Storytelling Within an Organization: Igniting Change Through Listening

The human experience is a constant process of cultural transfers. How we transmit language, world views, cues for beliefs, values and behaviour are corridors of enculturation through which children learn and arrive at places of participation and inclusion as adults in society.

If the true measure of a society is in how we treat our children… a key question poses itself for North America.  What are the indicators we must learn to read? Are there report cards? Who created them? Who reads them?

Our children have neither the power nor opportunity to create tools to measure our performance. How are we doing? How can we assess what we offer our children in terms of their safety, security, guidance, and support?  Increasing numbers of young people arrive on our streets. We have created social programming and services. We have developed industries of care and attention, and credentialed professionals to deliver. Yet scores of young people still turn to our streets. Children and young people have become the living indicators of the society we offer.

The DOORWAY began as an opportunity to imagine an alternative option for young people who have experienced the gaps in society’s one-size fits all services.  The Doorway’s approach offers innovation and social change in the ways society thinks about children and young people who have had to achieve their survival in the culture of the street.  This approach commits to learning from them how we can help their efforts to build their lives forward.

Cultural Learning and Listening

The frame of the DOORWAY approach is the belief that the street and the non-street are distinct cultures and that movement from one to the other is a cross cultural process. Cultural learning and change are achieved by listening and learning the cues to the operative language, beliefs, values and social agreements encountered.

The cultural information necessary to adapt to fit a new context is learned from people who share conversation and space. There is no textbook and no self help study course. People deliver culture. Children who go to the streets for survival learn to adapt to fit the culture of the street. In the same process, they learn and adapt to fit non-street culture.

The DOORWAY approach recognizes the transfer of cultural information as key to learning necessary change in transitioning from one culture to another. Community people host an integration environment where the exchange of cultural information and cues is communicated in shared conversations and storytelling.  It is a human process, a ‘village’ which teaches and supports young people.

Diligent Listener

The DOORWAY has developed with diligent intentionality as listener viewing our research and evaluation as documented listening. Listening is the strategy to read the living report cards presented in individual lives and experience.

As a community of practice, we believe that we all need to tell stories. Storytelling occurs in silence. It is possible only in the context of listening. It requires full attention in the moment.  Cues to learning are in the other person. Stories are mediated often through a single person’s point of view.  The dialogical process of cross cultural storytelling practiced at The DOORWAY is lived out by the articulation of our stories, really listening, and creating dialogue between stories. As we listen we understand.

Young people are offered a critical path business planning approach to create their planned steps to get off the street. They design personal change one step at a time in any of 13 life categories.(e.g. housing, employment, education, health, personal, problem solving, …) Individual plans are written toward self-determined goals, without interference from the listener.  A cross cultural conversation then offers listening and learning to both perspectives as individual young people discuss their thinking and planned steps with a community cultural interpreter. A community of people who listen and learn from young people complete the circle of communication and mutual learning.

In each written plan to achieve personal goals, young people document the stories of their learning.  They also contribute a personal monthly reflective piece of writing about their experience of making change in adapting to the chosen culture.  Both of these pieces, recorded internally in this learning environment, are the content for qualitative research theme analysis. Storytelling directly provides the content for the continued learning of the organization as a community of practice.

Opposition to Storytelling

In large part, the prevailing acceptance of the scientific model for assessing collected knowledge and observations still imposes significant opposition to the value of storytelling. Traditional emphasis on rationality, factual accuracy and verifiability, science and evidence-based knowledge, has challenged stories as reservoirs of meaning and knowledge. Evaluation tools are created in a world which still believes that imposing the methodology and the criteria for statements of outcomes and success of people is a product, produced in linear sequenced formats.

Evaluation of success for individual young people through The DOORWAY approach still faces the challenge of scientific framing and the imposition of ‘experts’ as evaluators.  The process of cultural change and change in thinking are not easily documented quantitatively.  The questions: Who needs to know? And why? need to be asked.  We advocate for young people to define their own success in building their own places in mainstream culture.

Storytelling has long been a feature of human societies. Building on this tradition in a society which is only now beginning to see beyond the scientific and rational is exciting and leading edge.

The DOORWAY approach with young people requires that we accept the concept of listening as a critical first measure of learning how to be helpful to people who are asking.  As Frederick Perls so simply suggests in his Paradoxical Theory of Change: (paraphrased) “… fully acknowledging starting points is critical to maximize personal growth from where one is today, to where one wants to be instead.”

Storytelling is an Invitation to Contemplation

Learning for adults is less about taking in new information than it is about connecting with people who help put that information in context and suggest new ways of understanding it. We each learn and adjust our approaches not just by getting facts but also by getting relevant information in situ with all the nonverbal cues that candid stories afford. Together we see patterns emerge and discover new ideas worth trying.

For credentialed perspectives built on academic theories, storytelling seems insufficient as a methodology. The rational western approach to manage and control as best practice is hard to challenge when it is held so closely to the scientific medical model which believes people need to be fixed. The critical understanding that never is named in this approach is the role of context in every individual’s life. An early sociologist, C.Wright Mills said: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” Storytelling is the fleshing out of both!

The DOORWAY continues to learn that a key role in community responses to assist others is to discover questions, not to answer them, and to raise issues not to resolve them. Listening and storytelling are an invitation to contemplation.