a narrative perspective on organizational learning...
TRANSCRIPT
A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING FROM UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES*
Raghu Garud Smeal College of Business
431 Business Building Pennsylvania State University
State College, PA 16802
Roger L. M. Dunbar Stern School of Business
New York University New York, NY 10012
Caroline A. Bartel
McCombs School of Business University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station B6300
Austin, TX 78712
July 25, 2008
* The ordering of authorship is arbitrary and the authors have contributed to the arguments in this paper at different points in time. We would like to thank Arun Kumaraswamy, Philipp Tuertscher, three anonymous reviewers and Joe Lampel for their valuable feedback and comments.
A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING FROM UNUSUAL
EXPERIENCES
Abstract
We explain how organizational experiences that fall outside already known experience
categories pose a challenge to traditional notions of learning. We suggest that one way to
learn about and from such unusual experiences is through the use of narratives. Not only
do narratives help individuals make sense of unusual experiences, but, at the same time,
they facilitate a process whereby others can learn from them too. We explore how the use
of narratives to learn from unusual experiences can be a generative process, i.e., every
instance of learning from an unusual experience can potentially inform how other unusual
experiences can be addressed. We illustrate how this learning process unfolds and then
consider the differences between a narrative approach and the traditional logico-scientific
approach to learning.
2
With the globalization of markets, modularization of technologies and the digitization of
products, there has been a sea change in the nature of the events, threats and opportunities that modern
organizations confront. Organizations can no longer operate as islands buffered from environments by
layers of hierarchy and inventory. Now, they are integral parts of dynamic networks propelling new
markets, disruptive technologies, and transformational institutional change. As a consequence,
organizations often find themselves dealing with experiences they have not encountered before. How
organizations deal with such situations can have a significant impact on whether they survive and prosper.
The frequency of unusual experiences – those that cannot readily be classified into any prior
category of experience and yet must be dealt with – has also been increasing. This poses a challenge to a
learning perspective that views organizations as closed systems and defines learning as an improved
response to known stimuli (e.g., Kanigel 1997). To the extent that a definition of learning implies a
progressive refinement of knowledge based on known categories, a gap becomes apparent. Specifically, it
is not clear how organizational learning will occur when organizations confront situations that do not fit
known categories.
Following Weick (1991), we adopt a perspective on organizational learning that implies not only
an ability to deal with current unusual experiences but, in addition, an ability to learn from them so as to
deal better with future unusual experiences. For instance, organizations should be able to learn from
actual or near disasters to help reduce the possibility of future disasters or, at least, better deal with them
should they reoccur (Weick and Roberts 1993; Weick and Sutcliffe 2001). Organizations that depend on
innovation to survive should be able to learn from each innovation journey that unfolds (Van de Ven et al.
1999). Organizations that provide specialized services should be able to learn from the unique
requirements posed by each of their clients in ways that help meet the next client’s unique requirements
(Garud et al. 2006). In other words, organizations should be able to pull together the insights from novel
responses to unusual experiences in such a way that each encounter informs the next.
This paper attempts to understand the nature of such learning and how it might be sustainable.
Our central thesis is that, to be effective, learning from unusual experiences must be a generative process.
3
Specifically, learning should occur in such a way that past experiences can be mobilized in the moment to
shape but not determine responses to current and future unusual experiences. In other words, such
learning must provide organizations with triggers for reflection and novel action rather than predefined
response templates.
We propose that narratives make this type of organizational learning possible. Narratives portray
events in a structured manner with a beginning, middle and an ending, offering a particular point of view
on a situation through the use of a plot that temporally connects people, places and artifacts (Bruner 1986;
Polkinghorne 1987). As we will argue, narratives appear uniquely suited to promoting learning from
unusual experiences for three reasons. First, narratives are a primary means that individuals and
collectives use to generate meaning around unusual experiences. Second, narratives serve as triggers for
action, setting in motion responses to unusual experiences as well as new approaches to subsequent
unusual experiences. Finally, the accumulation of narratives of unusual experiences within organizations
offers actors a generative memory that is gradually transformed over time and through use. These
processes constitute the foundation of our perspective on learning from unusual experiences.
As an expedient way of explicating these processes, we build upon and extend a framework
offered by Riessman (1993)1. Riessman not only addressed how individuals attend to experiences, but,
also how these experiences are communicated to others, how they are transcribed and analyzed, and
eventually how they are read. We build upon this framework to explore how individuals and collectives in
organizational settings attend to, talk about, transcribe, analyze and read about unusual experiences
through a narrative construction process. We then extend Riessman’s framework by exploring how these
processes trigger action in organizational contexts and how the accumulation of narratives over time
creates a generative organizational memory that is continually replenished through use.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
The origins of a progressive approach to organizational learning can be traced to the efforts made
at the turn of the last century to enhance organizational effectiveness through scientific management 1 We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to Riessman’s work.
4
principles. Such an approach involves conducting tests and experiments to discover “the one best way” to
generate improved performance (Kanigel 1997). At the individual level, learning occurs as individuals
progressively refine their skills to deal with predetermined tasks through a process of learning-by-doing
(Argote 1999). At the organizational level, learning occurs as routines are progressively refined to yield
standard operating procedures to deal with the different categories of events that an organization might
experience over time (Nelson and Winter 1982).
The benefits of progressive learning are manifest in improved responses to well defined situations
within stabilized contexts, e.g., the repeated execution of firm sales orders. Responses are triggered as
situations are first identified and then placed into known categories (Bowker and Star 1999). Categories
not only enable actors to validate their own actions but, at the same time, also facilitate consensual
validation of organization-wide responses. This occurs because experiential categories are socially
negotiated and collectively shared in organizations (Bowker and Star 1999).
Organizations, from this perspective, are systems of meaning from which individuals draw and to
which they contribute in their ongoing efforts to understand, communicate and respond to the experiences
they encounter in their daily work. But, what happens when an experience does not fit squarely into any
known category? According to Vaughan (1996), there is a tendency for organizations confronting such a
situation to force-fit unusual experiences into known categories. As she demonstrated in the NASA
challenger disaster, responses generated by such force-fit “normalization” processes can often result in
suboptimal outcomes. Specifically, normalization efforts can generate “competency traps” (Levitt and
March 1988) at the individual level, and “core rigidities” at the organizational level (Leornard-Barton
1992).
Is there a way for organizations to learn from unusual experiences, not by normalizing them, but
by treating them as triggers for reflection and for novel action that, in turn, may inform future responses?
Such learning is becoming increasingly important in contemporary work environments where
organizations and their members often encounter unusual experiences on an ongoing basis. For instance,
in a quest to harness organic growth through innovation, organizations continually encounter new
5
experiences (Hess and Kazanjian 2006; Van de Ven et al. 1999). Similarly, with a shift to a service
economy, almost every encounter with a client has the potential to be new and unusual because each
client is likely to make new demands due to the specific and unique issues that they confront (Garud et al
2006). Organizational efforts to respond to such experiences by normalizing them may generate outcomes
that are disastrous, as exemplified by the NASA case (Vaughan 1996). Thus, developing a perspective on
how organizations can continue to learn from unusual experiences over time and explicating the core
processes involved is both theoretically and practically important.
Indeed, several scholars have suggested that having ways to deal with unusual experiences is an
integral part of organizing. March and Simon (1993) for instance, pointed out that organizational
members always have to interpret and negotiate the meanings associated with ongoing experiences in
order to match them with institutionalized rules. Tsoukas (1996) offered a distributed knowledge
perspective on organizations and suggested that there is always indeterminacy associated with the
categorization of organizational experiences thereby rendering unusualness a pervasive facet of
organizing. Brown and Duguid (1991) described similar processes that occur within communities of
practice as members seek the best ways to act when they encounter unusual situations.
