St. Paul's Indian Industrial School, Middlechurch, Manitoba, 1901. Wikicommons/ PD in Canada. Some rights reserved.All collections of people have a story, whether it is a purposefully created narrative or an implicit, subterranean understanding that members share about where they have come from and who they are.
Most groups, whether families, nations, or corporations, have both a consciously created and an unconscious narrative. This shared narrative is reinforced and extended not only through the stories people tell about their institutions but also through their actions, rituals, and processes, such as the American holiday of Thanksgiving, an annual (and idealized) commemoration of the first such harvest festival shared by Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621.
But few organizations have generated narratives to demonstrate how the organization will survive future periods of uncertainty and how they might both endure and adapt in order to thrive. Truth and reconciliation commissions, such as in South Africa following the end of Apartheid, and more recently in Canada’s commission on Indian Residential Schools’ survivors, are one kind of explicit effort to revisit the past in order to reconstruct a communal future. Yet today, an uncertain future, complexity, and an accelerating rate of change are prompting changed conditions. In order to emerge intact, healthy, and strong, organizations today need not only a shared vision of who they are, but also an animating understanding of who they can become in the face of future change. Without an understanding that our behavior in the world stems from the narratives we believe we are enacting, it is almost impossible to generate lasting change.
