The Innovation Journey and the Skipper of the Raft: About the Role of Narratives in Innovation Project Leadership

Story-making to nurture change: creating a journey to make transformation happen

Purpose

To overcome change management challenges, organizations often rely on stories as means of communication. Storytelling has emerged as a leading change management tool to influence and bring people on sharing knowledge. Nevertheless, this study aims to suggest stories of change as a more effective tool that helps people in taking action toward transformation processes.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors apply design science research to develop and evaluate how writing a prospective story engages organizational actors in the transformation process. The authors test the story-making artifact in a field study with five companies and 115 employees who participated in 75 workshops.

Findings

Using the findings to discuss the role of story-making in facilitating the emergence of new behaviors in transformation processes, the authors link story-making with the opportunity to make change happen through knowledge dissemination rather than merely understanding it.

Research limitations/implications

The authors illustrate the role of iterations, peers and self-criticism that help story-makers embrace sensemaking, developing a shared knowledge based that influence individual actions.

Practical implications

The authors propose the story-making approach that organizations can follow to nurture change to make transformation happen through knowledge cocreation.

Originality/value

The research explores story-making as an individual act of writing prospective stories to facilitate the emergence of new behaviors through shared knowledge.

Mobilizing Megaproject Narratives for External Stakeholders: A Study of Narrative Instruments and Processes

Megaprojects combine multiple external stakeholders, and a common narrative is essential to drive the project among often conflicting objectives. Narratives help organize people toward an agenda and therefore have performative and strategic implications. In this research, we explore how narratives are mobilized through narrative instruments and processes using the case study of the High Speed Two (HS2) megaproject in the United Kingdom. We record the use of three instruments—stories, labels, and comparisons—that undergo four processes: repeating, endorsing, humorizing, and actioning. These instruments and processes enable megaprojects to mobilize a narrative that helps in managing external stakeholders.

Project Narratives That Potentially Perform and Change the Future

This article develops a framework for applying organizational narrative theory to understand project narratives that potentially perform and change the future. Project narratives are temporal but often get repeated throughout the project life cycle to stabilize meaning, and could be about project mission, vision, identity, value creation, and so forth. Project narratives have important implications for organizational identity and image crafting. This article differentiates among different types of project narratives in relation to a project life cycle, providing case studies of project narratives on three major UK rail projects. We then set out the future research agenda into project narrative work.

Labeling Projects as Innovative: A Social Identity Theory

The notion of ‘innovative projects’ is popular and often taken for granted. This article challenges this taken for granted concept and attempts to provide detailed insights into what constitutes an ‘innovative project.’ Specifically, the article focuses on three main questions: (1) What kinds of projects are considered innovative? (2) How do projects become recognized as innovative and by whom? And (3) Why are projects recognized as innovative? This research follows the ‘linguistic turn’ occurring in project management studies, showing that social identity theory is a useful and insightful way of understanding discursively constructed labels chosen by practitioners to identify projects as innovative. Labeling projects as innovative has implications for practice as playing an important strategic role in bolstering the reputations of organizations and attracting customers; such labels are often used meaningfully, but also purposefully in project-based organizations.