Our proposal is that narrative construction processes provide a way to learn from these unusual
experiences on an ongoing manner. Learning begins as organizational members try and make sense of
experiences through their discussions with others using narratives. These narratives become ‘texts’ that
enable the analysis and transmission of knowledge over time and across cultural boundaries within an
organization. By doing so, narratives provide organizations with a generative memory.
Inquiry Frame
Riessman (1993) proposed a framework whereby individuals represent and makes sense of their
everyday experiences for themselves and others. This framework encompasses a series of five processes:
(a) attending to experiences, (b) telling others about these experiences, (c) transcribing these experiences
into texts, (d) analyzing these texts to clarify what may be learned, and (e) the reading of these texts by
others over time and cultural settings. Riessman’s framework is the foundation we use for our perspective
6
on generative learning whereby organizational actors represent and make sense of the unusual
experiences they confront in their everyday work. We outline Riessman’s position on each of these sub-
processes as they occur at the individual level, and then extend her perspective by showing how narratives
can be used in organizational contexts to provide a means of sustaining organizational learning from
unusual experiences.
Riessman (1993: 9) illustrated how a person attends to specific facets of an experience they have
had by reflecting on a walk she took on a beach in Kerala India. Given her interests, she attended mostly
to the gendered nature of the work she observed on the beach. She noted how the men fished with nets
and sold their catch to women, and how the women bought the fish from the men and then took the fish to
the market to sell. Attending to details that were consistent with her interests in gendered work, Riessman
represented her beach experience in a way that was interesting and relevant to her.
Telling others about an experience is another aspect of Riessman’s model and she illustrated this
by describing how she told her colleagues interested in gendered work about her walk on the beach. She
told them what the day was like, why she took an early walk, what the people wore, what the men did,
how they chanted, what the women wore, how they carried the fish to market in pails on their heads, and
how she reacted to what she saw, etc. Due to their shared understanding about the nature of gendered
work and the issues associated with it, her friends expected her to talk about certain things and, as she told
her story, they interrupted, asked questions, and offered insights. The result was a jointly developed
account on how gendered work manifested itself in different ways on the Kerala beach.
Riessman (1993: 11) also addressed the processes that occur as a person transcribes his/her
experiences into texts. Transcription aims to capture an experience and establish what happened.
Inevitably, however, it simplifies experience because a transcript necessarily provides an incomplete and
selective reporting of the details surrounding an event. The resulting text is not only a partial account, but
it also becomes detached from the person(s) who actually experienced the event. Texts are important,
then, because they are sedimentations of the experience that serve to inform others at later points in time
even though they have no relation to the original event or to those who experienced it.
7
Analysis of experience is yet another process that Riessman’s framework considers. Here the
person (whose experiences are shared and transcribed) creates a "meta story" – an analytical text – to
signify what happened, editing and reshaping what was initially told. This reformulated account has a
flow and a form that may be lacking in the original telling or text because analysis is performed with a
particular audience in mind. Consequently, the conventions and expectations of the intended audience
guide the person’s analysis of the experience so that the resulting account appeals to the audience to
which it is directed.
Readers and reading are the final aspects of Riessman’s (1993) framework. Reading addresses
how others play an active role in constructing meaning around particular texts. Quoting Rabinow and
Sullivan (1979/1987: 12), Riessman noted how, despite a person’s analytical efforts to create a text for a
particular audience, texts are still often “open to several readings and several reconstructions” by others.
Specifically, readers link text content back to their own experiences and, in doing so, they overlook some
facets while emphasizing others. Through such a process, readers interpret texts in a way that is relevant
to their own contexts.
We build on Riessman’s (1993) framework concerning how people represent experiences to
develop a perspective on how organizational actors not only represent unusual experiences but also how
they make sense of them for themselves and for others. We do so by exploring the specific mechanisms
that are at play in each of the processes that Riessman identified and then explain how organizational
actors respond when they confront unusual experiences. We also extend her framework to explore how
narratives trigger situated action within organizational settings and how, through narratives, organizations
accumulate knowledge of how unusual experiences can be handled in an ongoing fashion.
NARRATIVES AS A WAY TO LEARN FROM UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES
How might narratives provide a means of learning from unusual experiences? At one level,
narratives are temporally ordered accounts that capture details of particular situations. At another level, a
narrative relates emerging details to underlying forces affecting ongoing developments that constitute a
recognizable plot (Polkinghore 1987). Narratives capture the interplay between details and underlying
8
forces, and it is this property that enables individuals not only to represent unusual experiences but to also
learn from them over time. Building on Riessman, we propose that narratives: (a) allow organizational
actors to attend to unusual experiences and report on the details of interest to them, (b) talk with others
about such experiences in a holistic way, (c) transcribe their unusual experiences into texts that people
across an organization can use as boundary objects , (d) analyze such experiences and consider the
underlying forces that may explain the emergence of unusual experiences, and (e) enable others not
directly connected with such experiences to generate meanings relevant to their situations. In addition,
narratives can trigger action, a facet not explicitly considered by Riessman. This action unfolds within an
organizational narrative infrastructure from which individuals draw and to which they contribute.
Attending to
How might organizational actors attend to unusual experiences that occur in their work contexts?
By definition, unusual experiences do not fit neatly into established experiential categories. Consequently,
they are likely to implicate seemingly unrelated phenomena that do not necessarily cohere into anything
immediately comprehensible. Instead, unusual experiences in organizational contexts present themselves
as complex and disjointed events. Understanding such experiences is a challenge and those attending to
them seek ways not only to identify them, but also to imbue them with meaning (Tsoukas and Hatch
2001).
How does meaning emerge? One way is through the gradual construction of a narrative (Bruner
1986; Ricoeur 1984). Narrative construction typically begins with fragments of meaning that emerge as
organizational actors experiencing the unusual situation make observations and suppositions about what
may be going on (Boje 1995; Dewey 1997). Schon (1983) labeled this process “reflection in action.” Such
a process might consider, for example, motives and causal connections that may explain these particular
unusual experiences (Gabriel 2000). Fragments of meaning formed around particular details of the
experience often begin to cohere into a provisional narrative (or “ante-narrative” according to Boje 1991)
that offers emergent speculation about what may be happening.
9
Provisional narratives give people an opportunity to attend to and consider available details and
how they might relate to plausible plots that, in turn, might suggest additional relationships that could
exist and explain otherwise unrelated details (Dewey 1997:193; Polkinghorne 1987:143). Plots represent
overarching and conventional themes within an organizational context that people readily identify with,
enabling them to see actions, events and circumstances as being related parts of a larger whole (Bruner
1986; Gabriel 2000). The challenge is to find a viable plot that lends coherence to and provides insights
about the unusual experience within a particular organizational context. Different plots can take the same
details and make them comprehensible in different ways, while salient details put limits on the plots that
can be considered plausible (Greimas 1987; Pentland 1999). By moving between salient details and
possible plots, individuals attend to organizational experiences in a holistic manner, generating an overall
and integrated gestalt that will gradually give meaning to an unusual experience (Taylor and Van Every
2000). As Gabriel (2000: 41) put it, “story-work involves the transformation of everyday experience into
meaningful stories. In doing so, the storytellers neither accept nor reject ‘reality.’ Instead they seek to
mould it, shape it.” In sum, the property of narratives that allows the whole and its parts to be mutually
defined (Ricoeur 19884; Tsoukas and Hatch 2001) enables organizational actors to gradually create
meaning for unusual experiences.
