14 - Telling decisions: The role of narrative in organizational decision making

Summary

When we made the decision, we had already made the decision.

Corporate decision (?) maker

Organizational decision theory and the research that supports it depend largely on narrative: the selective, ordered representation of events as told, the telling of this representation to others, and the successive retellings of this telling. To discover how anything happens in an organization, we ask people to tell us stories. To convince others that we know something about how things happen in organizations, we construct and tell stories about those stories. As others react to our stories, they tell stories about the stories we have told – and so on.

Philosophers (Johnson, 1993; MacIntyre, 1981) argue that narrative is a meaning-making form and process that is central to human experience and conduct. “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 216). Human conduct is by nature “storied” (Sarbin, 1986): We think, imagine, and choose according to narrative structures. We connect information – random or otherwise – to form patterns and plots. These patterns and plots produce meaning, defined here, according to the literary theory of narrative, as the excess of the “straightforward copy of events recounted” (Barthes, 1982, p. 289). In this chapter, I argue that narrative is a form of human understanding comparable to heuristics in decision theory (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982).