of the Telecommunications Act of 1995, the telecommunications industry was now becoming deregulated. GTE – a phone company - was facing stiff competition and at the same time had a tremendous opportunity to compete in new markets to which it had previously been closed. The company leadership realized they needed a major shift in organizational culture. They could no longer have the employees expect to be taken care of for a lifetime if they |
| simply followed orders and performed their narrow job
function. GTE embarked upon a major culture change initiative
to shift the thinking of employees to see the business as a larger
whole. They wanted them to see how they might be a more proactive
and creative contributor to the larger enterprise, especially in terms
of meeting the needs of the customer. In short, GTE needed its
employees to become more entrepreneurial. I recognized that this transformation of the employee – and of GTE’s culture – was similar in many ways to the transformation from dependency to interdependency of the Hero’s Journey narrative pattern. Indeed, the modern hero “myth” in the corporate world is that of the entrepreneur (as any front page of the Wall Street |
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Organizational Learning with the Program on Social and Organizational Learning at George Mason University. As a result of my studies I began to apply the principles of dialogue, experiential learning, and appreciative inquiry to my work of helping organizations tap the deeper potential of employees and teams. Once again I found storytelling to be a key catalyst. In 1998, after leaving GTE and forming IRC Associates, I worked with Fannie Mae, the US Department of Energy, and the World Bank to apply what I had learned about organizational learning to building high performance teams. |
| As I began to teach and facilitate the dialogue process
with these teams it became clear that a powerful doorway into dialogue
is the sharing of personal experiences. With one team at Fannie
Mae, the members gathered every other week for three hours to share
their stories about what they were experiencing in helping Fannie
Mae prepare for the Y2K crisis. The team would share their stories
and then surface and explore the deeper assumptions and dynamics of
their interactions with their clients within the company. Not
only did this help them be much more effective and creative with their
clients, but it also created deep bonds of trust between them that
grew deeper as we continued the regular practice of storytelling and
dialogue.
Since then I have continued to apply storytelling, dialogue, experiential learning, and appreciative inquiry to a wide array of organizational needs, including organizational vision, strategic planning, project management, and teambuilding. Among the additional organizations I have worked with are the General Services Administration, VSA Arts, the Department of Education, the International Storytelling Center, the General Accounting Office, and the International Finance Corporation. |
| Smithsonian sponsored workshop on organizational storytelling, the time seemed right to begin to build an on-going professional community around organizational storytelling in the Washington DC area. In May, I organized an initial lunch at the World Bank to explore this, and then in July, Seth Kahan, Paul Costello, and I kicked off the first meeting of what eventually became known as the Golden Fleece organizational storytelling group. Golden Fleece has now been meeting monthly for almost two years and has spawned similar groups in Boston, San Diego, and internationally. In addition to my association with Golden Fleece, I have been an advisor to the International Storytelling Center to help them create and establish their vision as a beacon for the power of storytelling to transform education, health care, and business. I have also given workshops and presentations on organizational storytelling at the National Storytelling Festival and for the International Institute for Research, Johns Hopkins Center for Technology, and the Mid-Atlantic Facilitators Network. |
| ROB CREEKMORE President, IRC Associates, Takoma Park, MD (1998 – Present) Founder and President of a consulting, coaching, facilitation, and training firm that specializes in: -organizational learning -community based knowledge sharing -high performance communication -teambuilding -communities of practice -wholistic leadership development -organization development -strategic planning. -mindfulness training Rob’s clients include: |
Rob has organized, or helped organize, the following professional
groups/seminars: Prior work -Youth Consultant, Emmaus (Potomac Education: |