Telling
What mechanism enables organizational actors to share their unusual experiences in a way that
will be comprehensible to others who are steeped in their own realities? Again, narratives provide a
convenient format. Narratives constructed within an organizational context contain common cultural
symbols that are drawn from the larger organizational discourse, thereby establishing touch-points with
other organizational actors (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001). Members of an organization are also attracted to
emerging narratives because they depict something that is unique and distinctive that is occurring in the
organization. As Johnson (2002: 189) pointed out: “Narrative has always been about the mix of invention
and repetition; stories seem like stories because they follow rules that we’ve learned to recognize, but the
stories that we most love are ones that surprise us in some way, they break rules in the telling. They are a
10
mix of the familiar and the strange: too much of the former, and they seem stale, formulaic; too much of
the latter, and they cease to be stories.” In the case of unusual experiences, for example, it might be a
breach of a customary routine, practice or expectation, thereby giving rise to an unusual experience. It is
this combination of the ordinary and the unusual that provides a mechanism for a person to tell their
experiences to other organizational actors who might otherwise ignore them (Barry and Elmes 1997;
Martens et al. 2007).
Riessman (1993) highlighted how telling ultimately is an interactive process involving the
different people involved in the conversation. When people consider a narrative of an unusual experience
from their own vantage point, they often ask questions, offer comments, and add to the emerging story by
exploring alternatives and options that exist in their own situation. As Gabriel (2000: 41) suggested, “the
story emerges as a collage from a complex inter-subjective process.” Indeed, such emergent conversations
are a means through which individuals collectively make sense of an unusual experience they confront
(Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Such telling processes underlie Weick and Robert’s (1993) perspective on
“heedful-interrelating” and facilitate consensual understanding and real-time coordination between actors
as they navigate a way through unusual experiences. Thus, real-time sensemaking occurs through the
connections, reactions, and responses that emerge in the interactive process of people telling and listening
to narratives (Hatch and Weick 1998; Weick, 1995).
Transcription into Texts
By offering a simplified but durable record of events, texts make it possible for wider audiences
to gain access to insights about unusual experiences that otherwise could have remained locally situated
(Phillips et al. 2004; Taylor and Van Every 2000). In this sense, texts serve as memory devices that others
can access and use over time (Walsh and Ungson 1991). As Riessman (1993) noted, however, one of the
main functions of a transcription process is to abstract and simplify the details of raw experiences. What
implications does a loss of detail have for how organizations learn from unusual experiences?
Simplification and loss of detail are not a great concern when transcription uses a narrative form
to capture unusual experiences. The holistic property of narratives means that neither the surface detail
11
alone nor the deeper plot is critical to the process of generating meaning around unusual experiences.
Rather, it is the narrative as a whole that links the two levels that is critical. A narrative text helps an
audience understand the whole, and an emerging appreciation of the whole also helps them understand the
parts.2 Consequently, other organizational actors not directly involved in the experience can generate
meaning despite and even because of missing details in the narrative text. Specifically, the implied plot
informs individuals about how reasonable assumptions and expectations may be able to fill in gaps in
detail in a narrative. The relationship between surface level detail and a deeper plot provides coherence to
a narrative, enabling individuals from different parts of an organization to comprehend what has occurred.
At the same time, the presence of gaps at the surface level accords narratives flexibility, allowing
individuals to apply their own frames of reference (e.g., identities, schemas, scripts, goals, and belief
systems), real-world experiences, and tacit knowledge of given tasks and actors to generate their own
unique inferences (Taylor and Van Every 2000).
The coherence and flexibility implicit in narrative texts makes them potential “boundary objects”
to diverse audiences (Carlile 2002; Star 1989). Boundary objects are abstract or physical artifacts that
have the capacity to bridge perceptual and practical differences among diverse actors. Star (1989) offered
geographical maps as examples of boundary objects: maps introduce unfamiliar physical territory while,
at the same time, allowing groups to focus on their different knowledge interests within the territory, e.g.,
she suggested that in a particular mapped territory, life zones might be of interest to biologists whereas
animal trails might be of interest to museum conservationists. In a similar way, a narrative text describing
an unusual experience can serve as boundary object because it draws on aspects of an organization that
are known to all (e.g., structural arrangements, routines, commonly held values) while also allowing
different audiences to attend to those aspects of the experience that are of most interest to them. To the
extent that transcribed narratives become institutionalized3 and are made widely available to others (e.g.,
posted on company intranets or published in company documents), they may become especially potent as 2 For instance, as one gradually recognizes a narrative’s plot, e.g., whether it might be a tragedy or an epic, this also helps one to appreciate the potential significance of details as the narrative unfolds. 3 We thank Leigh Star for these insights.
12
boundary objects because they can continually inform others who are located in different parts of the
organization.
Analysis
Riessman (1993) introduced the formal analysis of texts as an additional aspect of her framework.
In the context of organizations and unusual experiences, analysis goes beyond a person’s initial
attributions of meaning and how this may be communicated to others to consider potential underlying
forces that may have propelled the experience. Through analysis of one’s narrative text, an organizational
actor is able to speculate on the generative mechanisms driving the unusual experience (Greimas 1966;
Pentland 1999; Tsoukas 1989; 1991). As generative mechanisms are identified, it is possible to consider
the implications for subsequent action and how other situations might be handled in the future.
As unusual experiences unfold, they can have implications for many people in an organization
and so multiple texts may emerge reflecting the vantage points of the different people involved (Bijker et
al. 1987). Each narrative text then provides a partial window into aspects of an unusual experience. When
analyzed together, these texts may help elaborate the broader social context surrounding the situation and
facilitate a broader, overall understanding of the forces involved that informs possible responses to that
experience (March et al. 1991).
As an example, consider Garud and Kumaraswamy’s (1993) study describing Sun Microsystems’
open systems strategy. Whereas the accepted view at the time promoted the virtues of closed computer
platforms (Porter 1980), Sun touted the open access it provided to its platform of intellectual resources.
Within the computer industry at the time, Sun’s strategy was considered unusual. Intrigued, Garud and
Kumaraswamy analyzed publicly available texts (i.e., newspapers, industry magazines, etc.) to identify
the deeper forces that might underlie Sun’s strategy and drive its success. This led to the identification of
two generative forces – network effects and continual change – driving Sun’s strategy. The researchers
concluded that a combination of these underlying forces can explain the spate of ‘open source’ strategies
that have subsequently been seen in systemic industries. This example illustrates how analyses of
13
different texts depicting different accounts of the same experience may yield a more nuanced perspective
that informs subsequent action.
Reading of the Text
As Riessman (1993: 14) noted, texts eventually reach the hands of other people, “who bring their
own meanings to bear.” She suggested that, “Every text is plurivocal, open to several readings and to
several reconstructions.” She concluded, “Collaboration is inevitable as the reader is an agent of the text.
This is consistent with Ricoeur’s (1984) view that a narrative text establishes a link between the world of
the author and the world of the reader. Thus, other organizational actors who encounter a narrative text of
an unusual experience do not simply understand it ‘as is’. Instead, they actively contextualize the
narrative so that it fits with and has relevance for their own organizational situations (Dewey 1997:199).
As we described earlier, individuals actively connect narrative details to their broader knowledge and
experiences, drawing on their own perspectives, real-world experiences, and knowledge of a given issue
or context to assess and elaborate on the meaning of the narrative. Readers therefore not only consider
depicted events, but also how they can relate these events to their own experiences to generate insights
relevant to their own contexts.
