Human Resource Management - Organizational Culture & Organizational Leadership Effectiveness

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Understanding the effects of leadership development on the

creation of organizational culture change: a research approach

Keith W. Ray and Joan Goppelt

Many leadership development programs are intended to improve individual leaders’ skills and abilities to perform. Methods for measuring the effect of such programs range from simple metacognitive self-report surveys to 360-degree feedback, to instrumentation of psychological phenomena. However, the outcomes of some leadership development pro- grams are aimed at affecting larger systemic issues facing the organization. Methods for a researcher to measure and under- stand the linkage between a developing leader and the resulting effect on an organization are difficult because of the social complexity of that organization. Organization development practitioners can find it equally challenging to help people in the organization learn what is happening and facilitate new ways of organizing. The authors argue that methods that take a social constructionist perspective combined with social com- plexity theories of change are useful in promoting an under- standing of the relationship between leadership development and organizational culture change. Such methods might con- ceive the organization as a network of conversations where systemic change emerges from the network interacting with other networks of conversation. Both researchers and practi- tioners can benefit from capturing emerging narratives and enlisting organizational actors in collaborative sensemaking.

Introduction Implicit in most leadership development programs is the assumption that if individual leaders improve, they will create improved performance for those who follow them

❒ Keith W. Ray, PhD, Director of Research, Act Too Consulting, Inc., 917 W. Inyokern Road, Suite C, Ridgecrest, CA 93555, USA. Email: keith@acttooconsulting.com. Joan Goppelt, Principal Researcher, Act Too Consulting, Inc., 917 W. Inyokern Road, Suite C, Ridgecrest, CA 93555, USA. Email: joan@ acttooconsulting.com

International Journal of Training and Development 15:1 ISSN 1360-3736

58 International Journal of Training and Development

and accordingly the organization will have improved performance (see, for example, Ciporen, 2010). This assumes that as leaders’ interactional transformations transfer throughout the organization, other people in the organization will fundamentally change the way they interact with one another.

Both organization development (OD) practitioners and organization researchers need methods to produce knowledge of leadership development program impacts on larger organizational context. However, each has a unique perspective and foreground different aspects of these phenomena. Barge and Shockley-Zalabak (2008) describe the important differences in the epistemological and ontological commitments of scholars and practitioners by stating that ‘academic scholars have traditionally been concerned with the construction of scientific knowledge, which tends to be decontextualized and based on technical rationality, while practitioners are more concerned with practical knowledge that focuses on making moral choices about how to act in contingent situations’ (p. 251). For leadership development programs, the practitioner’s goal is to develop methods that create greater impact and provide better decision making within the context of the client organization. The researcher wants to provide a better under- standing of how leadership development programs affect organizations either by measuring outcomes or by investigating the processes of organizational change.

We propose that a narrative approach that incorporates constructionist and complex- ity theories of organization can meet the needs of practitioners and researchers when they engage in understanding and influencing a leadership development program’s effect on the organization. Such an approach takes an ontological position on organi- zations and organizational change and as such makes epistemological assumptions that guide practice and research. We begin with reviewing the theories that guide this approach and then discuss a specific set of methods consistent with these theories. We then illustrate these methods using an example of an ongoing leadership development project.

Literature review Leadership development often focuses on the individual leader’s character (Grieger & Fralick, 2007), competencies (Bolden & Gosling, 2006) or skills (Mumford et al., 2000). Barge and Fairhurst (2008) argue that leadership is a discursive activity and that it is ‘a lived and experienced social activity in which persons-in-conversation, action, meaning, and context are dynamically interrelated’ (p. 228). This follows a general move in the social sciences toward communication (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000) and viewing organizations as discursive constructions (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Hosking & McNamee, 2006). This view has implications for researchers and practitioners wanting to understand and influence leadership development programs from a con- structivist perspective.

Constructivist paradigms also assume that social reality is always under construction and that there is no one true social reality to be found. Through communicative acts and repetition, patterns of social relationships begin to stabilize that some may construct as an organization, suborganization, group, culture, etc. The challenge for the constructionist researcher then becomes how to report the plurivocality of the constructions of patterns of organizing.

Constructivist approaches to organizational research range from examining a collec- tion of organizing processes (Weick, 1969), describing action nets (Czarniawska, 2008), to discursive pragmatism (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). These approaches shift the researcher’s focus from the organization as a thing to the processes of organizing (Karatas-Ozkan & Murphy, 2009). Czarniawska (2008) enhances Weick’s (1969) sense- making in organizations with the addition of action nets. Meaning and action are inextricably entangled; meaning begets action begets meaning. Pearce and Cronen’s (1980) Coordinated Management of Meaning theory builds upon the Wittgenstein (1953) and Austin (1962) notion that speech acts are performative and that through language we create relationships (Gergen, 1994) and stabilize our social worlds.

