Introducing Story Domes David Boje & Steve King Sept 1 2007

1. Introducing Story DomesDavid Boje & Steve KingSept 1 2007

2. Bini Domes are shaped like spheres • Dante N. Bini invented a patented method of cement dome construction, which produces circular, monolithic, reinforced concrete shell structures in just an hour or two. Bini domes typically range in size from 12 to 40 meters in diameter. Over 1,500 Bini-based buildings are in use in 23 Countries.

3. Building an architectural dome • After they are constructed – domes are very stable, self supporting structures that provide highly useful and esthetic space for many architectural and industrial applications • But building a dome is challenging due to instability and danger of collapse during the building process

4. Bini domes are used for many diverse domestic and commercial structures (Story Domes are a Bini-like approach to organizational narrative work!)

5. What is a Story Dome? • Domes are a useful metaphor for seeing the relation among overarching past-narratives, future-antenarratives, & now-stories spheres, that are needed in organizations for : • Goals, strategies and policies (GSP) • In many different kinds of large and small organizations, GSPs are high-level linguistic constructs that inform, control or guide granular front/back office business activities, workflows, project management, strategies, public relations, and critical processes, etc.

6. What is a Narrative Dome? It’s a beginning middle & end narrative, that is super-imposed onto everything else, towering above

7. Goal/strategy/policy BME narratives can be thought of as protective “domes” for organizational processes and workflows • Granular front/back office workflows • Business processes • Production / supply chain • Project management GSPs: High-level goals, management controls strategy, policy, consensus

8. TWO NARRATIVE DOME TYPES ARE IN NEED OF NEW SOLUTIONS: • BME Narratives are too petrified, with BMEs (beginning, middle, & end), too linear, too retrospective (past-looking), to ornamental • Fragmented Narratives take too much detective work, to search for an originary BME to guide reassembly of an image that may never hav been • Experts dotersely-tell fragments, letting others fill in the blanks (of the assumed narrative whole), but that this can lead to a mess…

9. Most Narrative work neglects the future story BME & Fragments of retrospection is like being a DOME HEAD, always replaying the PAST In long-standing organizations with strong cultures like Disney, Nike, Wal-Mart, and McDonald's, even the founding narratives are restoried, in each telling, to ante-up new ways to antenarrate the future. We need Story work in organizations to antenarrate the future, not reciting the petrified past. Antenarratives are bets on the future.

10. Story dome type 1:Authoritarian, top-down, BME Narrating • Using the dome-building metaphor, some goal/strategy/policy constructs are built like domes that have rigid bureaucratic struts and supports that go up first. These managerial BME struts do not necessarily reflect the needs of all the stakeholders and contributors In the over-bureaucratic model, after BME struts are constructed, But the foundation, floor, wall,s tiles or bricks is all the stakeholder Stories & Antenarratives that form the dome shell. Problem: they are too often forced into an architecture that is rigid and unrepresentative of the commercial and social ecosystems

11. Traditional dome construction with scaffolding and temporary supports seems rather risky to us...

12. Beyond BME domes…some futuristic antenarrative structures?

13. Important STORY TYPES are different from Narrative Dome types: • ANTENARRATIVES - are Forward-looking, travel & move widely, pick up & jettison meaning with each context arrival (Boje, 2001) • Emotive-Ethical Stories - are Now-looking, emotion is often an ethical answer to a crisis happening now (Boje, 2007) • Horsesense Stories - are Now-looking, with intuitive or energetic relation to others in the now (beyond the 5 empiric perceptual senses of retrospective narrative sensemaking (Rosile, 2007) CAN STORY DOMES make NARRATIVE work better?

14. 1 – flat BME cement slab 2 – slab is lifted by air (story) pressure while cement is still wet 3 – cement cures to stable self-supporting structure combining best of BME with story co-ocnstruction

15. TAMARA • Tamara is a model of how organizations have storytelling going on in-the-now, simultaneously in more than one room (Boje, 1995) • Complex organization has storying going on in multiple sites, in hundreds of rooms, buildings, & global enterprises --> in different nations.Story meaning depends upon your social networking, the path history of all the rooms you were in, before the present one. • Complexity pathways of simultaneous story rooms, even in organizations with as few as 12 rooms is huge (12 factorial is 479,001,600 different pathways in social networks).

