Story-making to nurture change: creating a journey to make transformation happen

Purpose – To overcome change management challenges, organizations often rely on stories as means of communication. Storytelling has emerged as a leading change management tool to influence and bring people on sharing knowledge. Nevertheless, this study aims to suggest stories of change as a more effective tool that helps people in taking action toward transformation processes. Design/methodology/approach – The authors apply design science research to develop and evaluate how writing a prospective story engages organizational actors in the transformation process. The authors test the story-making artifact in a field study with five companies and 115 employees who participated in 75 workshops. Findings – Using the findings to discuss the role of story-making in facilitating the emergence of new behaviors in transformation processes, the authors link story-making with the opportunity to make change happen through knowledge dissemination rather than merely understanding it. Research limitations/implications – The authors illustrate the role of iterations, peers and self-criticism that help story-makers embrace sensemaking, developing a shared knowledge based that influence individual actions. Practical implications – The authors propose the story-making approach that organizations can follow to nurture change to make transformation happen through knowledge cocreation. Originality/value – The research explores story-making as an individual act of writing prospective stories to facilitate the emergence of new behaviors through shared knowledge.