Encountering multiple narrative texts depicting different unusual experiences may also enable
individuals to generate responses to other unusual experiences that they face. Specifically, Thompson,
Gentner, and Loewenstein (2000) suggested that individuals exhibit greater ease in generating insights
applicable to their own situations when they have access to different texts. People who compared different
bargaining case studies, for example, were more likely to transfer insights to an actual bargaining
situation than those who considered the cases individually and in isolation. Access to texts of different
unusual experiences may activate an analogical engine that individuals can then use to establish a range of
possible links and relationships. Similarly, organizational actors may be more likely to abstract learning
from the narrative texts of different unusual experiences, a process that is consistent with the notion of
analysis that we discussed, but now done by the reader.
14
This generative learning process is not inductive in nature – based on the recognition of recurring
rules across similar cases – nor is it deductive in nature – based on the application of logical rules across
similar cases. Rather, it is an abductive process (Peirce 1958), whereby individuals bring their own frames
of reference to their reading of a narrative in order to identify possibilities relevant to their own situations
(Bartel and Garud 2003; Czarniawska 2004a). Specifically, narratives simultaneously attend to the present
(i.e., the experience), generate anticipations of the future, and evoke memories of the past (Ricoeur 1984;
Carr 1986; Tsoukas and Hatch 2001). People who have different past experiences and different future
visions, therefore, draw different inferences from the same narrative.
Action Generators
How do narratives trigger action and what is the nature of the resulting learning? We have already
discussed how the generation, analysis, and reading of a narrative are processes that are continually and
actively generating new meaning. Specifically, organizational actors continually apply their own frames
of reference to generate and make sense of narratives. In applying these frames of reference, they conduct
“thought experiments” (Ricoeur 1984) projecting themselves into the narrative and asking, "What would I
have done in this situation?" or “What would this mean for me?” By doing so, people create opportunities
to generate new meanings that fit their local realities and contexts (White 1987).
Consequently, as people read narrative texts about unusual experiences, they also continually
translate the insights they draw from them into implications relevant for their own situations (Patriotta
2003; Ricoeur 1984). Thus, analysis and reading both inform the actions that might be taken in a given
context. This is how learning is manifest from narratives of unusual experiences – in the form of novel
situated actions that are informed by the past. As Lave and Wenger (1994: 34) noted, “the generality of
any form of knowledge always lies in the power to renegotiate the meaning of the past and future in
constructing the meaning of present circumstances.”
In such a process, organizational actors develop their own recounting of the narrative and they
make it a part of their own experience. Through recounting, both the person and the narrative are likely
transformed. People are transformed as their perspectives on their own contexts change along with their
15
actual decisions and actions on the job. The narrative itself also takes a new form as individuals elaborate
on certain elements and infuse it with new meanings and inferences that they have either drawn on or
developed to fit their local situations. The original narrative is gradually replaced in favor of a newly
crafted, locally salient narrative.
This mimicry of direct experience, comparable to what Tarde (1962) labels as “generative
imitation,” gives narratives the power to affect peoples’ knowledge of their past experiences as well as the
beliefs and actions that they bring to current experiences (cf. Fazio and Zanna 1981; Green and Brock
2000). Narrative interpretations become triggers for local action, a prompt for ad-hoc performances
(Patriotta 2003), as individuals give meaning to events that unfolded in other contexts but are now seen
from the vantage point of a local context. This idea echoes Denning’s (2001) point that narratives serve as
springboards – points of departure for new approaches that people construct in their own minds, drawing
on available narratives and placing these events in familiar contexts thereby embedding them into their
own experiences.
Organizational Learning
How does learning from narratives of unusual experiences unfold at the organizational level?
First, narratives preserve the complexities and struggles that inevitably surround unusual experiences. As
Barry and Elmes (1997: 430) noted, “narrativity emphasizes the simultaneous presence of multiple,
interlinked realities, and is, thus, well positioned for capturing … diversity and complexity.” Indeed,
consistent with Bruner’s (1991) notion of “narrative accrual”, the presence of several narratives sets up an
overall cultural context within an organization – a narrative infrastructure in Deuten and Rip’s (2000)
terms, or a “cultural tool-kit” in Swidler’s (1986) terms – that represents the organization’s perspective on
how to deal with unusual experiences. Such a narrative infrastructure adds to emerging organizational
knowledge not in a traditional sense of adding another piece of reinforcing evidence to what is already
known, but in a generative sense, enhancing understanding of the antecedents, processes, and outcomes
associated with an organization’s history and how it wants to proceed. Often, then, a narrative
16
infrastructure depicts and implies ways to deal with unusual experiences within an organization. These
are an organization’s cultural understandings and narratives are manifestations of these understandings.
As individuals draw upon these cultural resources to create their own narratives as guides to their
actions in a particular organizational setting, they simultaneously add to the organizational infrastructure
(Giddens 1979). To be credible, narratives have to be seen as relevant to others in the organization and
this is established by the use of recognizable symbols that are contained in the narrative infrastructure
(e.g., using the term ‘value-added service’ in companies such as IBM). At the same time, each narrative is
also constitutive of a distinct identity, adding unique value in comparison to the narratives that have been
offered by others. This engine associated with narratives – establishing similarities and differences (Barry
and Elmes 1997) – results in the continual generation of new narratives that serve to replenish and
revitalize an organization’s narrative infrastructure.
Second, narratives enable organizational actors to incorporate the unusual into their own work
perspectives. Individuals’ interpretations and responses to unusual experiences are shaped in large part by
their understanding of how they believe their organization would like them to react. As individuals
encounter unusual situations during their daily work, narratives of unusual experiences preserved in an
organization’s cultural infrastructure help people sort out whether these experiences should be interpreted
as representing contradictory goals, opposing expectations, or simply novel ideas. Accumulated narratives
of unusual experiences also help define values and standards that determine accepted and expected
behavior (Boje 1991; Czarniawska 1998; Martin 1982). Narratives incorporated into an organization’s
memory represent an organization’s perspective and, as they are told and re-told, enable organizational
members to position any particular unusual experience they encounter within the broader cultural context.
Third, narratives about unusual experiences can help an organization establish an experimentation
approach oriented towards detecting problems, and updating and improving possible response strategies.
As narratives typically describe a disruption and restoration of an established order, each story provides a
prototype for such a “design attitude” (Boland and Collopy 2004; Romme 2003). Such narratives not only
attract attention to emergent problems, but also to how they might be fixed – the result is both a design
17
urge and also a sense of agency. Further, the multiplicity of meanings narratives generate ensure variation
in the problem solving approaches organizational actors use. Consequently, narratives promote both a
design attitude and also a problem solving process that encourages experimentation and conscious
selection of an approach to deal with unusual experiences as they are confronted in day-to-day work.
In sum, narratives of unusual experiences, as they accumulate within an organization, can create a
generative memory that enhances organizational actors’ ability to construct diverse interpretations of
situations and to engage in situated performance. Individuals may evoke different narratives and different
elements of narratives to provide a rationale and script for behaviors that otherwise may be dismissed as
irrational or inappropriate. As a result, narratives of unusual experiences provide mechanisms whereby
organizations make sense of, react to, and learn from experiences that do not fall into familiar categories
of experiences. Narratives can encourage insight in the course of sensemaking as a result of everyday
action and they can allow for the amplification of potential ideas by mobilizing resources across an entire
organization.
