3.3 The power of re-storying leadership
One important practice in leadership is what Schedlitzki et al. (2015) call ‘re-storying’. This is the process where groups reconstruct a story for the purposes of:
- highlighting issues and experiences that have been subdued by history
- building up the importance of a group of people marginalised in the dominant account of history – e.g. women, Black workers
- drawing out previously overlooked but important villainous characters
- building up confidence and the agency of people to act in the present, as they feel more connected to the stories and struggles of the past.
Re-storying can work effectively with a well-known story from history, as it can highlight how even stories that have become widely accepted conceal all kinds of power dynamics. Re-storying can also work with fictional stories. Telling an alternative to a well-known story from a different perspective than the original can draw out the power relations of the original, revealing hidden possibilities and developing the capacity for recognition and empathy. One example of such re-storying is the novel Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1995), which was later adapted into a hit musical. The novel re-stories the classic film The Wizard of Oz, helping the readers see the ‘wicked witch’ as a persecuted freedom fighter with different colour skin, who bravely resists an authoritarian regime.
Re-storying is a practice that you can follow within your own work groups, and there are various ways of approaching it. For example, you could ask people to:
- adopt the perspective of a marginal or hidden character, or one originally portrayed in a negative light
- switch around the identities of characters to surface, subvert and challenge norms around race, gender and sexuality
- change the dominant genre of a story, drawing out hidden perspectives.
You will now try re-storying for yourself, in relation to the Rosa Parks story.
Activity 4 Re-storying Rosa Parks
The way the Rosa Parks story tends to be told subdues her radical power and that of the other women. The way the story was told to you in this course tries to recover some of their power. Nevertheless, there are other ways in which the story could be told in order to generate particular responses.
Think and make some notes about how you would re-story the Rosa Parks and/or Montgomery bus boycott history for the purposes of leadership within your organisation. In doing so, you could re-story by changing the emphasis on who the central characters are, or which genre to emphasise.
For example, a previously marginal character might become central. In Week 2, the story was told as part epic, part tragedy – the purpose was to show you how people with little in the way of material resources and social power could work together to achieve great things. You could do something similar or come up with your own genre, or mix of genres.
Discussion
Here’s an example of re-storying Rosa Parks within the Open University business school.
As a school committed to diversity, the OU business school is working to improve opportunities for female members of staff. It has attained certification from a scheme called Athena Swan, which sets standards on gender equality. Part of the process is thinking about how members of staff of all genders manage to balance their home commitments with work, finding ways of working that suit diverse individuals. The home/activism/work dynamics of the Rosa Parks story are fascinating. Rosa Parks was married to Raymond Parks, and when they met, Raymond was the more politically active of the two. Yet the roles did switch over time and Raymond took on significant domestic responsibilities, including caring for Rosa Parks’ mother when her health failed. At times Rosa Parks was the main wage earner and had to let her politics subside, but at other times she had the freedom to be politically active, partly due to the support she had from Raymond. The story could therefore be re-storied as a romance from the perspective of Raymond. The leadership purpose would be demonstrating how great things can be achieved when people within families support one another and stereotypical gender roles are subverted – but the story could also flag issues of justice concerning care in general, opening possibilities for new initiatives and campaigns around this issue.
This focus on re-storying ends the week’s learning.