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Management Inquiry

Strategy as Storytelling: A Phenomenological Collaboration

Wendelin Küpers, Saku Mantere and Matt Statler
Journal of Management Inquiry published online 14 May 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1056492612439089

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439089
Küpers et al.Journal of Management Inquiry
JMIXXX10.1177/1056492612439089

Journal of Management Inquiry

Strategy as Storytelling: XX(X) 1­–18

© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1056492612439089
http://jmi.sagepub.com

Wendelin Küpers1, Saku Mantere2, and Matt Statler3

Abstract
This article presents a phenomenological inquiry into storytelling practices in corporate strategy-making processes, as
experienced by nonsenior stakeholders. The authors utilize the potential of phenomenological methods to provide an
enriched understanding of strategy as lived, embodied experience. Based on a strategy workshop in a company called
ICARUS Inc., a large, international information technology corporation facing the challenge of reinventing itself after a period
of considerable success, the authors identify three embodied narrative practices enacted during that workshop event:
(a) discursive struggles over “hot” words, (b) the de-sacralization of strategy, and (c) recurring rituals of self-sacrifice. The
article critically analyzes these practices in reference to recent research on strategy as a lived and narrated experience and
discusses their implications as well as the implications of the workshop itself. Overall, the article aims at providing theoretical
as well as methodological contribution for narrative practices of strategy in organizational lifeworlds.

Keywords
storytelling, narrative, phenomenology, collaborative research, strategy as practice

Introduction From the strategy-as-practice perspective, strategy appears

This article is an exploration of strategy as it happens in the
everyday lifeworld of nonsenior people working in organi-
zations. This is not to say that strategy does not often take
shape in the executive suite, or at retreats in exotic locations
involving top managers and highly paid consultants.
However, strategy also occurs in mundane circumstances
involving middle management as well as entry-level employ-
ees. Indeed, the role of nonsenior members of the organiza-
tion in the formation of organizational strategy has been
acknowledged for more than 30 years following the birth of
the strategy process research (e.g., Burgelman, 1983; Floyd
& Wooldridge, 2000; Mintzberg, 1978).
More recently, the issue of nonsenior organizational
members has grown in relevance as scholars have begun to
explore strategic management as a form of social practice
(Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl, & Vaara, 2010; Jarzabkowski,
Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Johnson, Melin, & Whittington,
2003; Whittington, 1996, 2006). From this perspective, not
only do the social practices associated with strategy have
crucial impacts on the lives of nonsenior members of the
organization, but these actors contribute to, participate in,
and enact those social practices throughout the organization,
from the center to the periphery. An entire stream of litera-
ture has emerged around understanding the impact of middle
managers on strategy formation (e.g., Floyd & Lane, 2000;
Floyd & Wooldridge, 2000; Mantere, 2005, 2008; Raes,
Heijljles, Glunk, & Roe, 2011).
as lived, embodied experience (Samra-Fredericks, 2003).
Strategy is what people do, rather than what organizations
have (Whittington, 2006), and strategic practice is founded
on “dwelling” and “way finding” in the organizational every-
day life (Chia & Holt, 2006, 2009). Recent empirical work
on middle management strategic practice has made progress
in unraveling the cognitive, sensemaking aspect of strategy,
as experienced by peripheral organizational members. For
instance, Balogun and Johnson (2004, 2005) have mapped
the collective sensemaking of middle managers and the
resulting schema changes after the top managers have left
them to deal with strategy. Regnér (2003) has suggested that
a cognitive divide separates the inductive mode of strategic
thinking characteristic of middle managers in organizational
peripheries from the deductive mode characteristic of top
managers in organizational centers. Maitlis (2005) has iden-
tified strategies for stakeholder sensemaking as a response to
leader sensegiving.
1
Massey University (Albany Campus), Auckland, New Zealand
2
Hanken School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki,
Finland
3
NYU Stern School of Business, New York, USA
Corresponding Author:
Saku Mantere, Hanken School of Economics, P.O. Box 479,
Helsinki 00101, Finland
Email: saku.mantere@hanken.fi

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2 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
The concept of sensemaking (Weick, 1995) does not cap-
ture the full experience of strategy as a social practice, how-
ever. Practice is embodied and emotional as well as cognitive
(Chia & Holt, 2009). In this article, we use phenomenology
as a theoretical lens and empirical methodology to explore
strategy as an embodied narrative practice. Specifically, we
focus on strategizing at the outskirts of the organization, in
resonance with a number of authors who have begun to
explore strategy “in the absence of top management”
(Balogun & Johnson, 2005; see also Balogun & Johnson,
2004; Mantere, 2005, 2008; Samra-Fredericks, 2003).
Strategy as Narrative Practice
Of late, an increasing number of strategy researchers have
begun to consider storytelling as a relevant strategic practice
(e.g., De la Ville, & Mounoud, 2010; Rouleau, 2010;
Sonenshein, 2010; Statler & Roos, 2007). There are at least
two ways in which narrative can be important for the study
of strategizing. The first of these is ontological, and the sec-
ond is instrumental.
The basic tenet of the ontological view is that strategy is
narrative, a story told about the emplotted and poly-semic
experiences and identities of narrators (Sonsino, 2005) and
futures of organizations. This view was most forcefully
explicated by Barry and Elmes (1997), who defined the very
phenomenon of organizational strategy as a form of fiction.
The ontological approach generally involves a hermeneutic
and interpretative methodology. The hermeneutical orienta-
tion of this perspective on strategy can be regarded as a
continuation of work on strategy as a set of multiple and con-
tending discourses, where strategic management is regarded
as a linguistic and interpretive phenomenon (Ezzamel &
Willmott, 2008; Hardy, Palmer, & Phillips, 2000; Knights &
Morgan, 1991; Mantere & Vaara, 2008). Our present focus
on organizational peripheries highlights the view of organi-
zational storytelling as polyphonic activity (Barry & Elmes,
1997; Boje, 1991; Mantere, Sillince, & Hämäläinen, 2007).
In this sense, rather than the single voice of a CEO strategist,
organizational storytelling is practiced by multiple, intercon-
nected narrators, and strategy takes place through their
voices.
Recent research has suggested that narratives contain
guiding principles that can facilitate situated and coherent
decision making in complex environments (Oliver & Roos,
2005; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). Stories have specific
themes, characters, and plots as well as emplotments.1 These
elements not only structure experiences, enabling the emer-
gence of a collectively created and sustained organizational
culture and identity, but they also deliver the force of power
relationships between and among individuals. In this sense,
organizations have been theorized as narrative entities,
achieved through the telling of stories (Boje, 1995) that
“capture organizational life in a way that no compilation of
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facts ever can . . . because they are carriers of life itself, not
just ‘reports’ on it” (Czarniawska, 1997, p. 21).
Strategy involves fictional narratives that emplot an orga-
nization, allowing it to transform itself from its past and
present into its future (Barry & Elmes, 1997). Organizational
actors enact strategies by engaging in narrative, and over
time, these stories shape patterns of organizational processes
and identities, and set the stage for the future (Barry &
Elmes, 1997; Stacey, 2003). Stories hold power over organi-
zational futures in part because they allow organizational
actors to express emotions, values, and meanings (Gabriel,
2000). Stories not only organize experience but they also
frame how people develop and exchange interpretations
(Boje, 1991). When people tell stories, they enact and com-
municate their knowledge as well as create new proper sto-
ries (Fisher, 1987). In this sense, narratives can be seen as
orienting inscriptions of past performances and as scripts
that provide staging instructions for future performances
(Barry & Elmes, 1997).
From the instrumental perspective, storytelling is
regarded as practically advantageous for the adoption of stra-
tegic plans and the communication of strategic intent
throughout the organization because it makes the content of
the strategy more easily understood, which in turn enhances
coping and emotional buy-in among employees (Beer &
Eisenstat, 1996; Mantere, 2008; Shaw, Brown, & Bromiley,
1998). This perspective is commonly adopted by organiza-
tional actors who seek deliberately to cultivate storytelling as
a form of strategic practice, as we will see at length in the
case illustration presented below.
Phenomenology as a Method for
the Study of Embodied Narrative Practice
In this article, we adopt phenomenology as a research meth-
odology and a theoretical lens. Through such an approach,
we seek to integrate the ontological and the instrumental
approaches to strategy as narrative. This integration depends
on three corollary assertions: First, phenomenology views
all human experience as intrinsically narrative; second, phe-
nomenology emphasizes the way in which narrative experi-
ences are always embodied; and finally, phenomenology
frames embodied narrative experience in a context that
involves an interplay of people, cultures, environments, and
objects.
Phenomenological methods can bring the researcher into
closer touch with individual and social realities, while ascer-
taining the heterogeneous dimensions involved. Inasmuch as
phenomenological research entails a direct connection and
firsthand, grounded contact, it can be called radically empiri-
cal, retaining a sensibility and awareness for how organiza-
tional phenomena appear. Specific qualitative criteria of
research ensure the trustworthiness and rigor of conduct, as
enabling reflexive practices that involve interpretation of
Küpers et al. 3
actual happenings. Accordingly, a range of different phe-
nomenologically oriented methods (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998;
Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Denzin & Lincoln, 2003; Giorgi,
1997; van Maanen, 1979; van Maanen, 1990) have been pro-
posed, discussed, and employed to deal with the richness of
phenomenological descriptions (Ray, 1994) with their life-
worldly situatedness and meanings in organizations (Holt &
Sandberg, 2011).
Phenomenology and arrative. Phenomenology was founded
as an epistemological program based on the intention to bring
philosophy and science back to things as they appear (Welton,
1999). Since its inception, phenomenology has evolved as a
“movement of thought” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. XXI) with a
historically broad variety of diverse approaches (Spiegelberg,
1982), specific methodologies (Küpers, 2009), and a variety
of debated research methods (Finlay, 2009). These approaches
are united by a focus on the human “lifeworld,” that is, on
lived experience, in all its complexity and reflexivity.
For phenomenologists, narrative is one of the most basic
foundational aspects of the lifeworld. Human beings live in
the world and make sense of it as “homo narrans” (Fisher,
1985). It is metaphors and stories that make the world intel-
ligible as such. From the perspective of hermeneutic phe-
nomenology, stories and narratives2 appear and work as a
form of telling, where a telling involves a teller or narrator,
an audience, and a subject and an arrangement of elements,
including actions, events, characters, experiences, and situa-
tions. Together, these elements constitute an unfolding tem-
poral configuration that makes sense of or gives meaning.
In other words, stories are a basic, human way of organiz-
ing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions (Cunliffe,
Luhmann, & Boje, 2004). As Ricoeur (1984) stated, “Time
becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after
the manner of a narrative, narrative, in turn, is meaningful to
the extent that portrays the features of temporal existence”
(p. 3). Indeed, all human experience has an “inchoate narra-
tivity” (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 74) and this proto-narrative quality
of experiencing constitutes a genuine demand for narrative.
Human life is prefigured by antenarratives, a “fragmented,
nonlinear, incoherent, collective, unplotted” (Boje, 2001,
p. 1) basis for understanding itself. Based on this preconfigu-
ration, human existence in and reception of the world is pre-
narrative. The stories or narratives that would be referred to
as such from a nontechnical perspective are social accom-
plishments, crafted out of the primordial plenum of antenar-
ratives. Thus, although previous researchers have noted how
organizational actors use narratives all the time to make
sense of their surroundings (Barrett, Powley, & Pearce, 2011;
Weick, 1995), from a phenomenological perspective, these
signs, symbols, rules, and norms of experience are already
mediated by more primordial narratives that are related to
implicit knowing (Küpers, 2005), history, and memory. We
anticipate, come to know, and use stories because we already
have a historical and narrative knowledge of them.
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Phenomenology and embodiment. For phenomenologists,
embodiment is fundamental to human experience. Prior to
any theoretical perception of our surroundings, we exist in
the world as bodies and interact with the world with our
bodily organs. Narratives are rooted in and processed through
the living, feeling, and signifying bodies that interact with
their respective worlds. Narratives are thus produced and
received through spoken, written, pictorial, and kinesthetic
practices.
Phenomenology allows us to focus on the ways in which
narrative experience is embodied and emotional. This notion
extends the concepts of strategy as a lived experience
(Samra-Fredericks, 2003) and strategy as practical coping
(Chia & Holt, 2006) by presenting the lifeworld as a horizon
for “all activities and possible praxis” (Husserl, 1970,
p. 142). Furthermore, it extends the inquiry into the social
practices of organizational members by focusing on the
world that is most immediate to them as knowing subjects,
the world in which they lead their daily work lives (Husserl,
1950, Hua. VI, 135).
From a phenomenological perspective, anyone involved
in organizing and strategizing processes always encounters
reality through bodily organs, from an intentional and
responsive point of seeing hearing or touching. With the
intentionality associated with bodily consciousness, the
agent within the sphere of organizing does not feel only “I
think,” but also “I can” or “I relate to”—or “I do” (Macmurray,
1957, p. 84). The organization that takes place through nar-
rative is not only what people think or say about it but also
primarily what they “live through” with their “operative
intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xviii) and
responsiveness.
As Peterson and Langellier (2006) argued in their plea for
a performance turn in narrative studies, “Narrative requires
bodily participation in listening and speaking, reading and
writing, seeing and gesturing, and feeling and being touched.
In all of these instances, some body performs narrative”
(p. 175). The actions of the body, therefore, stand at the cen-
ter of narrative production and reception. The lived body
moves reflexively and reciprocally to facilitate or restrict
possibilities for the expression and perception of narrative.
However, before narratives are conceived or represented,
they are lived through the body as meaningful (Langellier &
Peterson, 2004). In this sense, the body is a part of and par-
ticipates in narrative practices—the body serves as a kind of
performative boundary, providing a horizon of speaking, lis-
tening, and feeling for what is happening in and through
emerging narratives and the accompanying social relations.
Phenomenology and the context of lived experience. The
embodied self can take on an identity appropriate to its own
discovery only in a linguistic community. Although the self
finds itself already situated in a world of signs, symbols, and
texts, it participates in “constitut(ing) a linguistic world and
a cultural world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 197). The final
4 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
aspect of phenomenology that allows us to extend existing
methodological approaches to strategic storytelling is that it
frames embodied narrative experience within a context that
involves the interplay of people, cultures, environments, and
objects. As noted previously, in lived bodily experience,
there exists a temporal ordering that gives structure and con-
tent to narratives (Menary, 2008). Embodied gesture is “an
action that helps create the narrative space that is shared in
the communicative situation” (Gallagher, 2005, p. 117). The
empathic and expressive power of corporeality is not merely
a carnal condition for social knowledge and living bonds of
communication, it also provides a medium of transforma-
tively linking one expressive modality to another. This trans-
formation moves, for example, from direct vision, audible
styles, and kinesthetic rhythms of experience to narrated sto-
ries or institutionalized records of writing or performances
(Mickunas, 2007, p. 156).
In this sense, phenomenology allows us to consider not
only how any understanding of organizational reality is
always mediated historically and culturally by narrated and
interpreted discourses but also how these practices and medi-
ations are always embodied by multiple actors. We can never
experience, know, and narrate about things or encounter
independent of our “Erlebnisse”3 as bodily engaged beings
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962). We find the narrative and the to-be-
narrated lifeworld meaningful primarily with respect to the
ways in which we act within it and the ways in it which acts
upon us. Thus, “embodiment” does not simply mean
“physical manifestation.” Rather, it means being grounded
in everyday, mundane experiences and being inherently con-
nected to others and our environment in an ongoing
interrelation.
From a phenomenological perspective, narratives are a
mode of human existence, a social practice in and through
which humans develop, enact, reflect, interpret, and commu-
nicate knowledge of themselves and the world they inhabit.
Human beings are agents in the narratives they produce,
value, interact with, and use to communicate through embod-
ied language as an expressive medium of interrelation.
Through this expression, the “narrative work” is re-created
and reworked in its reception, interpretation, and corre-
sponding interaction and transformation. Accordingly, nar-
ration is a dynamic signifying practice that is the work of
embodied human agents in cultural settings (Day Sclater,
2003, p. 321). Through acts of embodied communication,
and in the creation of narratives, power relations (and the
conception of identities) are (re-)created as well as con-
tested (Langellier & Peterson, 2004; Peterson & Langellier,
2006).
Thus, to the extent that specific modes of embodied nar-
rative practice may be modified, the field of social practice
becomes open for revision, social identities become open for
reevaluation, and new “strategies” of engagement become
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possible for realization. Opportunities for an alternative self-
description and redescription can and do emerge in the
course of strategic practice. In this light, embodied narrative
practice involves a social creation and negotiation of mean-
ing in which knowing is an emergent process. Organizational
actors appear as storytelling “organisms” who, individually
and collectively, lead storied lives in an embodied way.
A Twofold Contribution
In light of the concepts and methodological considerations
outlined earlier, this nontraditional article makes a twofold
contribution. First, we seek to extend existing theories of
strategy (i.e., as process, as practice, as lived experience, as
narrative) by analyzing strategizing as embodied narrative
practice. Second, we seek to make a methodological contri-
bution by illustrating how phenomenology can be realized
beneficially as an empirical research methodology.
Phenomenology as a research method helps us not only to
understand organizations as meaningful, often ambiguous
and unfolding lifeworlds (White, 1990) but also to explore
the experiential and playful enactment of narrated lifeworlds
as a mode of strategic practice. It holds the potential to over-
come limitations of the prevailing cognitive bias in conven-
tional views on strategies and narratives, in theoretical and
practical realms (Clegg, Carter, & Kornberger, 2004). With
a phenomenological orientation, we can approach narratives
as an embodied way of humans’ experience and processing
of the world, while reflecting systematically on their “con-
textual” dimensions (Küpers, 2005).
In the following section, we present an account of a phe-
nomenological storytelling experiment that was conducted
by a group of researchers in collaboration with a group of
practitioners. We will show how phenomenological methods
can be employed to generate deeper insights into the practice
of strategy and use the insights to inform the research litera-
tures that focus on strategy as a managerial discipline
(Knights & Morgan, 1991; Mantere & Vaara, 2008;
Whittington, 2006) and collective storytelling (Gabriel &
Connell, 2010; Hansen, Barry, Boje, & Hatch, 2007). While
many calls have been made for more authentic investigation
of what happens within strategic processes and organizations
(Johnson et al., 2003; Whittington, 1996, 2006), and collab-
orative research is regarded a promising venue for such work
(Balogun, Huff, & Johnson, 2003), very few examples of
collaborative research yet exist within literature on strategic
management (see, however, Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008). In
this light, we present the nontraditional aspects of our
research design as a contribution that may inspire future col-
laborations among researchers and practitioners.
Phenomenology in action: Designing and facilitating a storytell-
ing workshop. The empirical context for our research was a
technology firm that we refer to here using the pseudonym
Küpers et al. 5
“ICARUS.” We chose this name because the firm faced the
threat of decline after a period of rapid growth and success.
The notion that considerable success explains subsequent
failure has been termed “the Icarus paradox” (Miller, 1990).
As we will describe, the practitioners were acutely aware of
this challenge and their narratives connected to the paradox
in different ways.
ICARUS provides a particularly appropriate empirical
context in which to explore strategy as embodied narrative
practice. They had a traditional, top-down process that would
be familiar to most strategy scholars and practitioners. At the
same time, ICARUS also had a robust bottom-up process
that explicitly involved storytelling and integrated contribu-
tions from even low-level employees. ICARUS even had a
“chief storytelling officer,” and it was that individual who
initiated the process by contacting the authors, presenting a
set of goals and objectives, and soliciting their involvement.
Thus, while the experiment described below may appear
merely as a one-off event designed by external academics
involving just a few dozen organizational actors (who were
communications and strategy professionals working in
upper- and lower-middle management), it should be empha-
sized that those actors did not approach the workshop as par-
ticularly abnormal or exogenous to the organization. Instead,
because ICARUS already had a well-established set of story-
telling practices that were explicitly framed as a key part of
the organization’s strategy process, these actors saw the
research collaboration as a part of something that they had
already been involved in, and would continue to be involved
in. In other words, although the collaboration was a unique
event, the storytelling practices themselves were an endoge-
nous, authentic part of strategy making at ICARUS.
Designing the Storytelling Workshop
In collaboration with a team of 8 researchers, the authors
designed, facilitated, and gathered data during a 1-day story-
telling workshop. We acted as facilitators of the workshop
groups, while the other researchers acted as participant
observers. The design of the workshop was based on phe-
nomenological principles. We sought intentionally to inte-
grate the richness of lived experience by asking the
practitioners to act out their stories out in a dramatic, perfor-
mative way (Tyler, 2007). There have been various studies
on the theory, practice, and evaluation of the phenomeno-
logical method as a qualitative research procedure (Giorgi,
1997). Just as all research methods are designed and selected
based on the degree to which they appropriately enable
researchers to respond to empirical phenomena, phenome-
nology offers an ideographic approach to subjective and
intersubjective experiences, embedded in material, “inter-
objective” conditions (Küpers, 2009). This stance requires
considerable reflexivity on the part of the researcher to
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remain sensitive to the phenomenon and its narrative
recounting. Phenomenological research practice is driven by
a rigorous emphasis on qualitative approaches that focus on
people’s intentions, lived experiences, and contexts. Once
those experiences are perceived, expressed, and reflected
upon by using phenomenological epoché (reduction)—
referring to the suspended judgment necessary for phenom-
enological inquiry—they become the building blocks for
descriptions and interpretations that allow for the develop-
ment of more generative theorizing about the general struc-
tures of experience related to narratives or storytelling and
strategy as practice.
The design of the narrative workshop was inspired spe-
cifically by the notions of an experimental phenomenology
(Ihde, 1977, 1986), and phenomenology-based narrative
approaches (Moustakas, 1994) and narrative inquiry
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) for interpreting the living and
ambiguous tale worlds and story realms (Young, 1987) of
strategy. Following the spirit of reflexivity, “working phe-
nomenologically” means being open to unpredictability and
paradox within any research encounter, and remaining intel-
lectually agile in the face of that encounter going in unex-
pected directions. In this way, we sought to learn not only
about strategy but also, reflexively, about the capacities that
are awakened in us through the empirical encounter.
Facilitating the Storytelling Workshop
We began the workshop by inviting the practitioners to
engage in the practice of storytelling. The tool we chose for
this task was a set of classical narrative genres (see Table 1).
These genres—namely, comic, tragic, and epic saga (Gabriel,
2000)—served as an open framework for contesting existing
dominant as well as creating new narratives. We aspired on
one hand to help the practitioners to get into a storytelling
mood, entering a state where they would be willing to use
their imagination and express their emotion. On the other
hand, we introduced a variety of genres to produce polyph-
ony between the subgroups engaged in storytelling.
To facilitate dynamic storytelling, we conducted sponta-
neous interventions that interrupted the discussions in ways
that oriented the participants toward their own lived expe-
riences (Table 2). The facilitator would surprise—even
shock—the practitioners as they were creating their stories by
urging them to focus on a particular phenomenon of their life-
world. Many of these interruptions were drawing on the
embodied nature of the phenomenal experience, for example,
the nature of one’s breathing at a specific point, the felt sense
of emotions or a gestural or facial expression and so on.
As a third element, we created a provisional agenda for a
full workshop day (Table 3). Our intent was to recreate a
dramatic story structure, where an introduction is followed
by a challenge that is subsequently resolved. This structure
6 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)

Table 1. Tragedy, Comedy, and Epic as Arenas for Narrating: Extract From Participant Guidelines, Specific to Three Different Groups

Group 1. Tragedy
  I.  Imagine the moment of glory!
  •  What are the characteristics of the hero at the moment of glory? What is his or her greatest virtue? What is the hero’s “Achilles heel?”
  II.  Identify the tragic situation!
  •  Which action of the hero leads to his or her downfall? Which characteristics of the hero explain this action? In which ways do
forces beyond the hero’s control take over (fate, identity, culture, path dependency, inertia)? Which other actors are at play with
which he or she is interacting with?
  III.  Find hope for redemption
  •  What can be learnt from the downfall, to be reborn?
  IV.  Build your storyline
  •  Pick a suitable time when the story begins. Identify a specific, significant event in history (10-15 years) which would be a suitable
beginning for the story, representing the hero at the height of his/her powers. What is the series of events, series of actions,
starting with the tragic act? How did we reach the point where we are now? Does this story end here? How has the hero
changed and how has the situation changed?
  V.  Prepare to tell the story
  •  Prepare to tell the story to the other groups. What medium is most appropriate for telling the story?
Group 2. Comedy
  I.  Find a taboo central to your organization
   What are you not supposed to talk about, or especially laugh about? What about your organization do others find funny?
  II.  Identify the comic situation
  •  How do you set the comic scene: characters (an engineer, a manager and a salesman) and setting (walk into a bar and . . . )?
  III.  Build your storyline
  •  Events: What do the characters do? Who breaks the taboo and how? Who is the target of the joke (who is the joke on)? Who
gets the joke and who doesn’t? How do we end the story (punch line)?
  IV.  Prepare to tell the story
  •  How do you present your story to make the others laugh? How do you surprise them?
Group 3. Epic
  I.  Choose the monster!
   Discuss important threats to your organization or strategic challenges. Choose the one you fear most, this is your monster!
  II. Imagine the chosen monster!
   Discuss how the monster appears
  III.  Discover a way to overcome the monster!
  •  Discuss actions conducted to overcome the monster. What was done first, what then? When were these actions taken? What did
we try to achieve by these actions? Discuss what the monster did in response to each action. What did we learn from this?
  IV.  Build your storyline
  •  Pick a suitable time when the story begins, some significant event in history (e.g., 1-15 years), which would be a suitable beginning
for the story. What is the series of events, series of actions to deal with the monster? How did we reach the point where we are
now? Does this story end here? How have we changed and how has the monster changed?
  V.  Prepare to tell the story
  •  Prepare to tell the story to the other groups. What medium is most appropriate for telling the story?

Table 2. Potential Facilitator Interventions (Extract)

•  How did it feel like to be in this situation?
•  Can you find a facial expression to express this?
•  Please describe your gestures or your breathing on the moment when this happened!
•  Can you find a metaphor to illustrate how this felt?
•  How was the event discussed in corridors, lunch breaks, rumors, anecdotes, and so on?
•  Is there a mirror that the hero can look into (tragedy, saga)?
•  Think of an inside joke to fit this! Think about a bunch of drunken engineers discussing a strategy statement after participating in a
strategy road show (comedy)?
•  Please close your eyes and imagine a monster! How does it appear, look, smell or sound? Is it bloodthirsty, or just bored? Is it material
or immaterial (like the market forces; epic)? What does it do or want?
Note: Specific questions and requests were designed to elicit detailed illustration of experiences also to encourage the practitioners to reflect on their
narratives. The facilitators of all three groups drew on the same set of responses.

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Küpers et al. 7

Table 3. Strategy Storytelling Workshop Agenda (Summary)

Scene I: Creating multiple storylines in small groups from past to present (2-3 hr)
After a short introduction of participants and their expectations, as well as a target-setting discussion for the workshop, the group is
divided into three small groups (tragedy, comedy, and epic). Each group will be given the task of crafting a specific storyline from a
selected key event in organizational past to the present. To ensure a variety of viewpoints, the groups will craft stories belonging to
specific “genres” or “story-types.” For instructions, see Table 1.
Intermission
Coffee break or lunch.
Scene II: Creating a shared future story (2-4 hr)
The groups begin by telling/performing their stories to other groups. The audience members take notes during the performance, focusing
on similarities and discontinuities with their own group’s story.
  Collecting key “morals” or “lessons learnt”
  The crafting of a future story begins with a few volunteering participants from each small group reporting their notes regarding the
other groups’ stories: What are the continuities and discontinuities between interpretations of organizational history? The
facilitator uses the whiteboard to collect key lessons learnt in an open-ended discussion regarding the volunteers’ notes.
  Depicting the key lessons with picture cards
  All participants gather around the table and choose a picture card to represent one key lesson. The participants take turns in
presenting their cards and why they depict the chosen lesson. The facilitator makes sure that all lessons are depicted.
  Building a narrative out of the key lessons
  The participants build a sequence on a piece of flip chart paper out of the chosen cards. The cards are attached to the paper by
using scotch tape. The sequence represents the key events or actions, required to reach a chosen strategic outcome.
The participants choose a title for each picture. These titles are chosen to name key events in the story. They simulate different forms of
telling the story to other members of the organization.
Epilogue (1/2-1 hr)
The workshop is ended in a reflection discussion, focused on next steps and people responsible for carrying them out.

took shape in three different genres as participants tried to
narrate ICARUS’s history until the present moment. A reso-
lution of the collective future storyline was then created out
of the three genre narratives with the use of a large set of
vivid and provocative picture cards that we had prepared for
the event.
The morning of workshop day was spent on three practi-
tioner groups preparing a narrative of the organizational
past, leading to the present (Table 3). Each group was work-
ing on a different narrative genre (Table 1). The three sepa-
rate narratives from the morning session—a tragic, comic,
and epic saga—became the focal objects of storytelling for
the whole group.
It should be stressed that while we actively facilitated the
discussions between the participants (Table 2), we expressly
sought to avoid supporting any particular account or interest.
All the key expressions of ICARUS strategy that we quote
and analyze in this article were made by ICARUS members.
Our role was to challenge the participants to tell their story,
nurture participation, and provide stimuli to focus the par-
ticipants to reflect upon their lived experience (Table 2).
Interpretation of Findings
After conducting the workshop, we set out to make sense of
what we had learned about the organization. On one hand,
our intention was to produce a workshop methodology that
might be useful to the participants; on the other hand, we
deliberately sought to develop greater understanding of strat-
egy as a lived experience at ICARUS by reframing it from a
phenomenological perspective.
Our interpretation of the events proceeded in an abductive
manner as a dialogical process between theory and the data
(Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007; Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010;
Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008; Wodak, 2004),
beginning with participant observation notes taken during
the workshop. Immediately following the workshop, and
over the subsequent days, we engaged in initial reflective
discussion together with the members of the facilitation and
the rest of the research team. Over the following several
weeks, in periodic e-mail communication, we identified key
themes within the data. In a matter of few weeks, the three
authors of this article wrote a 10-page insight memo of their
findings, which were forwarded to the practitioners. Elements
of this memo and the received feedback by the practitioners
were later developed further to produce the findings dis-
cussed in this article.
As noted previously, one of the benefits of phenomeno-
logical analysis is that it allows the interpreter to engage in
dialogue with concealed aspects of organizations, that is, tacit,
embodied knowing embedded in the organizational lifeworld
(Küpers, 2005). We appreciated the opportunity to collaborate

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8 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
with a group of very reflective practitioners. They were will-
ing to engage in very critical reflection concerning their orga-
nization, and they participated with enthusiasm in exercises
that showed daring and devotion. Their willingness to criticize
current practice also hints at robustness in their organizational
culture, and a readiness for continuous learning and renewal.
In the phenomenological descriptions presented below, we
have changed all the names of participants as well as some
details of the narrative to preserve the anonymity of the indi-
viduals as well as the ICARUS organization.
Strategic storytelling at Icarus: Three embodied narrative
practices. The tragedy that ICARUS employees created was
about a hero (the company) who had achieved great success
in the old days through a belief and unwavering commitment
to a vision. Now the vision had slowly become obsolete, with
the hero unable to shake the vision off and reinvent himself
(the hero was portrayed by a male practitioner). The tragedy
that the participants composed was performed as a play, with
makeshift costumes. The hero embarks on a journey, and
encounters an old man, who conveys a message: “Beware of
your vision, as it will slowly devour you,” and so on.
The epic that the participants created was about an empire,
which had grown too large to realize its own borders. It had
to cut pieces of itself to avoid destruction. This epic was per-
formed in a traditional storytelling method, with listeners
closing their eyes, hearing the narrator account the story of
the rise and feared fall of the empire.
Finally, the comedy that the participants developed was a
sketch, played out in the unheated sauna that belonged to the
conference facilities where the workshop took place. It fea-
tured a group of middle managers as “old-timers,” who were
joined by an enthusiastic new recruit. The story made fun of
the cynical practices that went against official truths regard-
ing organizational values.
The afternoon commenced with the groups performing
their narratives to the other groups. These performances
were followed by an intense discussion and debate about the
interpretation and moral of the stories, which the participants
finally condensed into a single joint narrative about the
future. A prospective narrative was first debated and finally
expressed by the participants as a response to the Icarus par-
adox that their company was facing. The company was pre-
sented as with the challenge of ceasing to be the tame
“lapdog” that it was in the process of becoming—becoming
“the underdog again” instead. The ultimate goal of becoming
“the creator of chaos,” a dweller of a dynamic environment
under constant construction would be reached by a succes-
sion of steps, involving such steps as a “funeral for cyni-
cism” and capturing the “pioneer mentality” that ICARUS
had had in the good old days.
It was during the afternoon that the analytical findings of
our article became most fully evident as the practitioners
took charge of the implications of the genre narratives
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produced during the morning workshop. The workshop had
in an important sense a “happy ending” as the participants
were able to craft a shared notion of a desired future for
ICARUS. This shared narrative was accomplished by much
debate and dynamism, which revealed important aspects of
the practice of strategy at the company.
Through our analysis, we identified three storytelling
practices at ICARUS, Inc.: (a) a struggle for ownership of
“hot” words, (b) the de-sacralization of strategy, and (c) a
recurring ritual of self-sacrifice. We will discuss the rele-
vance of all the three practices below, interpreting them
using the vocabulary chosen by the practitioners. These
practices are simultaneously intimately local, as they bring
out aspects of ICARUS’s strategy work that are tender and
clandestine, yet they also resonate with and enrich theoreti-
cal work on strategy as a lived experience.
Storytelling Practice 1. Struggling
Over Ownership of “Hot” Words
The discussion got a bit heated. Mike [a junior devel-
opment consultant] passionately argued that he wanted
to have more say in matters of organizational strategy.
“I want to find myself in our strategy,” he argued.
When Eva [a senior communications official] asked
him: “are you saying that you want to be empowered?”
Mike seemed to get even more agitated. “No, I don’t
fucking want to be empowered! I said I wanna find
myself in our strategy!” (Facilitators’ notes, Extract 1)
At ICARUS, storytelling was founded on the notion that
words have owners. For example, we noticed that “change
management” meant something very different from “strat-
egy sharing” for ICARUS employees—and although to an
outsider this strong disassociation may appear strange, it
appeared totally “natural” and acceptable to the insiders in
the room. Indeed, “strategy sharing” was an organizational
process, owned by a specific group within the corporation,
whereas “change management” involved a completely dif-
ferent set of owners and activities.
Strategy words and concepts are loaded with power
(Seidl, 2007). The ability to use them endows an individual
with the capacity to maintain a crucial “space of reasons”
within the corporation (Schildt, Mantere, & Vaara, 2011).
In this sense, ICARUS portrayed a “linguistic division of
labor,” as specific terms and terminologies being owned and
maintained by particular groups and institutions (Putnam,
1975; Schildt et al., 2011). In situations where a new term
such as “storytelling” is introduced to the organization, a
struggle over ownership emerges.
Even though we interacted with a group of middle man-
agers, we witnessed such a struggle as a key aspect of
Küpers et al. 9
storytelling practice. It appears that specific words played a
key role in the establishment and exercise of power and
authority at ICARUS. Such authority was determined
through a process of giving very explicit ICARUS-specific
meanings and interpretations to management terms, such as
“empowerment” or “‘storytelling.” This authority is both
generically attributed to a functional set of responsibilities
and specifically, to the individuals who hold those responsi-
bilities and serve as “gatekeepers” or “process-owners” for
terms.
Strategy words can be interpreted as “code words,” which
are expressions that are intentionally employed and take on a
meaning different from their literal definition to those “in the
know” in a particular context and can reframe how a person
or situation is perceived (Safire, 2008, p. 133). In essence,
the true meaning of the code word or phrase is explicitly
known to like-minded members of a social group, whereas
outsiders presumably are not in the know. Code words are
used to intentionally evoke a particular framework that will
then “secretly” define a person or situation to those knowing
the code. Presumably, the same words could be unintention-
ally used by an outsider in a social group, but in that context
their use would likely be interpreted as an accident, perhaps
leading to a private snicker. What qualifies them as a type of
code, then, is their explicit and intentional use based on a
prearranged understanding, which evokes a frame shared by
a social group.
Marshak and Hercleous (2010) proposed that an implicit
frame, triggered and represented by a few unintentional
words or phrases (often metaphorical), can evoke powerful
emotional reactions subconsciously linked to a storyline (a
fuller representation of the frame), which then guides all fur-
ther strategic reasoning and decision making. They showed
how discursive “hot buttons” and their interpretive conse-
quences can be as, or more, influential in strategic organiza-
tional decision making as objective data and analysis.
Moreover, a single ill-chosen phrase or two could invoke an
unintended storyline and thereby completely change a strate-
gic outcome:
Framings keyed by evocative phrases, depending on
the content of the phrase and frame evoked, therefore,
can be seen as a means for operationalization of
dominant discourses and counter-discourses, or even
as a manifestation of more elemental, archetypal stor-
ylines. As such, implicit frames can potentially sub-
consciously re-affirm, challenge, or alter dominant
discourses, while at the same time influencing the
decision situations within which the frames occur.
(Marshak & Hercleous, 2010, pp 22-23)
The notion that strategy words are “hot” for ICARUS
practitioners is illustrated by the example cited in the
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epigraph above about “being empowered.” Mike claimed
that he wanted to infuse his personality into strategy, to “find
myself in [strategy].” A more senior participant, Eva, inter-
preted this remark and asked a seemingly friendly question:
“So you want to feel empowered?” Mike forcefully rejected
this suggestion, exclaiming: “I don’t fucking want to be
empowered, I said I want to find myself in our strategy!”
(Facilitator notes).
To an outsider, the term “empowerment” might reasonably
be defined in terms of finding one’s authentic self in and
through work activities. However, to the ICARUS insider,
there was a crucial distinction that plays itself out in terms of
power and subjectivity (see Ezzamel & Willmott, 2008;
Knights & Morgan, 1991; Laine & Vaara, 2007; Mantere &
Vaara, 2008). When someone is empowered, he or she is at the
same time objectified. Being empowered means being empow-
ered by somebody else. Thus, the term “empowerment” clearly
has a specified meaning and established ownership within
ICARUS, and the deconstruction of these significations and
power relations through storytelling practices can lead to
important realizations. The use of the word empowerment had
surfaced an underlying language game, the rules of which we
saw contested between Mike and Eva (Mantere, 2010).
In this manner, certain terms may be seen as “hot” in two
different senses. In the first sense, some words are regarded
as key, timely, actual, and important. Ownership of such
terms brings authority to an individual. In the second sense,
“hot” words are ones that burn one’s fingers, something to be
avoided unless one is prepared to face potential conse-
quences. Such terms appeared to have an interesting ambiva-
lence for the group. On one hand, they were to be
avoided—for example, one practice at ICARUS was to avoid
using the term “problems” at all costs and using the term
“challenges” instead. Yet, on the other hand, this taboo sta-
tus made these terms compelling, and they surfaced repeat-
edly in stories. One of the comic characters of the stories the
practitioners performed was a top manager, an “emperor
with no clothes”-type who repeatedly insisted that “we don’t
have politics here” smacking of pretentiousness, pomposity,
social hypocrisy, denial, or hollow ostentatiousness.
Another example of this ambivalence was the word
“learning.” Although the practitioners were very keen to
learn about their organization, their colleagues, and the busi-
ness environment through the storytelling practice, at the
same time they insisted that if you had to “learn,” you had
already lost in the competitive, and fast-paced IT market-
place. They insisted on referring to ICARUS as an “entrepre-
neurial, creative organization” rather than “a learning
organization.”
On reflection, we also discovered that we were not neutral
facilitators in the struggle of ownership over words. Our use
of the term “storytelling” was challenged by one of the
participants:
10 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
Tim [junior communications manager] ended the pro-
ceedings in a rather strange way. After what we had
regarded as an intense, fascinating experience, at the
end of the day he goes on to argue that: “this is all fine
and well, but this isn’t storytelling . . . I don’t know
what this is but storytelling it ain’t.” He went on to
present a competing, web-based methodology that his
team had created for storytelling. What does one make
of this? What a lousy way to end what was a great
workshop. (Facilitators’ notes, Extract 2)
Perhaps most poignantly, it appeared throughout the
workshop that the term “storytelling” holds a variety of
meanings that are not always agreed-upon by all participants.
We were initially shocked when Tim noted, “I don’t know
what this is but storytelling it ain’t,” as he was the most nota-
ble champion of introducing “storytelling” to ICARUS. We
felt hurt that our collective efforts could be dismissed in such
an offhand manner. After our initial shock, we realized that
the discussion of storytelling was another “hot” word, an
ownership of which was contested through a discursive
struggle over power/knowledge (see Mumby, 2005). Hot
words are forms of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Our
attempt of framing storytelling through the phenomenologi-
cal methodology that we had designed (Tables 1-3) could
also be challenged and so it was. Although as external facili-
tators we had little self-interest in influencing ICARUS, our
influence did work to surface implicit configurations of
power, inviting their examination and reorganization. In this
sense, our method was not as “neutral” as we may have
anticipated.
The first practice described here—the ownership of “hot”
words—suggests that specific stories and the ways they were
told contributed significantly to ICARUS’s total vocabulary
of strategizing. Strategy words were claimed, owned, gov-
erned, and contested in and through storytelling practices.
Storytelling Practice 2. De-sacralizing Strategy
Eva [senior communications manager] noted that
strategy was revered in the organization as a near-
sacred practice, “For strategy to be truly ‘shared,’ as
we say, we need to de-sacralize strategy.” I have to
admit I was impressed at this term. De-sacralising and
not worshipping “sacred cows” nor accepting limiting
taboos seems to be important for these practitioners in
order to avoid self-deceptions and to be able to deal
with phenomena in a realistic and creative way. In a
way the practitioners are following a phenomenologi-
cal orientation, by seeing phenomena as they appear,
and what they are supposed to be. De-sacralisation,
similar to demythologization, relativizes and redefines
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the significance of authorities. (Facilitators’ notes,
Extract 3)
The resonance between strategic management and the
mystical has been recognized in existing strategy scholar-
ship (Knights & Morgan, 1991; Mantere & Vaara, 2008;
Suominen & Mantere, 2010; see also Grint, 2010). While
strategists are generals, they are also shamans, visionaries,
and holders of sacred wisdom that few individuals can
access. The storytelling session allowed the ICARUS prac-
titioners to surface this tendency and explore its limitations.
They realized that, for strategy to be truly shared by organi-
zational members, it would need to shed its sacred skin. The
practice of de-sacralization was introduced and examined.
The second storytelling practice has close connections
with the first. Sensitivity to the meaning and power dynam-
ics that accompany specific terms appears as something cen-
tral to ICARUS, hinting at a tendency to attribute “holiness”
to specific terms, and to assign these terms to a chosen set of
“enlightened” individuals who guard over the “purity” of
these “firmaments.” In a complex internal and external envi-
ronment, such firmaments may contribute to cultural stabil-
ity and offer coherence in an otherwise tumultuous everyday
existence. Yet, if such “purification” of terms becomes too
rigid, there is a risk of cultural stagnation, ultimately result-
ing in poor adaptive capability to external challenges.
For ICARUS participants, the painful process of “de-
sacralization” involved “cutting oneself,” losing fixed mean-
ing in favor of the creation of new meaning (see Practice
3 below). In the practice of strategic management, a strong
sense of fundamental meaning and top management owner-
ship appeared to have been established long ago at ICARUS.
In more recent times, a counterdiscourse of “strategy shar-
ing” had begun to play a prominent role in strategizing. At
ICARUS, strategy itself appeared to be “owned” by a spe-
cific party within the corporation (Practice 1). Through
de-sacralization, the meaning as well as the established own-
ership of a term was challenged, and by this process, the
power dynamic shifted as multiple voices and reinterpreta-
tions of the term emerged.
During the workshop, the theme of de-sacralization sur-
faced, for example, in the use of such profane expressions as
“taking the piss” out of strategy vocabulary, or in the calls to
accept “violent” or “street-fighting” characteristics as an
important part of ICARUS’s otherwise polished organiza-
tional identity.
Storytelling Practice 3.
Recurrent Ritual of Self-Sacrifice
Group 3 had all participants close their eyes as they
accounted their monster saga [ . . . ] A major theme of
their epic was “cutting away the monster within.” The
Küpers et al. 11
word “cut” had a very real, embodied feel . . . The
repugnancy and horror of actually cutting away pieces
of yourself. – Facilitators’ notes, Extract 4.
The third and final practice is the one that finds most
resonance with the Icarus paradox. ICARUS’s response may
be read as an enactment of the Icarus paradox, downfall of a
business brought by considerable success (Miller, 1990).
Strategic management is by nature built on competition. At
first glance, you would expect that strategy storytelling
would focus on overcoming external enemies, competitors.
At ICARUS, another crucial aspect of competition was
emerged: competing against oneself, overcoming the enemy
within. Indeed, strategic management was also initially born
out of a realization that competitive advantage was fleeting
and organizations needed to “cut” themselves constantly: cut
costs, people, units, and businesses (Kiechel, 2010).
The hero in Group 3’s presentation was an empire that
had grown so large that it did not see its borders. It had
to cut itself to be able to see its borders again . . . Only
to grow again. (Facilitators’ notes, Extract 5)
Each of the three storylines the ICARUS practitioners
composed involved some kind of internal enemy or problem
that could never be overcome because it dwelled within the
organization and was therefore inevitable. One major exam-
ple of this phenomenon was the use of the horrific word “cut-
ting oneself.” The notion of cutting seemed to carry strongly
influential connotations and provoke particularly intense
emotional responses. This became quite evident in a discus-
sion about the difficulty of “cutting budgets,” cutting back
workforces, and the pain of cutting off part of one’s self to
overcome the evil parts within—the evil of becoming fat and
docile.
The specific manifestations of this inevitable and internal
“enemy within” differed from story to story, from “empire
building” to “not seeing one’s borders” to an entrenched cul-
ture of self-interest and smuggling tax-free merchandise
through customs during business trips. One of the three sto-
ries, a tragedy, presented a strong belief in the corporate
vision as the hero’s greatest strength, but this was also the
hero’s Achilles heel. In the third group’s saga, ICARUS was
presented as an empire that could not see its borders any-
more. In the comedy, presented to the other groups in a cold
sauna, a large organization had borne a host of cynics, who
was reminding us of the “pioneering old days,” while
denouncing the need to see things anew.
Reflecting on the implications of the comedic story,
participants acknowledged that “it’s a bold message to
laugh about something serious.” One participant cited
the following example: “Think about a guy from
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headquarters who goes to visit country operations. The
second biggest lie in this situation is when the guy
from HQ says ‘I’m here to help you.’ But the biggest
lie is when the country manager tells him, ‘Thank you,
you are very welcome here!’” Basic assumptions
about the unity of the corporate culture and the com-
mon interests shared by members in diverse parts of
the organization are being contested. – Facilitators’
notes, extract 6.
The epic storytelling group legitimated the need for such
self-sacrifice in reference to the notion that there was a mon-
ster within that had to be dealt with. The monster was
described as insidious, and the challenge it presented was
attributed to not knowing when and how it appears, to its
unpredictable sudden appearances as the “other” which at
the same time is part of oneself. The monster absorbs, “eat-
ing up the heart” in a kind of subtle exploitation, “making
one fat and sleepy,” effecting “being sucked and stymied”
which even has implications for employees’ private lives.
Furthermore, it threatens loyalty and causes suffering from
disloyalty, generating uncertainty, and ambiguous feelings.
In terms of relating and dealing with the monster, a
“knowing/doing gap” was articulated. The participants
described the difficulty in facing the monstrous dangers “as
one is not prepared,” as “having no blue print” or “appropri-
ate weapons.” It seems that the monstrosities require “sacri-
fice,” that is, “killing parts of one-self” (e.g., “cutting the
hand off”) and “guerrilla-like counter-subversion,” which
nobody is ready to do. The possibilities for rebellious under-
takings, and for free and creative counteracting instead of
“merely learning,” were problematized, as these can lead to
“anarchistic practices” carrying the dangers of “technologies
of totalization.”
Coherent with the recent curiosity for monsters in social
and organizational research (e.g., Thanem, 2006), the prac-
tice of ritual self-sacrifice questions the power, purity, and
boundaries of an organization by accentuating its risky
encounters with heterogeneous, monstrous bodies. We
invoke with Thanem (2006) the spirit of Bergson as well as
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) work on “creative involu-
tion,” and the storytelling practices described here extend
previous social and organizational research focused on the
radicality of monsters. Our findings challenge the stigmati-
zation of monstrous embodiment, opening up a possibility of
seeing monstrosity as part of a living interpenetration of
foldings and movements (Wood, 2002).
The need for self-sacrifice seems to be based on “cultural
entrapment,” that is, a process by which people at ICARUS
got (and get) locked into past paths of success and lines of
action, subsequently justify those lines of action, and search
for confirmation that they are doing what they should
be doing instead of searching for what they could doing
12 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
differently. In this way certain meta-narrative patterns may
hinder, if not directly excluded, the emergence of new pro-
cesses of narrative knowing and enactment.
During the performance of the saga, one participant
stated that “the emperor realizes that the sickness is
within, so he begins to cut himself in hopes of healing
himself . . . but the cycle always begins again.”
(Facilitators’ notes, Extract 7)
Yet, while the notion of entrapment was key to the sto-
ries, as in any good tragedy, there was also a notion of self-
realization, enabling rebirth. The fight with the monster, the
“empire cutting itself,” never ends. The hydra grows new
heads as the old ones are cut off. Success breeds loss of
responsibility and cynicism, yet the hero is reborn again.
Mike, the young angry champion from our first extract
framed this challenge as reinventing the organization as the
“underdog” once again.
The notion of a reborn hero rising again as the underdog,
only too aware of the risk of eventual succumbing into the
charms of the enemy within shares has striking similarities
with the absurd genre in literature. The absurdist authors
broke free of the convention in classical tragedy to glorify
the suffering of the hero as something purifying or cathartic.
This development that was in many ways crystallized in the
work of 20th century modernists writers such as Brecht,
Kafka, Beckett, and Camus saw the birth of “the absurd
hero,” who “embraces his endless torment in magnificent
lucidity, undeceived by hope, un-destroyed by despair”
(Poole, 2005, p. 80).
Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging and
living the contradiction between the desire of human reason
and the unreasonable world without hope. The question then
arises: How can storytelling champions act as leaders in such
an absurd culture? One of ICARUS’s leaders was reported
saying, “It’s my opinion, but they can consider it a fact.” A
key aspect of ICARUS appeared to be a strong belief in their
top managers as near-mythical characters. These leaders are
envisioned as pioneers, as people who break new ground,
and defeat the monster again and again. The myths concern-
ing leadership seem important to ICARUS staff, as these sto-
ries personify an important aspect of rebirth: for example,
fighting the bureaucratization and security of a successful
and large organization through a “pioneer mentality.”
Indeed, even as they recognized and critically reflected upon
the mythical character of these stories, they “chose to
believe,” as they represent something valuable, preserving
their culture’s integrity (Levi-Strauss, 1969).
The contradiction in such stories is that alongside this
motivational value, they belittle the present and glorify the
past. Dead pioneers breed cynics who de-sacralize the past
through parody. The paradox they encounter is the challenge
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to capture the pioneer spirit, yet by seeking to capture their
spirit they imitate them. The mimetic paradox is deepened as
on one hand the rebirth of “the empire that cannot see its
borders” into “the underdog” involves newborn humility,
preached widely in the organization, whereas on the other
hand, the underdog has ferocious belief on its own capacity
to survive: “Losers learn, winners create.”
Ambiguity of Storytelling: A
Metareflection on Embodied
Narrative Practice
The stories enacted by ICARUS practitioners in the work-
shop and retold here by the researchers evoke and illustrate
the lived experiences of organizational members who were
peripheral to the traditional realm of strategic management
(Laine & Vaara, 2007; Mantere, 2005). Although certain
aspects of these storytelling practices are particular to
ICARUS, other aspects seem illustrative of the bottom-up
strategy development and implementation processes that can
be found in many dynamic multinational firms. In the pre-
ceding section, we identified three practices, namely, “own-
ership of hot words,” “de-sacralization of strategy,” and
“recurrent self-sacrifice,” which reflect the situated life-
world of ICARUS middle managers, but we believe these
practices resonate beyond the borders of that firm. In this
section, we engage in a process of meta-reflection on how
these practices illustrate the embodied way finding (Chia &
Holt, 2009) that takes place whenever people in organiza-
tions engage in storytelling.
The three practices—“ownership of hot words,” “de-
sacralization of strategy,” and “recurrent self-sacrifice”—
reveal ways in which narratives can enable organizational
members to develop, enact, and share knowledge processes
within their lifeworld. Their intentionalities, perceptions,
actions as well as their identities—altered by organizational
change and strategy—were mediated by and interpreted
through narratives. To sustain feelings of authenticity and
develop their own self-understanding, the practitioners real-
ized a kind of narrative identity work that included enlisting
others to lend social reality to the desired changes (Ibarra &
Barbulescu, 2010). In this sense, narratives and their identity-
related storylines (Mishler, 1999) are specific media that
serve to build “transition bridges” (Ashforth, 2001), crossing
gaps between identities and roles and transforming all kinds
of social interactions, including strategy processes.
The transitional and dynamic character of narratives also
shows the quality of nonlinear, cyclic, or spiraling stories
and how this characteristic, together with the emergence of
prospective sensemaking, can bring about a future that would
not otherwise exist (Boje, 2001, 2010; Boje, Rosile, & Gardner,
2007; Yolles, 2007). As the plurivocal and polysemous
Küpers et al. 13
antenarratives are “in the middle” and “in-between” (Boje,
2001), they direct attention toward the ambiguity of collec-
tive sensemaking, approaching what is happening in the flow
of experience (p. 293). Although bridging between supple-
menting fragments and living stories of presence on the
move, they form interesting patterns of complex relation-
ships (Boje, 2010).
Furthermore, in the organizational context of strategy
making, storytelling enables and manifests the social condi-
tions as well as the power differentials in play. The instance
of “not wanting to be empowered”—as exemplified in the
discussion between “junior-Mike” and “senior-Eva” in
Extract 1—serves as a one illustration of such a contest.
Within strategy literature, authors have started to acknowl-
edge the role that the discourse of strategic management
plays in subjugating people into particular social positions
(Ezzamel & Willmott, 2008; Knights & Morgan, 1991).
From the instrumental perspective identified above, narra-
tives can set forth powerful and persuasive truth claims,
including unquestionable beliefs about appropriate behavior
and value that can be used to subjugate precisely to the extent
that they remain unquestioned.
Recently, authors working on strategy-as-practice have
started to explore the agency to resist such subjugation
through discursive struggle (Laine & Vaara, 2007; Mantere
& Vaara, 2008; Mumby, 2005). In this sense, Mike’s resis-
tance against “being empowered” elucidates how a single
word may become an arena for such a discursive struggle
over subjectivity in an organization’s strategy process
(Mantere, 2010). Instead of allowing himself to be subju-
gated, Mike engages in identity work (Sveningsson &
Alvesson, 2003) and tactics of resistance (de Certeau, 1984)
as he seeks to construct a subject position of his own liking
in and through strategy practice. The “empowerment” case
reveals and debunks an ideology of empowerment that is
turned to purposes of tightening the iron cage of managerial-
ist control and manipulation (Agre, 1995; Barker, 1993).
Thus, stories can function as the instrument of oppression
and emancipation. Organizations are not neutral instruments
used only for mutually agreed on purposes, but instead they
are inherently political (Salaman, 1979). The space of the
individual subject (as well as the overall purpose and func-
tion of the organization itself) are often politically contested.
In this process of contestation and struggle, people actively
and creatively craft narratives to attain power, realize objec-
tives, and maximize interests. Narration about supposedly
shared values, for example, can embody selective dominance
and social inequality, and “sunshine” stories can be used as
means of managerial oppression and panoptical discipline
(Boje, Gephart, & Thatchenkery, 1996). To be sure, story-
telling can oppress by subordinating employees to one grand
strategic narrative, but at the same time, ingeniously per-
formed narrative practices of strategizing can be creatively
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liberating, showing organizational members that there are
always a multiplicities of stories, storytellers, and story
events (Boje, 1995).
In this light, stories can resonate with an individual’s or a
group’s experience in ways that create and sustain meaning-
ful collective action. The practitioners used the storytelling
workshop as an occasion to confront the Icarus paradox
(Miller, 1990) that was their central strategic challenge, and
in the process of contesting the meaning of this challenge,
they forged a collective response to it. Instead of just a sin-
gle, dominant vision propagated in the name of strategy, we
witnessed collaboration and collective vision. Furthermore,
stories appeared to function as an “energizer” for generating
important information and relationships. Some of the stories
enacted during the workshop enabled identification with
ICARUS and led to self-organized activities. For example,
the group joined together in reference to the expressed need
to de-sacralize the holiness in the strategy process, and thereby
to fight the Icarus paradox.
Thus, although the aforementioned three practices are
deeply ambivalent, this ambivalence itself can have consid-
erable value for organizations. Indeed, ambiguity gives rise
to a sense-giving imperative (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991),
and this process of political contestation can be a source of
resilience (Sonenshein, 2010; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001). In
the case of ICARUS, people acknowledged the absurdity of
their practice of self-sacrifice and saw this process of contes-
tation as an integral part of their organization’s strategy.
Their mastery of critical reflection and tolerance for ambigu-
ity may also be interpreted as a testament to the robustness
(Burgelman & Grove, 1996) of ICARUS’s culture. Indeed,
future studies might be directed toward understanding the
value of such robustness, that is, a cultural capability for
reflection, especially related to more performance-related
issues such as capability for strategy renewal (Chakravarthy
& Doz, 1992; Floyd & Lane, 2000). Agile organizations
(Doz & Kosonen, 2008) capable of reinventing themselves
in response to strategic dissonance (Burgelman & Grove,
1996) may be built on passionate and critical debate, and
they may be hospitable to ambiguity and absurdity as well
as to shared visions and collective commitment.
In conclusion: A meta-reflection on method. In the interest of
providing a robust methodological basis for such future
research, a concluding meta-reflection is necessary. The
design, facilitation, and interpretation of the workshop
explicitly drew on phenomenology to frame the stories
enacted by ICARUS members in their original flux, ambigu-
ity, and opaqueness. The methodological contribution of this
article is to illustrate how such phenomenological methods
can be used to approach the ambiguity of strategy as story-
telling. We believe, however, that this contribution itself is
ambiguous, especially with regard to the ethical issues that
can arise whenever researchers engage directly with
14 Journal of Management Inquiry XX(X)
organizational members in the practice of storytelling. In this
regard, we feel obliged to sound a warning call about how
the use of narrative methodologies in strategy work (and
strategy research) can also involve possible misuses and eth-
ical pitfalls.
The power of stories lies in their capacity to encompass
thinking and feeling about issues and thereby to compel peo-
ple to take certain actions and avoid others. In this sense,
narratives can be instrumentalized and appropriated as an
ideological tool for the legitimation of dominant power rela-
tionships. Because stories can set forth truth claims about
values and behaviors in organizations, they can be used as
means for manipulation to gain or retain power that privilege
some interest over others (Mumby, 1988). Because stories
include rhetorical ploys and shadow themes (Stacey, 2003),
they can be mechanisms of oppression and mystification as
well as contestation and resistance (Sims, 2003). Therefore,
researchers have an obligation to reflect critically about who
they themselves are, why they choose to tell certain stories in
certain ways, and whom they seek to benefit by telling them.
In this light, attention needs to be given to the dynamics
of meaning and power through which dominant groups
frame dissonant voices as peripheral “outsiders.” Often the
voices of managers and their staged performances within the
organizational context are louder, more articulate and more
powerful than others (Hazen, 1993). The challenging task for
researchers would thus be to try to hear and amplify the
voices and stories of those organizational members that have
been kept out of the dominant discourse, or otherwise ostra-
cized, marginalized and exploited.
Moreover, researchers should reflect critically on whether
the stories they tell about strategic practices might be overly
conservative or progressive, that is, following either a nostal-
gic path backwards toward supposedly better, good old days,
or reaching toward escapist, utopian futures. Strategy stories,
while often hegemonic and homophonic (Ezzamel &
Willmott, 2008; Knights & Morgan, 1991), can also be poly-
phonic (Barry & Elmes, 1997). By the same token, every tell-
ing of a story provides a way to marginalize or forget another
way of telling the story (Lyotard, 1986). Accordingly, any
critical approach to narratives must acknowledge that what
has been told could easily be told again, and differently.
To investigate further the ambiguity involved embodied
narrative practice, organizational researchers may have to
reject the modernist version of referentialist-representalism
(Madison, 1993) and instead embrace antifoundationalism
and antiessentialism based on phenomenology (Merleau-
Ponty, 1962). By keeping in mind the embodied dimensions
of human experience, post-Cartesian phenomenology can
help overcoming the cognitive bias and logo-centrism that
prevails in strategy research and practice (Clegg et al., 2004).
To conclude, we affirm the simple yet profound notion
that “a path is made by walking.” This phrase is attributed to
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authors ranging from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado to
Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu. In organizations such as
ICARUS, the importance of finding the way forward by
walking is captured in the design of bottom-up strategy pro-
cesses. In the context of strategy research, the significance of
this phrase may be captured in the concept of strategy with-
out design (viz., Chia & Holt, 2009), as well as in the well-
known distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy
(viz., Mintzberg, 1978). Strategy researchers struggle, how-
ever, with the development and deployment of research
methods that are similarly open to emergent phenomena. We
tend to use overly cognitive tools that blind us to the noncog-
nitive dimensions of experience, just as our tendency to seek
predictive knowledge and unambiguous conclusions blinds
us to the unpredictable and ambiguous aspects of our own
research practices. Phenomenology may provide strategy
researchers with a methodology that remains rigorously
open to emergent change, while rendering more explicit and
visible the biases and power dynamics that are suppressed in
the stories we tell about ourselves.
Living stories remain open to multiple meanings. This
ongoing process of enactment and interpretation enables and
constrains the activities of organizational actors (Fenton &
Langley, 2011) as well as organizational researchers. We
hope the story that we have cocreated and shared here will
generate understanding about how organizations, strategiz-
ing, practitioners, and researchers are interwoven in a “con-
texture” through embodied narrative practice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Through “emplotment”—the process by which narratives link
temporal events by directing them toward a conclusion (Ricoeur,
1984)—idiosyncratic actions are woven into a meaningful
whole (Polkinghorne, 1988).
2. There are different interpretations in the organizational litera-
ture debating the nature and status of stories versus narratives
and storytelling versus narrating. Terminologically, narratives,
narration, and story(telling) are often used interchangeably,
treating distinct processes as the same or placed on a continuum
(Prince, 1982). For instance, Czarniawska (2004), defines nar-
ratives as a “spoken or written text giving an account of an
event/action or series of events/actions, chronologically con-
nected” (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 17), whereas stories need to be
emplotted in that they are more complicated, imbued by
Küpers et al. 15
emotions, descriptions of tensions, and/or moral conclusions.
Gabriel (2000) also argues that “not all narratives are stories; in
particular factual or descriptive accounts of events that aspire at
objectivity rather than emotional effect must not be treated as
stories” (p. 5); whereas stories are a prominent and specific type
of narratives and are as such an important part of the construc-
tion of the lifeworld of individuals, expressive form of organi-
zational life. Boje and colleagues (Boje, 2001; Boje, Rosile, &
Gardner, 2007) argue that narrative is distinguished from a
story in that the latter one has a plot linking a set of events in
some kind of causal sequence. According to Ricoeur (1984), “A
story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or
undergone by a certain number of people, whether real or
imaginary” (p. 341). Stories in and about organizations can be
interpreted as emotion-generating narratives through which
experienced events become charged with symbolic significance,
in which facts are turned into stories and stories into facts
(Gabriel, 2000).
3. “Erlebnis” is a common German word that has the normal con-
notation of event, occurrence, adventure, and experience, some-
thing memorable that happens to someone. It refers to lived
experiences as we live through it and recognize it as a particular
type of experience.
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Bios
Wendelin Küpers is associate professor at the School of
Management, Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand.
Previously he has been affiliated to the Institute for Leadership and
Human Resource Management at the University of St. Gallen,
Switzerland, and the Open University of Germany. In his inter- and
transdisciplinary research and corresponding publications he
focuses on embodied, emotional, and creative/aesthetic dimensions
of organizational and management practice.
Saku Mantere is professor of management and organization at the
Hanken School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki,
Finland. His research is focused on what makes organizations strate-
gic and how strategic management affects organizations. He is par-
ticularly interested in strategic change, middle management agency,
and strategy discourse. His work has been published in journals as
Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal,
Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Strategic
Organization. Mantere is associate editor of the Journal of
Management Inquiry, and coeditor of the Journal of Management
Studies special issue on Strategy as Discourse.
Matt Statler is the Richman Family Director of Business Ethics
and Social Impact Programming and Clinical Assistant Professor
of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern School of
Business. Previously, he served NYU’s Center for Catastrophe
Preparedness and Response as the Director of Research, and as
Associate Director of the International Center for Enterprise
Preparedness. He worked as director of research and as a research
fellow at the Imagination Lab Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland,
following several years as a management consultant in New York
City. His research has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics
and Long Range Planning, and he is the coeditor of the recent
Encyclopedia of Disaster Relief (2011, with K. Bradley Penuel)
and Learning from the Global Financial Crisis: Creatively,
Reliably, Sustainably (2011, with Paul Shrivastava).