16. Story Dome is a Co-Constructive Process

17. OVERALL STORY DOME MODEL • INPUTS MOST ORGANIZATIONS HAVE: • BME & Fragmented Narratives (past-looking) • Antenarratives (forward-looking) • Emotive-Ethical & Horsesense (now-looking) • SITUATED CONTEXTS • Tamara (the simultaneous storying going on in multiple venues: rooms, cities, nations) • OUTPUTS OF STORY DOME WORK: • Turning events into experience • Shaping collective memory & strategic story action • Building collective story practices

18. A Story Dome is a sphere that inflates, in very short time, if you know how to do it

19. Dome realities • Real world (physical) domes can be unstable when under construction, with the possibility of failure or collapse.. • But when they are completed, domes are generally highly stable and self supporting in an organic, resilient way. • The same is true of narrative domes in many respects! • Over-arching policy and consensus BME narratives can be unstable and bottom-up collective story arrays are hard-to-build initially, but when they succeed, they are self-supporting, with a useful strategic life. • Story Domes can be persistently rigid, or they can be very flexible, i.e., quickly put up/taken down for short term projects

20. There are New Story Dome Patterns, that are strong, yet supportive

21. Story dome type 2:Grass roots, bottom-up, Storying • As an alternative to bureaucratic, top-down approaches, a GSP story dome can be built, brick-by-brick (story-by-story) from the bottom-up... but this is time consuming, difficult and prone to failure, due to the instabilities that BME narratives (and type 1 domes) have when under construction

22. Story dome type 3:The Antenarrative Dome • Unlike the top-down and bottom-up approaches to goal/strategy/policy narratives, the Antenarrative Story Dome method balances the BME top-down needs of the executive suite/BOD with the bottom-up storying needs of the staff, customers, contractors and other stakeholders. Antenarrative Story Domes build GSP content quickly and efficiently, enabling the realization of a distributive consensual antenarrative (DCA

23. Story Domes: Advanced tools and methods • Story Domes avoid the pitfalls of typical GSP doctrines and formal petrified BME narrative creation efforts, which include: excessive time/human/financial resource demands, linearity, and the tendency towards GSP failure or inefficiency • With Story Domes, GSP viability is achieved by rapid, organic DCA (Distributive Consensus Antenarrative) expansion using a number of advanced tools and methods: • Boje’s Antenarrative Engine (up,down,left,right sensemaking); Rosile’s HorseSense-making, Story Sphere discovery; Tobey’s Thinklets (cognitive neuroscience); Tamara training, etc. See workshops at http://storyemergence.org • Get an Antenarrative Lift Effect

24. Stories Domes can support short- and long- term organizational GSP needs with rapid, efficient construction of Distributive Consensual Antenarratives (DCA) • A DCA has a unique and useful antenarrative cohesion and a holistic, holographic nature • A DCA is able to unite many story fragments, antenarratives as well as BME & terse narrative constructions into a productive holographic whole.. • “Whole-in-every-part” means there’s a unified cohesive discourse that all participants resonate with. • “Parts-throughout-the-whole” means that the partshave influence throughout the whole... all stakeholders and local/cultural interests are represented.

25. A different Story Dome for every organizational learning and improvement requirement!... • Because Story Domes are neither fully top-down or fully bottom-up.. • ...they can support rapid creation of GSP DCN that is accurately suited to the specific needs of each organization or ad hoc project.. • Some Story Domes are highly persistent. eg, corporate policy & embedded social networks • Other Story Domes are light, ephemeral and dynamic (like air-supported structures), which enables DCA construction for tactical projects and focused near term collaboration (eg, joint marketing campaigns, relief efforts, seasonal projects, etc.)