AN ILLUSTRATION
We use observations from 3M Corporation to illustrate how the process of learning from unusual
experiences can play out. 3M has, over the years, built up a culture that emphasizes the value of unusual
experiences in sustaining innovation. In fact, 3M epitomizes what it means to embrace the unusual. That
is, it is usual at 3M to talk about, report, analyze and act upon experiences that do not fit easily into
known categories, and then to learn from these unusual situations so as to contribute value on later
occasions. Dr. Coyne (1996), the former Senior VP of 3M’s R&D, characterized innovation as
"controlled chaos." In an interview he told one of us, “we don’t lead innovation, innovation leads us.” He
was fully aware of the contradictions implicit in an organization where learning from unusual situations is
considered usual and expected. As he stated:
A tradition of innovation is a curious thing. On the one hand, it seems almost
contradictory - a stubborn, unchanging habit of embracing the new and surprising. On the
other hand, it seems unnecessary: in a world marked by constant and accelerating change,
18
surely everyone everywhere feels the need for new ways of thinking and working. I hope
to convince you that a tradition of innovation is both possible and necessary. And I'll
discuss how we have, for almost over a century, built such a tradition at 3M.
Learning About and From Narratives of Post-it Notes
To illustrate Dr Coyne’s point and to show how 3M uses narratives of innovation to sustain
innovation, we offer excerpts from well-known narrative texts describing the development of Post-it®
Notes to (Lindhal 1988; Nayak and Ketteringham 1986; Peters and Waterman 1982; 3M’s Innovation
Chronicles, 1998) and the organizational process of learning from unusual experiences.
In 1969 and before Post-it® Notes, 3M’s Spence Silver recalled in his narrative to Laura Lindhal:
I wanted to see what would happen if I put a lot of it into the reaction mixture. Before, we
had used amounts that would correspond to conventional wisdom. I find that very
satisfying, to perturb the structure slightly and just see what happens. I have a hard time
talking people into doing that -- people who are more highly trained. It’s been my
experience that people are reluctant just to try, to experiment -- just to see what will
happen! (Nayak and Ketteringham 1986: 57-58).
The outcome was a substance Silver had never seen before and thus an event that he could not
readily place into a familiar category derived from his work experience. As he put it, “I was doing some
experiments with a new polymer system and I made this material and said, ‘This is interesting.’ When I
looked at it under the microscope, it was beautiful!”
Unable to place this unfamiliar substance into a category that he or others at 3M were familiar
with, Silver decided to keep the new substance and to gradually investigate its properties – a decision that
ultimately led to the creation of Post-it® Notes. In her interview, Laura Lindhal, asked Silver whether he
had ever considered his experiment that led to an “impermanent adhesive” a mistake. Silver retorted:
"They want to call it ‘a mistake that worked.’ I like to think of it as a solution that was looking for a
problem to solve" (Lindhal 1988). Adding, “The first time I saw it, I said: ‘This has got to be something.’
Then I started telling people about it.”
19
In these exchanges preserved as narrative texts within 3M, we see two aspects of our proposed
framework on learning from unusual experiences. That is, we see how Silver used a narrative approach to
both attend to and tell others of his unusual experience. Silver believed that his discovery was potentially
valuable when he juxtaposed it against what was already known, i.e., it was something that neither he nor
anyone else had seen before. But, it was still not clear what it was or why it might have value. And, so, he
started telling anyone who would listen about it. He hoped that, with their help, he would identify
economic value in the unusual substance he had created. “Who did you tell?” asked Lindhal. Silver
responded: “Anyone who would listen. Technical directors, other scientists, the tech group I was part of.”
In talking to others, Silver constructed a provisional narrative – a speculative, incomplete account
– to explore the usefulness of the material that he had stumbled upon. He also invited others to participate
in this process because it was not clear what value a “glue that did-not-glue” might hold with 3M given
that it was committed to glues that stuck. As Nayak and Ketteringham (1986: 61) highlighted, "In this
atmosphere [at 3M], imagining a piece of paper that eliminates the need for tapes is an almost unthinkable
leap into the void.”
Yet, at 3M, people realize there is always potential value in unusual things. Dr. Coyne often
quoted Frances Bacon in talking about the 3M innovation process: "As the births of all living creatures
are, at first, misshapen, so are all innovations” (Coyne 1996). This underlying and shared cultural belief
constituted the backdrop against which detailed discussions about the new substance then unfolded,
connecting those involved to the more general narrative concerning the nature of 3M’s innovation
processes and thereby engaging their attention.
Several texts describe the process leading to the emergence of Post-it Notes and today, each
serves as a boundary object for 3M employees. We have offered quotes from Lindhal’s interview with
Silver in 1988. There is a longer narrative describing the episode in Nayak and Ketteringham’s (1986)
book titled “Breakthroughs.” Other renditions can be found in books chronicling the history of 3M or in
Dr. Coyne’s UK Innovation lecture series. There is also a video narrative of what happened, with people
20
who were directly involved in the process appearing and recounting their versions of what happened
(Peters and Waterman, 1982).
An analysis of these narrative texts reveals that navigating and learning from unusual experiences
necessarily requires many people distributed throughout an organization to be actively engaged. Besides
Spence Silver, for example, there was Art Fry. It was Fry who used Silver’s impermanent glue to keep in
place the little pieces of paper he used to mark pages of his hymn book. Fry said: “It’s a classic 3M tale. I
couldn’t have done what I did without Spence. And without me, his adhesive might have come to
nothing.” Geoffery Nicholson, Technical Director, recounted how he attracted the attention 3M’s
disinterested Marketing Department by sending them something he expected them to find unusual -- free
Post-it Notes samples.
The different texts describing the Post-it Note experience continue to have good currency at 3M
and they illustrate how 3M uses narratives to exploit insights from past unusual experiences to foster
further innovation. Consistent with our perspective on learning from unusual experiences, reading and
analysis of these narratives reveals and reinforces the perspective of 3M’s broader cultural context
concerning how innovation unfolds. This perspective then informs individuals on how they should view
and respond to events in their own work contexts. For example, 3M uses the narratives of Post-it® Notes’
development to convey how innovation often begins with something unusual that initially may appear to
be a problem or a ‘mistake.’ In fact, 3M’s official history titled “Our story so far” notes how 3M’s origins
actually trace back to an unexpected ‘mistake.’ 3M’s founders had invested in a corundum mine and then
discovered the ore was of very low grade. At the time, high quality corundum was used to make gems –
rubies and sapphires – but this option was not possible with their low grade ore. Desperate but reluctant to
give up, the 3M founders observed the extreme hardness of the corundum ore and began to consider how
it might be used. They turned it into sandpaper and the 3M Corporation story began.
21
Narratives about other innovations abound at 3M 4 and their current website (www.3M.com)
contains numerous examples describing what 3M people have done as they have encountered something
unusual. Each features a particular series of unusual experiences as viewed by those who were involved.
There is also available a formal analytical text – a meta-story – of 3M narratives that Dr. Coyne has used
to talk about Innovation processes at 3M (Coyne 1996). In this analytical text, Dr. Coyne revisits several
3M innovation narratives and draws from them insights concerning how innovation is sustained within
3M Corporation.
The wide availability of such narratives emphasizes that people at 3M encounter unusual
experiences on an ongoing basis. “Stories are a habit of mind at 3M, and it’s through them – through the
way they make us see ourselves and our business operations in complex, multi-dimensional forms – that
we’re able to discover opportunities for strategic change” stated one 3M employee (Shaw et al. 1998).
Indeed, by institutionalizing narratives of unusual experiences, 3M has created a narrative infrastructure
that not only memorializes past innovations, but also provides a springboard from which to generate new
ways of encouraging and exploring the possible meaning of new unusual experiences.
Tapping into 3M’s Generative Memory
To further illustrate how learning from narratives can have many generative aspects, we describe
Kris Kindem’s personal experiences at 3M.5 Kindem was part of a knowledge management group that
was charged with exploring how 3M could take advantage of digital media and the World Wide Web.
Sometime in 1997, Kindem reported how a “smoke stack” metaphor – signifying going directly to the end
user – in the Post-it Notes narrative had influenced him. Reading the text, he asked, “What does it mean
‘to go to the smoke stack’ in today’s information technology world?” His answer was that somehow, one
should use the power of the web to connect 3M directly with its customers.
