“Ensuring that narrative – which is different to story telling -becomes a pervasive element of the organizations life requires channels to be created within which people can tell their own stories in a natural way as part of the day- to-day progress of their work environment. Professional performance by storytellers, actors and the like can be a useful short-term innovation, but it is a performance and its impact is short term. Executives reading a script prepared by a journalist or scriptwriter are less effective than when they speak from the heart; although there is a place for the staged presentation, but it is precisely that, it is staged, expected and the long term impact is low. Pervasive use of narrative involves the creation of sustainable capability across the entire organisation. This paper provides a summary of one of the most useful narrative techniques in this domain: the use of archetypes.

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