Summary and Conclusions
Let’s imagine for a moment I’m a manager attending my own presentation, as outlined in the artifacts for this project. My “somebody wanted but so” story from this past year would go something like this: “I sought something greater—both professionally and personally—but knew I would never find it if I stayed put. So, I looked for something new.”
This quick story describes the essential challenge I encountered between the genesis of this project and its conclusion: In the midst of a pandemic, I left my quaint, comfortable, and predictable one-woman-show of a job managing employee communications to become a people leader for a complex, challenging, and dynamic team of employee communications professionals at a substantially larger multibillion-dollar, multinational corporation.
From a results perspective, I wouldn’t recommend this; it blew up my entire project. Where I had once had a well-designed survey based on a measurable, real-life application, I now found myself stuck, battling the dueling demons of analysis paralysis and pandemic fatigue (and onboarding remotely to boot).
But from a growth perspective, this leap in my professional life felt entirely lockstep with the culmination of my research and work in Gonzaga’s Masters of Communication and Leadership program.
Nearly every significant project I’ve completed within this program has centered on employee communications. Whatever the lens—ethics, difference, strategy—I always found a way to tie theory and coursework back to what I consider my greatest passion: how to help employees feel connected to their work.
While significant research has been conducted on storytelling within organizations over the last 30 years, as a result of my work on this project, I’ve identified a number of areas for concrete research in the future. They include:
- The ROI of storytelling in organizations,
- How to democratize storytelling within organizations, and (perhaps?) most importantly
- The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in corporate storytelling
Nearly 40 years after Walter Fisher introduced the Narrative Paradigm Theory into mainstream communications academia, we still find ample applications for this theory. As media continues to evolve from Twitter to TikTok to whatever our coming AI-driven business world holds in store, one thing remains clear: Humans are storytelling animals. And maybe, someday, robots will be, too.