4 For example: Our story so far: Notes from the first 75 years of 3M Company, 3M Center, St. Paul, MN, 1977; 3M Innovation Chronicles, 3M Center, St. Paul, MN; Huck, V. Brand of the Tartan: The 3M Story, St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company; 1995; 5 This part of the illustration is based on our interactions with Kris Kindem. We have shared our description with Kindem who agreed with its content.
22
To develop an understanding of the situation he confronted, Kindem abandoned the surface level
details of the original narrative – smoke stacks and early 20th century factories – and transferred attention
to the core challenge and possible solutions that might be relevant to his own context. He concluded that
he had to find a way to use the power of the World Wide Web to connect directly with customers in a way
that was essentially equivalent to a face-to-face meeting with a salesperson. Kindem decided to create
digital three dimensional representations of 3M products so that customers worldwide could turn on their
computer and get a “virtual feel” for them. Not only would this help in the disintermediation process the
web naturally allows, but, in addition, customers would get a better appreciation of the 3M product range.
To Kindem, the digitized 3D website representations of 3M’s products was what “going to the smoke
stacks” meant in a digital age.
Kindem’s reading of other narrative texts chronicling different innovations at 3M also revealed
how innovation requires the active engagement of many people distributed throughout an organization.
Kindem realized that to accomplish his digitalization objective, he too would need to gain the support of
many 3M people. He would need the cooperation not only of technical people, for instance, but also the
managers of the different product groups whose products he wanted to digitize. He realized that his
novelty claims would probably be contested as most of these people were accustomed to material artifacts
and the idea of creating a virtual object to sell products would seem to be a highly unusual one to them.
Riding Kindem’s new idea into good currency would be a critical and difficult task, therefore, as many
people at 3M had no immediate reference to or familiarity with the notion of a “virtual object.”
Kindem was influenced by another generative mechanism he inferred from many 3M narratives --
bootlegging. At 3M, bootlegging refers to the opportunity and right of 3M employees to access and use
any of 3M’s unutilized resources. Art Fry described how it works:
At 3M we've got so many different types of technologies operating and so many
experts and so much equipment scattered here and there, that we can piece things
together when we're starting off. We can go to this place and do "Step A" on a product,
and we can make the adhesive and some of the raw materials here, and do one part
23
over here, and another part over there, and convert a space there and make a few things
that aren't available (Nayak and Ketteringham, 1986: 66-67).
In this vignette, we see how 3M has institutionalized bootlegging as a symbol that employees can
draw upon to tap into 3M’s material, social and financial resources depending upon their project’s needs.
Kindem too decided to bootleg resources from the knowledge management group to create a series of
initial digitized representations of 3M’s products. He used these examples to demonstrate the benefits of
“going to the smoke stacks” via the World Wide Web to targeted product departments. “Wouldn’t it be
exciting to apply the smoke stack approach to your industry?” Kindem asked the product managers who
were also familiar with the smoke stack metaphor in 3M narratives. In this way, Kindem was using the
original narrative of “going to the smoke stacks” as a boundary object to establish a link not only with 3M
traditions, but also to mobilize support for his digitalization proposal. He did so by making it possible for
product managers to imagine the usefulness of this unusual representation of their products and by also
enabling them to personally experiment with 3-D representations of their products on their own computer
screens.
In our examples of the Post-it® Notes and Kris Kindem, we have drawn from several different
narrative texts that are a part of 3M’s narrative infrastructure. Each text is an instance of how an unusual
experience emerged and how it was then used to foster innovation. As Useem (2002) noted: “At 3M,
stories are a big deal. Every employee knows about the 3M scientist who spilled chemicals on her tennis
shoe – and came up with Scotchguard. Everyone knows about the researcher who wanted a better way to
mark the pages of his church hymnal – and invented the Post-it Note. Collectively these stories form a
larger narrative about how 3M became, and remains, one of America’s premier corporations.” 3M’s
success is due in part to how it has used narratives as a means of promoting ongoing learning from usual
experiences.
THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO LEARNING
Organizations increasingly confront situations that require members to break existing routines,
violate expectations and otherwise disrupt customary ways of working. Each case constitutes an unusual
24
experience that must be managed. As the situations at 3M illustrated, organizations can use narratives
both to make sense of what transpired and to explore what can be learned to deal with future unusual
experiences. Such a sensemaking approach to learning unfolds by identifying a possible underlying plot
while attending to the emerging details of ongoing events.
This process differs from other learning strategies, particularly those based on a logico-scientific
(LS) approach to learning driven by a measurement-based scientific process that refines accumulated
knowledge (Bruner 1986). The key distinctions between these approaches are summarized in Table 1.The
overall learning strategy in a LS approach is to generalize from samples of particular phenomena to
populations of the same phenomena. This is accomplished by abstracting away contextual details from
phenomena and it is this abstraction process that then enables phenomena to be placed into known
categories. Through such a process, the LS approach reduces complex experiences into well defined and
discreet events fixed in time and space. By examining how these events co-vary with other events, the LS
approach tries to establish efficient causation to explain outcomes (Eisenhardt 1989; Mohr 1982).
A narrative approach, in contrast, resists attempts at reductionism (Tsoukas and Hatch 2001).
Rather, a narrative is inherently processual and holistic, recognizing the different roles that multiple actors
and material artifacts play in how experiences unfold (Hutchins 1995). Agency is an eminent factor that
such a perspective sees as distributed through different networks of associations and emergent between
actors and artifacts over time (Czarniawska 2004b). People in organizations not only mobilize histories of
prior experiences that they then contextually apply to their own organizational situations but, in addition,
they also decide whether or not to enact scripts based on organizational histories that describe how to deal
with emergent unusual experiences.
Consistent with such an epistemology, participants in narrative development play active roles in
determining how local actions then unfold. Specifically, individuals draw upon their own contextualized
inferences from others’ narratives (what Peirce (1958) has labeled as ‘abduction’, an approach to
generalization that lies in contrast to induction and deduction in the LS approach). Such a process is
25
driven by generative imitation (Tarde 1962) rather than exact replication, which a LS approach suggests is
how learning ought to unfold in an organizational setting (e.g. Winter and Szulanski 2001).
These differences are manifest in the roles that information and meaning play in these two
approaches. A LS approach attempts to “remove doubt” by gathering more information on which to carry
out more statistical tests so as to facilitate a process of Baysian updating. Specifically, a LS perspective
suggests that perspectives ought to converge as more data is generated about the same unusual experience
even if organizational actors and other observers start from different positions. A narrative approach, in
contrast, attempts to establish plausibility by generating verisimilitude (Bruner 1986) through
dramaturgical presentations (Lampel 2001). There is as much said as there is left unsaid, creating a text
that invites people to psychologically engage with the narrative and imagine what they might have done
in similar situations (Bruner 1991; Ricoeur 1984). As these people may have different priors, their
contextualized understandings need not converge over time. Despite and perhaps even because of this
lack of convergence, individuals and groups may be more likely to find new and better ways to deal with
unusual experiences. The availability of different perspectives offers the ‘requisite variety’ (Ashby 1956)
needed to understand and possibly counter the complexities one encounters in unusual situations. Indeed,
narratives are robust enough to provide some structure and also pliable enough to allow groups with
different perspectives to generate their own nuanced meanings.
