Integral Strategy 109
- Integrative: It integrates different forms of data and knowledge into insights and
decisions. - Embedded: It depends on distributed leadership throughout the organization.
- Action oriented: It requires effective systems of implementation.
THE BIRTH OF STRATEGY: THE POWER
OF NARRATIVES
Discussions with college administrators about strategic planning quickly reveal
how differently people think about the process. The conversation may start as a dis-
cussion of the meaning of a vision for a college to be the best in its class, or it might
come to focus on the organization’s distinctive competencies and its responses to
a threatening environment. Frequently the most energy about strategy surrounds
questions of financial resources and the college’s market position in enrollment,
especially its net tuition income after discounts for financial aid and scholarships.
All these issues may be critically important, but in themselves they are strate-
gies of management, not of leadership. How can the strategic focus be shifted
to leadership? How can the language of strategy be translated into the idiom
of leadership? The answer begins by locating the foundation of strategy in the
organization’s unique identity, as revealed in its narrative of identity, its story.
For our purposes, narrative is the form that stories take as they tell of events that
unfold through time and create dramatic tension around conflicts and challenges
and their resolution (H. Gardner, 2004). Narratives are the way we tell, and story
what we tell, so often the two are one and the same. Narratives of identity are
one type of story that give an account of an organization’s or a society’s unique
characteristics. This point of departure moves strategy to a deeper plane of self-
analysis and self-understanding, where we begin to see that it has to do with sense
making and sense giving, and so with leadership.
For the past several generations, the modern imagination has been drawn to the
importance of narrative in understanding human experience. Most contemporary
fields in the humanities and social sciences have been fascinated, even preoccupied,
with the significance of narratives. The literature on the topic in each discipline
is so vast that it represents the shape of the modern sensibility.^1 Far from being
seen as simply fanciful inventions, stories are narratives of the meaning of events
as persons and groups live them rather than objectify them. Thus we find that case
histories and case studies, original historical texts and documents, myths and sagas,
songs and dances, paintings and sculpture, biographies and autobiographies, letters
and diaries, and novels, poetry, and plays are powerful sources of revelation of the
meaning of the human project. As Roland Barthes, one of the most influential
theorists on narratives, puts it, “under this almost infinite number of forms, the nar-
rative is present at all times, in all places, in all societies:... there does not exist, and
never has existed, a people without narratives” (quoted in Polkinghorne 1988, 14).
Stories as people live them or imagine them give us access to the participant’s
sense of meaning, to human interiority as the individual’s or the group’s lived forms