Czarniawska (2008) argued that ontological claims of constructionism is not a useful pursuit in organization theory because ontology is much like religion. If people believe that an organization has an essence, there is no way to prove or disprove that claim. Studying what an organization is will not yield much pragmatic knowledge. However, she stated that constructivists’ epistemological claims are useful as a way to study organizing. The question, ‘How is a social world constructed?’ is relevant to a con- structivist researcher who is concerned with describing the practices in organizations. In other words, constructivist researchers create knowledge about how organizations are performed. Constructivist OD practitioners are concerned with influencing how an organization is performed so that at least some of the versions of the organization are constructed differently.

Complexity theories Tsoukas and Hatch (2001) argue that it is useful to think of organizations as complex whether or not we can believe or prove they truly are. We can sidestep the particularly difficult ontological question of whether or not an organization is actually complex in a logico-scientific mathematical sense by making the epistemological assertion that it is at least enlightening to use complexity language to explain organizations. Complexity is a metaphor of organizations (Morgan, 1997) that guides our interpretation. If we view organizations as complex systems, then we can begin to see behaviors that might be missed if we frame organizations as simple linear systems of cause and effect.

Because simple cause–effect relationships do not adequately explain their experience, people turn to retrospective narratives to describe and make sense of what has hap- pened (Juarrero, 1999). As Baskin (2008, p. 1) puts it, people ‘experience the world in terms of the stories that we believe tell us what “reality” is, stories that we ourselves co-create as we interact with others’. We cocreate these stories by negotiating with each other to accept the story that describes ‘reality’ the best.

Narrative and antenarrative In Tamara, Los Angeles’ longest-running play, a dozen characters unfold their stories before a walking, sometimes running, audience. Tamara enacts a true story taken from the diary of Aelis Mazoyer. It is Italy, January 10, 1927, in the era of Mussolini. Gabriele d’Annunzio, a poet, patriot, womanizer, and revolutionary who is exceedingly popular with the people, is under virtual house arrest. Tamara, an expatriate Polish beauty, aristocrat, and aspiring artist, is summoned from Paris to paint d’Annunzio’s portrait. Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (479,001,600) (Boje, 1995, pp. 998–99).

Boje uses the play Tamara as metaphor for organizational storytelling and organiza- tional life. People follow and sometimes chase organizational actors around listening to their stories, choose where to go and who to listen to next, talk with one another to make sense of what they are experiencing, and negotiate to find meaning. However, no one has the whole story but instead only fragments and glimpses through their expe- riences and those they talk with. People are left to fill in the blanks with speculation and supposition based on previous experience and personal theories. Like the play, organizational life is fractured, fragmented and contradictory so that no one story could explain the totality of people’s experiences.

People make sense of their organizational lives through telling stories, and the manner of storytelling is a ‘collective enterprise where organizational members con- tribute linguistic fragments such as opinions, descriptions, and proto-stories’ (Barge, 2004, p. 107). Boje (2001) proposed antenarrative as a way to explain the fragmentation and negotiation that occurs as people make sense of their worlds. He uses ‘ante’ as having double meaning, first as in ‘coming before’ and second as in ‘placing a bet’.

Narrative is a retrospective account coherently weaving together the storytelling that has occurred before. Antenarrative is the speculative incomplete descriptions of episodes of lived experience offered up as a first attempt of sensemaking. Just like a poker player places an ante on the table before play begins, antenarratives are also bets on what will be a useful story to make sense of the experience. An organizational player might win the bet and the antenarrative or some form of it becomes the accepted narrative, or he or she might lose the bet and not have a way to make sense.

Baskin (2008) connected story and complex adaptive systems through his concept of storied spaces, which describes how humans make sense of complex social experience and in doing so adapt to the environment. As individuals tell antenarratives and negotiate larger narratives, they are able to create enough coherence to visualize a future through their stories and act upon them to create the future. This sensemaking process has the effect of both reducing complexity at the individual level and increas- ing complexity at the social level. Dominant narratives become accepted as true and stabilize the system so that more people can live together in coordinated action (Pearce, 2007). Narratives play the role of strange attractors in human social systems allowing them to stabilize and create a dynamic order. Antenarratives are equivalent to the system testing out multiple modes in the environment until one antenarrative becomes the stabilizing strange attractor narrative.

