Agar: Telling it like you think it might be

In his article Telling it like you think it might be: Narrative, linguistic anthropology, and the complex organization (E:CO Issue Vol. 7 Nos. 3-4 2005 pp. 23-34), Michael Agar discusses the potential of complexity for organizational development. He stresses the importance of local knowledge: “People who actually do things in an organization will have good ideas about how to do those things better. [...] Let’s call this simple idea the ‘local knowledge’ principle. [...] Now combine the principle of local knowledge with the principle of continual change and look at language. Perturbations, which occur with increasing frequency, are surprises - low probability events - that are first noticed in the organizational sites where they have an impact. ‘Notice’ means news, hot topics, something that we will discuss under ‘tellability’ later in this article. An organization, then, can use these local noticings to spot perturbations. Local knowledge, or, more precisely, surprises with reference to it, serve as early warning signs of changes that an organization should monitor. But noticing, useful as it might be, isn’t enough to take advantage of all that local knowledge has to offer. Practitioners are rich resources of experience, evaluation and innovation. Practitioners don’t just notice. They talk about what they notice with each other. The talk sets the new event in context, links it to possible causes, signigicant actors, and related events. The talk speculates on what the change means, uses the talk to imagine a future that includes it. An organization needs to take such talk seriously, not only as an indication that a potentially important change is underway, but also as a resource to evaluate and act on it.”  

As Agar writes, this is one of the reasons for the increased interest in story and narrative. The problem, however, is that both terms are used in many different ways. To start with story, he explains the difference between the Aristotelian definition of beginning-middle-end and the Lynch-stories(1), a compilation of stories that are always in media res (in the middle, the development, the plot), that refer to some larger, more complete story and that lack the initial complication and final resolution. To clarify what he means by narrative, Agar refers to the heart of narrative, time and cause. Usually, cause is an explanation of what we know has happened. In Lynch-stories, however, they are guesses about what might happen, grounded on the information we have at hand: “A Lynch-story is more an open-ended exploration, where information of all types is gathered and put together to figure out what might happen. Cause in a Lynch-story is more about guessing the near future using whatever information is available. Experiences go into words, and the words reduce the size of a large space of possibilities, and within that space the story makes some paths more likely than others.”

Agar then briefly discusses the approaches of Weick, Boje, Fonseca and Lane, to conclude that indeed they fit the concept of noticing changes and talking about them, but that they stop before actually investigating the living narrative. This leads him to ask: “If we zoom in on one of an organization’s small groups in the middle of sensemaking, what would be the texture of what we hear? How would the talk look in a transcript?” Drawing on the work of Ochs and Capps (2), Agar dives into the matter of sensemaking in the middle of linguistic messyness, incompleteness, ambiguity, spontaneity, and incoherence. He uses their frmework to distinguish between messy stories and polished stories:

1. tellership: one narrator versus many co-tellers
2. tellability: known beforehand versus arising and extincting
3. embeddedness: special event versus part and parcel of what is going on even as it is being told
4. linearity: neat sequence of cause and effect with a clear beginning, middle and end versus contingent drifting, wandering and looping back onto itself
5. moral stance: clear versus disputed and changeable

Polished stories cluster on the left-hand side of these scales, messy stories on the right-hand side. For the remainder of the article, he demonstrates how these messy stories are co-constructued and offers tools for analysis (turntaking, idealogy, relevance, adjectives). Of particular interst is the term sideshadowing, introduced by Ochs and Capps(2): “Sideshadowing occurs because the tellers want to pack in all of the experience from the situation that is the source of the story rather than to edit and re-shape experience into a polished narrative. Sideshadowing involves going ‘off on a tangent’, from a traditional narrative point of view, but of ‘covering everything that happened’, from the point of view of those who were there.” Sideshadowing is another type of logical link than time and cause, a type of connection in nonlinearity. Agar calls them local coherence relations. They create coherence whilst serving openness and contingency. His suggestion is that this is where sensemaking happens.

(1) After Peter Lynch, who wrote that the secret to investing was to go after the story of a stock. Lynch, P. (1994). Beating the street, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
(2) Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Related reading: Basten (2008) Dwalen door verhalen, in: Masselink, Van den Nieuwenhof, De Jong en Van Iren (red.), Waarderend organiseren. Appreciative Inquiry: co-creatie van duurzame verandering, Gelling Publishing: Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel