The Work Stories Do: How Stakeholder Storytelling Can Support Strategic Renewal

Abstract

Processes to create shared understandings of organizational identity, mission, and vision, and how these experiences might affect culture and offer insight for the strategic plan, have implications for system-level leaders of any organization in the educational sector. This capstone describes a strategic project of excavating stakeholder interpretations of organizational identity and mission through a shared storytelling process inside the complex environment of a nonprofit organization experiencing retrenchment and staff turnover. It considers the question of how mission and identity arise in shared experiences of storytelling and how this process might generate insights to improve organizational culture. Evidence from the project frames the capstone’s recommendations to create a team-based vision process for refining the mission. It argues that regular opportunities for stakeholder storytelling organically surface shared values, and this process is the first step in organizational learning and the practice of positive cultural development. A final recommendation is the addition of a learning officer role to embed equitable organizational learning in short and longer-term strategic planning.