We propose that if practitioners and researchers can understand how to make the antenarratives visible and help the system reflect on its processes of creating narratives, the group can perhaps adapt faster and in ways that benefit more people in the system. In the next section, we will describe a set of methods that should both help practitioners to influence the processes of adaptation through narrative creation and help researchers understand some of the processes that connect individual experience and organiza- tional change. Specifically, we propose methods that both enhance practitioners’ ability to influence organizational culture change through individual transformation in a leadership development and aid researchers in understanding if and how a leadership development program creates organizational culture change.

Methods When designing narrative research and practice, we call on the three principles: natural narrative fragmentation, storyteller signification, and cointerpretation/ collective re-storying. As organizational sensemaking through storytelling is a natural albeit fragmented process, stories should be collected with natural processes of conversation and used in their fragmented form. Each story fragment will have meaning(s) for the storyteller in the context it was told. Storytellers should signify their story told so that the contextual, temporal and interactional meaning can be captured. Once the story fragments with contextual meaning are captured, the researcher should enlist members in the organization who share common meaning and action constructs to collectively interpret the stories.

Natural fragments

In order to detect emergent patterns and facilitate sensemaking, one must collect narratives, antenarratives, and other fragmented experiences that people use to make sense of their world. If we wish to study or influence organizational changes, such as understanding how individual changes affect the organization, then we assume that people are using narratives and antenarratives from across their organizational expe- rience. In other words, people are using a large action net to inform and form their narratives about the organization. In turn, interaction with this action net means that if people change the way they interact, then a large part of the organization could possibly change. This field of narrative production is where organizational changes occur, and to understand it, we must be in the field (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998).

The challenge for a researcher is how to be in the field without affecting the field. Ethnographic methods are useful and have less effect on the field but are analogous to

hovering over the field without being in it. Czarniawska (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998) discussed a few methods she uses such as shadowing: following a person around during a their day, observant participation: people in the organization who gather their obser- vations, and ethnographic interviews: repetitive, open, and extensive interviews to achieve an account of people’s work. Interviews can elicit responses of how people represent what they do but not necessarily how they do it (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998). This problem is similar to the distinction Pearce (2007) makes between stories lived and stories told. Interlocutors may give the story told but there may be a gap between the story told and the story lived. We are not saying that how people represent their lives is unimportant. As researchers and practitioners, we need to know what our data represent. If we want to know how and what narratives are being produced that affect how people organize themselves, then we need to use methods that obtain the stories lived. Another method to solve this problem is to use what Czarniawska called narrative interviews: ‘chronological relations of events that occurred under a specified period of time’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998, p. 29). For example, a question such as, ‘Think of an event where you found yourself thinking, feeling, or acting differently as a result of your training. What happened?’ should yield an account of a specific event more or less chronologically. We have found that these types of stories are often fragmented and self-interrupted accounts combined with multiple events. Within the fragmentation, hedging, and connection to other stories, we begin to see the sensemaking in action through the production of antenarratives and narratives.

Another method to obtain stories proposed by Snowden (2000, 2005) called storytell- ing circles is intended to facilitate naturally occurring talk among a group of people while reducing the time required to follow people around and observe their conver- sations. The process gathers a sample population into a group and prompts them to have a conversation with each other. The group should have some level of coherence and common history from which to draw upon. The prompting statement places them in a specific context and then asks a question to generate talk. For example, the following question could be used to elicit stories about a training program.

Imagine you are sitting at a bar after work and a good friend comes up and asks you about the training you just attended in the company. What stories of your own would you tell if you wanted them to take the training, and what stories would tell if you did not want them to take the training?

As people in the storytelling circle begin to talk with one another, they naturally build upon each other’s stories with more stories, antenarratives, opinions, specula- tions and anecdotes about their lives. This is the process of sensemaking and narrative production, and the fragments of narrative material make up data for the researcher and provide the resources of change for the practitioner.

As people tell stories of change, such as how their individual change that occurred in a leadership development program has changed their behavior, their stories will contain a bifurcation point. A bifurcation point is where a person acted or reacted in a way that was different from the past and created a different result. We look for the bifurcation points in the stories and make them separate story fragments: the before story and the after story. The before story describes the person’s experience prior to a change. The after story contains antenarratives and narratives about the meaning the change has for the storyteller. By keeping these stories as separate fragments we can begin to see patterns about how and what change people are experiencing and can link changes due to individual leadership development experience to a larger change in the patterns of interaction.

