Tool four
Critical Narrative Review
For anyone on the receiving end of an organisational narrative: employees, board members, investors, advisers, citizens. Seven headings, and a review you can print.
Everyone in an organisation reads the narratives circulating within it. The question is whether that interpretive work is done consciously, with tools, or unconsciously, defaulting to whichever template feels most familiar. A board that responds to the rhetorical structure of a presentation without examining what the structure is doing has been captured by the story it exists to scrutinise.
Work through whichever headings are relevant. A careful review of three is worth more than thin answers under all seven — and a heading you cannot answer is itself worth recording.
Interpretation carries obligations too
Critical reading is not the same as cynical reading. The point is not to catch anyone out but to recover what the account has made hard to see, and to be honest that your review is also produced from a position. Someone standing elsewhere would write a different one, and the difference between the two is usually more informative than either alone.
Resistance deserves the same care. Some resistance is inertia; some is narrative critique from people who can see that the new story does not yet make sense from where they stand. Distinguishing them is one of the more useful things this review can do — see Read the story.
Status: drafted from the manuscript · author review required