Ultimately, the two approaches learn from and deal with unusual experiences in different ways. A
narrative approach preserves the complexity required to deal with unusual experiences and it facilitates
processes associated with action, such as emergent coordination, improvisation, bricolage and the like
(Tsoukas and Hatch 2001; Weick and Sutcliffe 2001). Narratives provide individuals with a basis for
reflection and action in contrast to ready-made plans. This compares with a LS approach that deals with
the complexities associated with unusual experiences by defining comparable cases, which requires
reducing and normalizing of sources of complexity. Then, by generating a priori knowledge, routines can
be developed and applied to control and predict situations.
CONTRIBUTIONS
26
We have offered a perspective that makes it possible for organizations to continually learn from
ongoing unusual experiences. Our narrative perspective on how organizational actors make sense of novel
events as well as how they contribute to the development and change of a narrative infrastructure builds
upon and extends work on narratives in organization studies (cf. Barry and Elmes 1997; Lounsbury and
Glynn 2001; Martens et al. 2007). Our central argument is that narratives foster generative learning from
unusual experiences and we have outlined the process whereby this occurs.
Our perspective contributes to the literature on organizational learning. By drawing attention to
unusual experiences, we bring into relief how organizational tendencies to normalize or even ignore
unusual experiences can often lead to suboptimal responses (Vaughan 1996). We argue that an approach
to learning that draws on narrative construction processes can lead to more productive responses by
making it possible for organizations to preserve and respond to the differentiating aspects of unusual
experiences in novel ways. As narratives build partly upon existing symbols (Martens et al 2007), their
power lies in allowing individuals to create situated understandings of unusual experiences and negotiate
the meanings of these experiences with others to generate consensual understanding. Narrative texts of
unusual experiences can serve as boundary objects that inform others about what transpired in such a way
that readers are left room to actively determine to what extent these experiences have local significance
and meaning. An organizational memory of such experiences is replenished in use (Giddens 1979) as new
narratives of unusual experiences become part of an organization’s narrative infrastructure over time. In
short, the narrative perspective we offer advances current understanding of generative learning processes
whereby individuals construct and share interpretations about unusual experiences and draw on past
experiences in ways that promote engagement and new actions.
Our perspective also has the potential to allay two tensions that currently exist in research on
learning and adaptation in organizations. One tension concerns exploitation and exploration (March
1991). Processes that reinforce exploitation often are conceptualized as being antithetical to processes
required for exploration, and the advice to managers has been to separate these processes in
organizational settings. However, narratives are mechanisms that make it possible for organizational
27
members to blend elements of exploration and exploitation together in their daily work lives. Specifically,
the use of narratives of unusual experiences creates a generative impulse for novel actions that
nevertheless takes into account builds upon an organization’s cultural and historical context. Specifically,
narratives enable organizational actors to formulate new courses of action for unusual experiences that
recognize, complement, or otherwise are able to co-exist with conventional routines and practices
A second tension concerns a distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge (Polanyi 1962).
This distinction refers to abstract, technical and readily articulable knowledge in contrast to knowledge
based on understandings that arise from active participation in and interaction with tasks, technologies,
and resources in a particular work context (e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Brown and Duguid 1991;
Lave and Wenger 1991). Nonaka (1994) created a bridge between these two facets of knowledge by
conceptualizing a knowledge spiral within which tacit knowledge is converted to explicit knowledge.
However, in the case of knowledge based on unusual experiences, because categories into which the
experience can be placed do not pre-exist, such a conversion process will be difficult at best. The use of
narratives to learn from unusual experiences, however, shows how tacitness and explicitness can be
intertwined. A narrative of an unusual experience need not capture a large quantity of explicated
information – a necessary requirement if we view tacitness and explicitness as separate knowledge
properties. Instead, as Denning (2001) pointed out, narratives can act as a “fuse that ignites a new story in
the listeners’ minds which establishes new connections and patterns in the listeners’ existing information,
attitudes, and perceptions”. In other words, even a small story of an unusual experience from the past can
initiate novel responses to emergent situations by triggering the tacit knowledge that is resident in
listeners. In this way, tacit and explicit knowledge are interconnected, with one triggering the other,
thereby allowing people from across the organization to learn from each other through narratives of
unusual experiences.
CONCLUSION
Learning has always been a central issue affecting the functioning of modern organizations, but
the role that different mechanisms and techniques may play in learning processes has continually evolved.
28
From the days of scientific management, for example, the focus has most often been on designing
organizations around a learning process that makes it possible to accumulate specific stocks of knowledge
and then to progressively refine and exploit them in dealings with various stakeholders. Ford Motor
Company’s approach at the turn of the 19th century, for example, resulted in dramatic productivity gains.
In Ford’s case, it was learning that made it possible to scale up operations so as to engage in the mass
production of goods and services. Division of labor specialization allowed skills to be fine-tuned through
learning-by-doing processes. Layers of bureaucracy and inventory buffered the organization’s knowledge
core from all developments in external environments (Thompson 1967). To the extent unusual situations
were recognized, they were quickly ‘normalized’ (Vaughan 1996), making it possible for organizations to
continue their established operations unchanged.
Today, such a learning process needs to be supplemented by an approach that is better able to
handle the unusual – what we have labeled as generative learning through narratives. Generative learning
through narratives of unusual experiences is different from traditional learning approaches. It requires a
mindset that recognizes that narratives are not a softer side of knowing that needs to be supplemented by a
more rigorous statistical analysis based on vast quantities of data (Gibb and Wilkins 1991). Narratives of
unusual experiences are not just carriers of knowledge, but, more importantly, constitutive of the agency
that individuals and collectives potentially bring to any situation. Indeed, narratives provide organizations
with a mechanism to tap into the local and detailed knowledge that lies distributed among those who must
encounter unusual situations and manage them on a day-to-day basis.
29
REFERENCES
Argote, L. 1999. Organizational learning: Creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge. Kluwer Academic, MA.
Ashby, W. R. 1956. An introduction to cybernetics. Chapman and Hall, London, UK. Bartel, C. A., R. Garud. 2003. Adaptive abduction as a mechanism for generalizing from narratives. M.
Easterby-Smith, M. Lyles, eds. Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge. Blackwell, UK, 324-342.
Barry, D., M. Elmes. 1997. Strategy retold: Towards a narrative account of strategy discourse. Acad.
Management Rev. 22 429-452. Bijker, W. E., M. P. Hughes, T. J. Pinch. 1987. The social construction of technological systems. MIT
Press: Cambridge, MA. Boje, D. M. 1991. The storytelling organization: A study of storytelling performance in an office supply
firm. Admin. Sci. Quart. 36 106-126. Boje, D. M. 1995. Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as 'Tamara-
land’. Acad. Management J. 38 997-1035. Boland, R. J., F. Collopy. 2004. Managing as designing. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Bourdieu P., L. Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL. Bowker, G. C., S. L. Star. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA. Brown, J. S., P. Duguid. 1991. Organizational learning and communities of practice: Toward a unified
view of working, learning, and innovation. Org. Sci. 2 40-57. Bruner, J. S., 1986. Actual minds, Possible worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bruner, J. S. 1991. Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Campbell, D. 1975. Degrees of freedom and the case study. Comparative Political Studies 8 178-185. Carlile, P. R. 2002. A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product
development. Org. Sci. 13 442-455. Carr, D. 1986. Time, narrative, and history. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis. Coyne, W. E. 1996. Building a tradition of innovation. The Fifth UK Innovation Lecture, Department of
Trade and Industry, London. Czarniawska, B. 2004a. Narratives in social science research. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
30
Czarniawska, B. 2004b. Management as designing for an action net. R. J. Boland, F. Collopy, eds., Managing as designing. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 102-105.
Czarniawska, B. 1998: A narrative approach in organization studies. Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA. Denning, S. 2001. The springboard: How storytelling ignites action in knowledge-era organizations.
Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, MA. Deuten, J. A., A. Rip. 2000. Narrative infrastructure in product creation processes. Organization 7 69-93. Dewey, J. 1997. How we think. Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola, NY. Eisenhardt, K. M. 1989. Building theories from case study research. Acad. Management Rev. 14 532-550. Fazio, R. H., M. P. Zanna. 1981. Direct experience and attitude-behavior consistency. L. Berkowitz, ed.
Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 14. Academic Press San Diego, CA, 161-202. Gabriel Y. 2000. Storytelling in organizations. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Garud, R., A. Kumaraswamy. 1993. Changing competitive dynamics in network industries: An
exploration of Sun Microsystems' open systems strategy. Strategic Management J. 14 351-369. Garud, R., A. Kumaraswamy, V. Sambamurthy. 2006. Emergent by design: Performance and
transformation at Infosys Technologies. Org. Sci. 17 277-286. Gibb, Jr., D. W., A. Wilkins. 1991. Better stories, not better constructs, to generate better theory. Acad.
Management Rev. 16 613-619. Giddens, A. 1979: Central problems in social theory. University of California Press, Los Angeles, CA. Green, M., T. Brock. 2000. The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. J.
Personality and Soc. Psych. 79 701-721 Greimas, A. J. 1987. On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, MN. Hatch, M., K. E. Weick. 1998. Critics corner: Critical resistance to the jazz metaphor. Org. Sci. 9 Special
Issue: Jazz Improvisation and Organizing: 600-604. Hess E., R. Kazanjian, ed. 2006. The search for organic growth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
MA. Hutchins, E., 1995. Cognition in the wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Johnson, S. 2002. Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, and software. Touchstone, New York. Kanigel, R. 1997. The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. Penguin
Books, NY.
31
Lampel, J. 2001. Show and tell: Product demonstrations and path creation of technological change. R. Garud, P. Karnoe, eds. Path creation as a process of mindful deviation. Lawrence Erlbaum, 303-328.
Lave, J., E. Wenger. 1994. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK. Leonard-Barton, D. A. 1992. Core capabilities and core rigidities: A paradox in managing new product
development. Strategic Management J. 13 111-125. Levitt. B., J. G. March. 1988. Organizational learning. Annual Rev. Sociology 14 319-340. Lindhal, L. 1988. Spence Silver: A scholar and a gentleman. 3M Today 15 12-17. Lounsbury, M., M. A. Glynn. 2001. Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy and the acquisition of
resources. Strategic Management J. 22 545-564. March, J. G. 1991. Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Org. Sci. 2 71-87. March, J. G., H. Simon. 1993. Organization (2nd edition). Blackwell, Oxford, UK. March, J. G., L. S. Sproull, M. Tamuz 1991. Learning from samples of one or fewer. Org. Sci. 2 1-13. Martin, J. 1982. Stories and scripts in organizational settings. A.H. Hastorf, A.M. Isen, eds. Cognitive
Social Psychology. Elsevier, New York, NY, 255-305. Martens, M. L., J. E. Jennings, P. Devereaux Jennings. 2007. Do the stories they tell get them the money
they need? The impact of strategy narratives on resource acquisition. Acad. Management J. 50 1107-1132.
Mohr, L. B. 1982. Explaining organizational behavior: The limits and possibilities of theory and
research. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Nayak, P. R., J. M. Ketteringham. 1986. Breakthroughs! Rawson Associates, New York. Nelson, R. R., S. G. Winter. 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic change. Belknap Press,
Cambridge, MA. Nonaka, I. 1994. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Org. Sci. 5 14-37. Patriotta, G. 2003. Detective stories and the narrative structure of organizing: Towards an understanding
of organizations as text. B. Czarniawska, P. Gagliardi, eds. Narratives We Organize By. John Benjamins Publishing Co., Philadelphia, PA, 149-170.
Peirce, C. S. 1931-1958. Collected Papers. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Pentland, B. T., 1999. Building process theory with narrative: From description to explanation. Acad.
Management Rev. 24 711-724. Peters, T., R. H. Waterman. 1982. In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies.
Harper & Row, New York.
32
Phillips, N.. T. B. Lawrence, C. Hardy. 2004. Discourse and institutions. Acad. Management Rev. 29 635-
652. Polanyi, M. 1962. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, IL. Polkinghorne, D. E. 1987. Narrative knowing and the human sciences. State University of New York
Press, Albany, NY. Rabinow, P., W. M. Sullivan, eds. 1979. Interpretive social science. University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and narrative. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL (translated by Blamey, K.
and Pellauer, D.). Riessman, C. K. 1993. Narrative analysis. Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Romme, A. G. L. 2003. Making a difference: Organization as design. Org. Sci. 14 558–573. Schon, D. A. 1983. The reflective practitioner. Basic Books, New York. Shaw, G., R. Brown, P. Bromiley. 1998. Strategic stories: How 3M is rewriting business planning.
Harvard Business Rev. May-June 41-50. Star, S. L. 1989. The structure of ill-structured solutions: Heterogeneous problem-solving, boundary
objects and distributed artificial intelligence.” M. Hans, L. Gasser, eds. Distributed artificial intelligence. Morgan Kauffman, Menlo Park, CA, 37-54..
Swidler, A. 1986. Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. Amer. Sociological Rev. 51 273-286. 3M. 1998. Innovation chronicles. St. Paul, MN, 3M General Offices. Tarde, G. 1962. The laws of imitation, translated by E.C. Parsons with introduction by F. Giddings,
reprint, Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith. Taylor J. R., E. J. Van Every. 2000. The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Thompson, J. D. 1967. Organizations in action. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Thompson, L., D. Gentner, J. Loewenstein. 2000. Avoiding missed opportunities in managerial life:
Analogical training more powerful than individual case training. Org. Beh. and Human Decision Processes 82 60–75.
Tsoukas, H. 1989. The validity of idiographic research explanations. Acad. Management Rev. 14 551-561. Tsoukas, H. 1991. The missing link: A transformational view of metaphors in organization science. Acad.
Management Rev. 16 566-585.
33
Tsoukas, H. 1996. The firm as a distributed knowledge system: A constructionist approach. Strategic Management J. 17 11-25.
Tsoukas, H., M. J. Hatch. 2001. Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to
organizational complexity. Human Relations 54 979-1014. Useem, J. 2002. 3M + GE = ? Fortune, Monday, August 12. Van de Ven, A. H., D. Polley, R. Garud, S. Venkataraman. 1999. The innovation journey. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, UK. Vaughan, D. 1996. The challenger launch decision. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL. Walsh, J. P., G. R. Ungson. 1991. Organizational memory. Acad. Management Rev. 16 57-91. Weick, K. E. 1991. The nontraditional quality of organizational learning. Org. Sci. 2 116-123. Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in organizations. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Weick, K. E., K. Roberts. 1993. Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks.
Admin. Sci. Quart. 38 357-381. Weick, K. E., K. M. Sutcliffe. 2001. Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of
complexity. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. White, H. 1987. The content of form: Narrative, discourse and historical representation. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, MD. Winter, S., G. Szulanski. 2001. Replication as strategy. Org. Sci. 12 730-743.
34
35
Table 1: Differences between LS and Narrative Approaches
LS approach Narrative approach Assessment of phenomena Information and categorization Meaning and sensemaking
Type of theory Predominantly variance Process
Nature of inference Inductive & deductive Abductive
Types of action Exact replication Generative imitation
Truth-value Removal of doubt by engaging in a
process of falsification Generation of plausibility by engaging in a process to establish verisimilitude
Social embedding Convergence through Baysian updating
Differences given similarities
Representation of phenomena
Reduces complexities Preserves complexities