Storyteller signifiers

Stories and antenarratives have meaning to the listener as well as the teller, although each might make different sense of the story. Context, such as who is telling, who is listening, location and history, can also change the meaning of a story. As multiple contexts intersect at one given storytelling episode, researchers may not be able to determine the meaning or meanings a storyteller intended to create with the story.

Stories-in-use are polysemic, and reducing the polysemy through narrative analysis methods that re-story such as described by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) can mask the complexity and emergent nature of organizational sensemaking.

One method to gain some understanding of the multiple meaning the storyteller is making with the story is to ask them to indicate through a series of questions, tags and keywords what the story means to them. Snowden (2010) and his colleagues at Cog- nitive Edge developed this method to combine quantitative data along with the quali- tative story. The storyteller indexes each story to form a type of structured signifier or story about their story. If each storyteller uses the same set of possible questions, tags and keywords, comparisons can be made between stories. When incorporated in a sensemaking database as described by Kurtz and Snowden (2007), the quantitative data become indexes into the meaning of the stories so that correlations between groups of stories can be determined.

Indexes can contain several types of data using different types of scales including graphic differential scales, ordinal scales and nominal scales. An example index is shown in Appendix A. Notice that the storyteller is asked to give the story a title. People will often give a title that is an abstraction of the story and create a one-sentence story. This provides the first piece of data about the meaning the story has for the person. The first eight questions are differential scales with both ends being undesir- able. The purpose of this type of scale is to increase the ambiguity so that the storyteller is less likely to respond in ways expected by a dominant discourse and more likely to respond in ways that bring the meaning of the story into focus.

Cointerpretation and collective re-storying

When compiled and presented back to a group of people within the organization, the stories and associated indexes create a collage of the organization’s sensemaking (Czarniawska, 2004). The collage may have a theme or may have elements grouped together that seem to relate to one another, but it does not tell only one coherent story as interpreted by a researcher. The collage reflects the polyphonic authorship of organizational life experience. The researcher elicits people in the organization as cointerpreters who then create stories from the stories – a collage from the collage.

This process of re-storying also aids the practitioner who is trying to help the organization become reflective to create new forms of interacting through new patterns of interaction. As people make sense of the stories, they will naturally make their own stories to bring the various pieces into coherence and as they do so create different expectations of how to interact. This will happen to varying degrees because, as Czarniawska (2008) stated, ‘it is an art to be able to live a fragmented life, and it is an art to tell stories in which the fragments are connected to one another, but it is not the same art’ (p. 39). For the practitioner, facilitating weaving fragments together to construct stories is important because ‘constructing stories seems to facilitate organiz- ing, at least to some people; and it certainly facilitates their understanding’ (p. 39).

One challenge in this process is to keep enough of the diversity of stories alive to facilitate future adaptation while still making enough sense to know how to act. In other words, how to keep just enough antenarratives open as bets on the future and not collapse on one narrative. For organizations that have a strong discourse that there should be one truth, this could be challenging. These organizations may quickly move to create the ‘correct’ narrative through rapid negotiation, which often means deferring to the powerful people, or powerful narratives. Processes that take care to manage the narratives of power are useful in allowing enough diversity to emerge (Snowden, 2005). Skilled consultants are also especially in danger of offering too much help during the sensemaking process and causing the group to prematurely converge on an explanation or narrative (Snowden, 2005).

We are not excluding the researcher from making his or her own sense of data as there are both epistemological and pragmatic reasons for doing so. The researcher will make sense of the stories using some combination of his or her own history and context along with an understanding of the organization. He or she can make observations

about the communicative acts of the organization that might be difficult for a person inside the organization, being affected by the discourse and having many things taken for granted, to see. The researcher can use the gap between his or her observations and the stories reported by people in the organization as a source of learning. On a pragmatic and practical side, researchers also have skills of reflection and are afforded more time to consider the data than are people in the organization. Researchers can use prehypothesis, or nonhypothesis interpretive methods such as grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), to develop theory as it emerges from data and provide an important perspective to add to the perspective of people in the organization.

Example research design

To illustrate the principles above, we will describe an ongoing study to understand how a leadership development program is affecting an organization. The organization is a large research and engineering unit of the US Federal Government. Within one division, a group of middle managers have begun to participate in and sponsor a leadership development program delivered by Learning as Leadership (LaL), a California-based leadership development organization. LaL’s program, delivered both on location and at a facility in California, is an introspective process based in part on ego development and rational emotive behavior therapy (Crocker & Nuer, 2004; Ely et al., 2006; Maultsby, 1984). The organization’s goal is to create a better environment through leadership development that they hope will also lead to increased interorga- nizational collaboration. Although the sponsoring managers have enough personal anecdotal data to support the program, they are unsure if or how participant changes are affecting the organization. We were asked to develop a strategic learning program designed to help them understand the effect of the LaL leadership development on the organization. Our role is as practitioner facilitating their learning process and as researcher to gain less contextualized knowledge. To facilitate learning we will use cointerpretation processes as part of a participative action research design (Reason & Bradbury, 2001).

Our research is non-hypothesis and our objectives are to explore three questions:

RQ1: What changes are occurring due to the LaL development program? RQ2: What is the nature of the observed changes? RQ3: Are the changes contributing to increased collaboration?

This research project is in the analysis phase, so conclusive results are not available. However, we provide this as an example of how these methods could be applied to design a research and practice project to help inform and design effective training and development programs in leadership.

Signifiers

The intent of index development is to create questions that, when answered, signify the meaning of a given story as closely as possible to the meaning the storyteller holds while at the same time constructing a set that will be relevant for all storytellers. Because we are not starting with hypotheses in this research that would guide our choices of indices, enlisting help from participants as cocreators of indexes was impor- tant. We drafted a set of signifiers then piloted the set with a few people from the target group. We asked them to tell stories, like they would in the actual interviews, and to use the signifiers to denote the meaning they were making of the story. For example, was the emotional intensity of the story negative, neutral or positive? In order to incorpo- rate their perspectives of possible meaning, we then asked about what other aspects of the story or their experience would they be curious about. What would they like to know about others’ experiences? What would they want to know about what was being created in the organization? From this signifier pilot process, we finalized the set of signifiers that will be used during the first phase of story collection. The signifiers are intended to be sufficiently ambiguous in order invoke the human sensemaking processes.

Story collection

One of the premises of a social constructionist perspective is that multiple meanings can be made of any episode. The researcher’s meaning is just one of many possible interpretations. To remain true to this plurivocality, the data collection and sensemak- ing process will be shared among people in the organization and the researchers. Another premise is that change happens with and in conversations, in particular within stories that people tell, hear, and retell. Through the storytelling and listening, people make sense of and then tell others what they understand to be true at the moment. Antenarratives are told before a ‘truth’ is created through the codevelopment and negotiation of a single dominant story line. In order to understand the beginnings and middle of an organizational change, capturing the antenarratives before they solidify illustrates how the change is emerging real time through the voices of the people experiencing and at the same time creating the change.

Using narrative interviewing (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998) we interviewed 30 partici- pants of the leadership development program. We used a couple of prompting state- ments to solicit stories from the interviewees. We strive to establish a conversational exchange in the interview and drop in the prompts of ‘Describe a positive or negative incident at work that you would attribute to your LaL experience’ or ‘Describe a change you have made at work that you would attribute to LaL’. Note that we used the abbreviation ‘LaL’ to refer to the leadership development program because we discov- ered that people were using this term almost exclusively, and it is important that language match the everyday talk as much as practical. We listened for what we determined to be a story: some sequence of events that has a before story, a bifurcation point and an after story or occasionally multiple after stories. Some stories were not told with a bifurcation point but nonetheless described some fragment of the storytell- er’s experience and were captured as well. We then immediately asked the storyteller to indicate the meaning that he or she made of the before and after stories he or she just told us, using the same index set for each story. We capture the stories and the meaning made of the story from the storyteller at the same time. If the storyteller agreed, we recorded the interviews for later transcription, otherwise we took detailed notes of the stories told and asked the interviewee to verify that our notes captured the story as he or she intended.

Sensemaking and analysis

The participant sensemaking and researcher analysis has not been completed in this study; therefore, we only describe the plan. We will ask others in the organization to read the stories we have collected and record the meaning they make of the stories. This iterative process of storytelling, making meaning from the stories, and telling more stories exposes the emerging narratives and subsequent meaning contained within them. This will ensure that we continue to engage the group of interest in making the meaning of the experiences within the context they create together. In subsequent phases of the project, we intend to expand the storytelling and sensemaking process outward to others who interact with those who have attended the leadership develop- ment program. The stories from these people about what is happening is needed to more fully understand what is being created in the organization, and specifically if the organization’s culture is changing in the perspective of the people in the organization.

