Rationale for the Use of Stories
,The interview serves as the starting point for dialogue that is core to the Appreciative Inquiry theory of organization innovation and change. In traditional action research or organization development processes, the data collected is thought of as an objective reality. It is assumed that the data, which is information, stands apart from the people involved and from the process through which it is gathered.
Alternatively, in the process of the Appreciative Inquiry interview we do not seek “objective data,” per se. Rather, the Al interview seeks to explore and bring alive the appreciative stories of the organization. This kind of data collecting stimulates participants’ excitement and delight as they share their values, experiences, and history with the organization and their wishes for the organization’s future. Appreciative Inquiry catalyzes the thinking and dialogue about positive possibilities that are often forgotten in the social and organizational patterns of deficit language so common in traditional organization development practices. This collective surfacing of such memories through appreciative stories enables forms of organizational innovation possible in ways usually not associated with deficit-focused methodologies.
The use of the story as the primary format for conducting an Appreciative Inquiry is intentional. Stories have a depth and breadth in them that conveys meaning much more effectively than a list of key points or other reductionist reports of a human experience. Stories have power to engage the imagination in ways that diagnostic discussions cannot.
The Power of Story
| Universal | All cultures use story to share knowledge, custom, tradition, and learning. Remember the Griots of West Africa who carry the oral history of the tribe, and pass it down from generation to generation. It is only through the story that a tribe knows its history. |
| Engaging | Stories create relationships; they connect teller and listener and create a shared reality. |
| Memorable | They are personal, dynamic, memorable, and transmit images and affect. |
| Dynamic | Stories are continuously changeable; multidimensional; and capable of multiple interpretations. |
| Stimulate Creativity | Story causes the suspension of our inclination to sort things into categories and causes us to search backward to earlier examples or parallels in our own experience. Stories create the possibility of new acts of creation. One story leads to more stories. |
| Moves Us Toward the New |
While a story causes us to look backward toward
a territory we think we have left behind, we also are thrown forward to
new possibilities and realities. |
| Is a Living Thing | As the story is remembered, recounted, and received by the listener, it becomes a living thing. The “aliveness” of the story energizes listeners to pass it on and remains reborn in the storyteller and gives new insight and life. |