Investigating a narrative based approach to leader development: Life stories, middle managers and the leader-follower paradox : A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the postgraduate degree of Master of Advanced Leadership Practice at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

There is a small amount of emergent leadership literature recommending people incorporate a narrative based approach into their leader development. This approach involves the identification and reflection on experiences and events from ones’ life so a story can be told about who they are as a leader (life stories). To date, life stories research has yet to account for the fact leaders must also follow. Middle managers embody this paradox. This study was an investigation into the potential for life stories to contribute to middle managers’ leader development. This study also looked at how life stories might contribute to middle managers understanding of themselves as followers and how they might use life stories in negotiating the leader-follower paradox. The overall aim was to make a further contribution to understanding the potential for life stories in leader development. A case study of five Auckland New Zealand based middle managers was conducted. Life history interviews were thematically analysed using life stories as a sensitizing concept. Participants demonstrated little to no previous knowledge, skill or experience in life stories as a development process. They told stories as leaders that generally implied existing life stories self-development themes but they did not explicitly identify them. They told stories as followers that were somewhat at odds with general opinions they held on following. There was little correlation with existing life stories self-development themes. Overall, Participants’ life stories base intrapersonal leader and follower self-narratives had potential to be coherent, but were instinctive and under-developed. Participants’ ability to draw on life stories to identify, discuss and negotiate the leader-follower paradox matched their existing integration of life stories and intrapersonal leader-follower identities. Overall, participants had potential to produce a coherent and integrated leader-follower narrative, but this potential was under-developed. More research is required. A narrative based framework for further leader-follower life stories development processes is offered as a starting point

The Virtual Storyteller: story generation by simulation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework that generates stories based on a concept called emergent narrative. In this paper, we describe the motivation and approach of the Virtual Storyteller, and give an overview of the computational processes involved in the story generation process. We also discuss some of the challenges posed by our chosen approach

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Desire Lines: Open Educational Collections, Memory and the Social Machine

This paper delineates the initial ideas around the development of the Co-Curate North East project. The idea of computerised machines which have a social use and impact was central to the development of the project. The project was designed with and for schools and communities as a digital platform which would collect and aggregate ‘memory’ resources and collections around local area studies and social identity. It was a co-curation process supported by museums and curators which was about the ‘meshwork’ between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ archives and collections and the ways in which materials generated from within the schools and community groups could themselves be re-narrated and exhibited online as part of self-organised learning experiences. This paper looks at initial ideas of social machines and the ways in machines can be used in identity and memory studies. It examines ideas of navigation and visualisation of data and concludes with some initial findings from the early stages of the project about the potential for machines and educational work

Creating stories for reflection from multimodal lifelog content: An initial investigation

Using lifelogging tools, digital artifacts can be collected continuously and passively throughout our day. These may include a stream of images recorded passively using tools such as the Microsoft SenseCam; documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity; and context sensing to uncover the current location and proximal individuals. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our personal life history provides us with the opportunity to review, reflect and reminisce upon our past experience. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections creates a barrier to such activities. We are currently exploring the potential of digital narratives formed from these collections as a means to overcome these challenges. By successfully reducing the content to that most appropriate to the story, and by then presenting it in a coherent and usable manner, we can hope to better enable reflection. The means by which content reduction and presentation should occur is investigated through card sorting activities and probe sessions which nine participants engaged in. The initial results are discussed, as well as the opportunity, as seen in these sessions, for lifelog-based stories to provide utility in personal reflection and reminiscence

Discursive resources: top managers' identities and the long-term survival of their organisations

This paper represents an attempt to understand the dynamics of the identity work in the context of the challenges top managers have to address. Managers' discursive resources influence what they notice and also the interpretation of what is noticed. Their ability to understand and challenge their discursive resources is crucial because the persistence of categories and metaphors that depicts a globalized world where they do not have capacity to react may explain the decline of their organizations. The stories they tell ground their emotions and their identities and then they see the world and themselves through them. Hence, their discursive resources and their emotions impact on the long-term survival of their organizations through the strategic exchange between top managers and organizations. The paper raises queries about the discursive resources that top managers use to define their identities, and how these identities may affect the long-term survival of organizations. The findings from this study add to the theoretical knowledge of the sense-making literature. They have practical consequences for the textile sector in Portugal and how strategic issues are addressed. This is in allowing an understanding of the influence that discursive resources have in managers' identity construction and the effects of their identities on the long-term survival of their organizations