In order to see emerging patterns not easily recognizable through traditional research methods, we will use a software package called SenseMakerS that is specially designed for detecting weak signals and emerging patterns (Snowden, 2006). All the transcribed stories and associated signifiers will be entered into the story database. The software graphically displays correlations between signifiers. These two- and three-dimensional images will engage the human visual processing which can detect patterns faster than other cognitive processes. We can then further drill down into the correlations and read the stories being told within that emerging pattern. For example, if there is a cluster of stories correlated to transformational change that was strongly negative and people

were always at odds, we can drill down the specific stories that people signified this way. The stories then provide the context within which the pattern is emerging. Participants can interrogate the data through relatively intuitive processes and engage in a ‘conversation’ with the stories and with each other.

Researcher analysis

The final approach to sensemaking is a grounded theory analysis of the data collected in the study. This will be the researchers’ interpretation of patterns and themes in these data. The material for the grounded theory will include more than the stories told because during the interview process we are also capturing conversation about how people were introduced to and got involved in the leadership development program. This provides additional information as to how the participants describe and made sense of the selection and invitation process. We, as the researchers, are located some- what outside the system of study in that we do not have a daily role in the organization. We, however, do have experience with the LaL program, having attended portions of it ourselves. We also have a long-term relationship with the organization and our own stories about what the organization is and is not. We can dedicate time to the analysis process, where participants will only be able to participate in the analysis as time allows.

One concern with our role includes knowing that some in the organization may see our interpretations as more legitimate than those of the people in the organization and could have too much influence on the meaning made and the subsequent narratives being formed. Our goal is as Czarniawska (2008, p. 12) stated, to make the ‘logic of practice explicit (hoping to provoke reflection and changes, if desired) and [reveal] the course of legitimizing practices’. We bring a different set of repertories to the analysis – we can tell different stories from our vantage point. We have the context and history of the organization along with our scholarly work in the fields of OD and change.

Results – initial The analysis phase on this example research project is not complete. However, some preliminary data support the theories and methods discussed above. For example, ‘Penny’ describes a sequence of events that includes a typical interaction (Story 1), a reflection and application of new skills on her part, and then the next interaction (Story 2). We provide the entire stories and their indexes in Appendix B.

In Story 1, Penny encounters a difficult situation and reacts by blaming herself and imagining a difficult follow-on meeting. This is an example of a before story.

I sat down to have that meeting and in my head, I had like in neon, I suck as a Project leader if I can’t get a solution to this. If I can’t get this to closure like now, then it’s all about me and blah, you know, you can just imagine and that 45-min conversation with the stakeholders turned into a freaking nightmare.

In Story 2, Penny reflects on the previous day’s events and has awareness that she needs to enter the meeting, as she put it, ‘more centered’. She then decides not to react the way she typically does and instead try to saying something different.

I just said something like, ‘You know, I know yesterday in this conversation that I was approaching it from the perspective of crisis and personal contribution and personal responsibility, and I’m trying not to do that today. I’m trying really just to hear what everybody has to say and unemo- tionally figure out what the next steps forward could be, to get resolution and I’m prepared, if we can’t get resolution, to let the customer know. ‘We’re still working and we’ll let you know as soon as we have something more’.

Penny creates a bifurcation point when she decides to say something novel in a familiar context. Her different reaction created a different response that created a better meeting than Penny had first imagined, which is an example of an after story.

In this case, Penny has developed a complete narrative of how the leadership development program has impacted her ability to lead and interact back in the

organization. She can point to specific instances and specific awareness that contribute to revised behaviors. During the interview, Penny tells us the two stories in a single conversation; we then stop the conversation and ask her to think of the sequence as having a before and an after. We then ask her to complete the signifier set, including giving the story fragment a title, once for the before and another for the after. The resulting signifiers are shown after the transcript of each story. Notice also that her indexes changed between Story 1 and Story 2. Questions 1–8 move from near the endpoints, which are generally negative, to the midpoints, which are generally positive.

In other cases, the participants have not developed a complete narrative of their experience and they might be speculating on a change that might occur and what might contribute to the change. We see this as an antenarrative. For example, in Appendix C, ‘Bob’ speculates that his increased awareness of how he views another person may eventually change his relationship with that person.

Bob: Well, I still think along the same lines that I have thought, but I’m much more willing – I have a much more open mind of the possibility that my set of experiences are just a subset of a bigger picture that I haven’t seen yet. And so I’m much more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt recently than I ever would have.

However, he has not actually experienced anything different in or with his interac- tions. Bob uses hedging language such as ‘it could be’, ‘a little bit’ and ‘maybe’, indicating that he is not sure if this story has a long-lasting truth in it for him.

Interviewer: Okay. So you’ve kind of gotten to the point where you could see a potential different outcome, but have you actually experienced a positive result yet?

Bob: Not yet.

In Bob’s example, we see the formation of antenarrative. As he interacts with others and with the person whom he is referring to in his story, he may begin to create a full narrative of the experience. Whether his narrative will be that his LaL experience allowed him to interact differently or whether his narrative will become that his experience allowed him to become aware but not make important differences will be negotiated and emerge in the days and weeks to come.

Discussion Some researchers and practitioners who embrace constructivist methods must shift their position relative to the organization. Practitioners are often hired for their expertise and for focusing on outcomes. The methods we describe are emergent, ambiguous and unpredictable, which are not often qualities practitioners speak of to portray an ideal engagement. Practitioners must position themselves more as observers than interveners. This might place them more ‘outside’ the organization than they are used to. At best they may help facilitate the construction of contexts that encourage the emergence of helpful narratives, but in no way can they predict, let alone guarantee, that the outcome will be as planned. This might be the type of emerging OD practices that Bushe and Marshak (2009) described as dialogic OD. These are processes and, more importantly, identities that constructivist practitioners will need to become comfortable with.

Researchers must also be comfortable with a repositioning. Constructivist research- ers must enter into the organization in order to ‘capture, describe, and explain the logic of practice’ (Czarniawska, 2008, p. 12). The more researchers engage in conversation within the organization, the more they can observe the emergence of narratives. However, they must also be aware that the more they become acculturated, the more narratives they may take for granted and find unremarkable. Czarniawska (2008) offers 10 contradictory memoranda that she suggests should be resolved by organization theorists not by choosing one part or another but rather by embracing both. Of these, the first is perhaps the closest to what we are discussing: ‘To be close to the practice of organizing while keeping enough distance to be able to problematize it’ (p. 133). Sensemaking is a dialogical practice, and for researchers to make sense of an

organization they will need to enter into that same dialogical space while at the same time keeping open the dialogical space of their academic community. In a sense they become, for a time, multicultural translators.

Researchers and practitioners have their own communities, discourses, and practices to attend to, have specific skills and knowledge, and have different goals and inten- tions; therefore, a mere shift in positioning may not be enough to create the actionable knowledge needed about leadership development. One solution may be for research- ers and practitioners to collaborate through engaged scholarship as described by Van de Ven and Johnson (2006) and by Barge and Shockley-Zalabak (2008). This would create a collaboration in which ‘academics and practitioners leverage their different perspec- tives and competencies to coproduce knowledge about a complex problem or phenom- enon’ (Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006, p. 803). Surely, understanding effects of leadership development on organizations is a complex phenomenon.

Some of the methods we describe should be refined as the practice develops. The methods of having storytellers index their stories can be cumbersome and artificial. Processes need to be developed to make this more seamless and natural. Gathering story fragments can also be artificial even if done through storytelling circles. Methods that enable people in the organization to become participant researchers should be developed to capture story fragments in the natural act of sensemaking.

What is leadership such that it can change organizations? A more critical question is, should leadership change organizations? How can leadership development programs be designed, executed and evaluated? We can hardly give the subject of leadership full attention without examining the relationship to power and its shadow: marginalization and oppression. But deconstruction and critical analysis will have little practical value unless researchers and practitioners can facilitate people in organizations to be reflec- tive and critical and help marginalized antenarratives to emerge, shape, and construct organizations.

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Appendix A: example index

Appendix B: Penny’s story Story 1:

Interviewer: Can you describe a significant change that you’ve made at work?

Penny: Ah, yes. There are several. The biggest shift for me was understanding, really understanding for me, Penny, how my ego was involved in everything I thought, every conversation I had, ever decision I made. It wasn’t like flipping a switch though. You know what I mean. It was very evolutionary and it’s still evolutionary, it really was some of the things that I had been telling myself over and over and over in my head that I wasn’t even aware of for instance, if I don’t figure this out, I suck as a Project Lead. If I don’t get this right, everybody is going to know that I’m in this Project Lead role way over my head. If I don’t get a solution now for this problem, then I’m not doing my job as the Project lead. That one thread of thoughts alone, that category of thoughts alone in my head caused me in conversations to be close minded. It caused me, in conversations to cut people off. It causes me to make decisions way to quickly.

Interviewer: Can you think of an example of a decision?

Penny: Oh yes, I can. I can think of many, but here’s one, this was like a case study for me, personally. We were a week out from the final program release review and we got a priority one anomaly while we were on the boat. The displays went away at night on the postage size ship, twelve foot seas, navigation computer error dis- plays blanked out, thank God, Ted was flying and he could land the plane, right?

Come back a couple days later and I’m in a meeting discussing that priority one anomaly and part of the issue with that anomaly was there was a pilot contribution to the way that unfolded. And that is like an emotional subject, when you are discussing any anomaly let alone a priority one a week from the final release review.

It was just all about emotion. It was just like a feeding frenzy of emotion, right? We cut off the conversation because people had other commitments. I told lead test coordinator, I’ll set up another meeting for tomorrow.

Story 2:

Participant: I set up another meeting for tomorrow and on my walk that morning I was like, okay, I get what I did to myself in that conversation yesterday. I get that, I mean, I had that awareness, and I was like okay, I need to go into this conversation more centered.

I need to let go about it’s not about me. I need to listen, just be present, be unemo- tional and see if I can get a different outcome. Went into that meeting and it started out the same exact way, just this, it was like a repeat, everybody had their mind set from the previous meeting and I didn’t say anything and I didn’t react, I just listened and after about 10 min of the same repeat thing, I said, something that wasn’t even profound.

I just said something like, ‘You know, I know yesterday in this conversation that I was approaching it from the perspective of crisis and personal contribution and personal responsibility, and I’m trying not to do that today. I’m trying really just to hear what everybody has to say and unemotionally figure out what the next steps forward could be, to get resolution and I’m prepared, if we can’t get resolution, to let the customer know. “We’re still working and we’ll let you know as soon as we have something more.”’

And I said that from a place of, I mean, this sounds corny, but I meant what I said and I had practice like not getting all in my head about it. And there was like a oh, okay. ‘You would go back to the customer at the end of this meeting and tell them you are sorry you don’t have a solution?’ Absolutely, absolutely. And I meant it, absolutely I’d do that. ‘All right.’ ‘Let’s write up on the board what we know.’

There was a shift and I thought it was just me seeing that shift because I was looking for it, you know what I mean? And when we finished that conversation an hour or so later, the test coordinator pulled me aside and he said, ‘You know what Penny? I really appreciate what you did in there this morning.’ He said, ‘I think we’re on the right path now. I think we’re past the emotion stage and thanks for getting us together on really just working towards a solution.’

And I just looked at him, and I go, ‘Sure, you’re welcome.’ And inside I was going, hallelujah, hallelujah. Because, for me, that became an example, you know what I mean, of something that I could practice. I could practice that, and I did and I still do. But it was something concrete. It was a concrete example for me to wrap my mind around.

Appendix C: Bob’s Story Story 3:

Interviewer: Describe a either positive or negative incident that happened to you while at work that you see in some way related to the Learning is Leadership.

Bob: Wow. There are a number of experiences that I have that relate to the focus of LAL or We Lead. A specific – well, I’ll just use one that’s on my mind and it has to do with one of the recent workshops that I’m working on, and that is I have an individual who I engage with periodically on a professional basis who over a period of time I attribute negative characteristics to. I’ve never – it seems that I never have a positive engagement with the individual, so I have formed a mental model of that individual that may or may not be correct.

Prior to these sessions, I instinctively – if that’s how I see it, that’s how it is, although I know and have studied on an intellectual and academic basis that that’s not true, I as an individual believe that’s not true for other people. I’m just being honest, as Simon Cowell would say – ‘Just being honest.’ So it’s really not the knowledge that I have that’s provided me with an overwhelming benefit, but I as an individual – I am thinking about that aspect of things differently and much more consciously than I ever have. And so that’s one example, because if – prior to this I would say, ‘He’s just lazy. He doesn’t work as hard as others.’

And it could be that my circumstances lead me down that path but he had a whole different persona and a whole different set of positive experiences that I’m just not aware of; I’m unaware of. So I think about it differently.

Interviewer: So when something comes up with this person now, what do you do? What do you think?

Interviewer: And does that change the way you interact with the person?

Bob: A little bit, yeah. I would say yes. Before I’d go into it just expecting a negative result. Now I go into it hoping for a positive result, because I know that there’s a possibility that there could be a positive result, whereas I would’ve ruled that out a year ago. I’ve had negative experiences. I’m gonna continue to have negative expe- riences, because that’s who he is. Maybe that’s not who it is; maybe that’s just who I see.

Interviewer: Okay. So you’ve kind of gotten to the point where you could see a potential different outcome, but have you actually experienced a positive result yet?

Bob: Not yet.

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