What is storytelling?

Storytelling captures the ways in which people rework a chronological sequence of events into a story and insert themselves into history. Storytelling is agency. It is to give the voice to the people and is beyond power, institutional policies, discourses and management programs.  In storytelling we allow actors with face, unique opinions, feelings and emotions speak. Functionaries, representatives and followers are not storytellers. With storytelling we appeal to the conscious creativity and actions through which citizens create and shape stories as responsible and answerable members of communities and societies.

What is Gaia storytelling?

Gaia storytellling is a rediscovery of the ancient wisdom of place. It implies understanding how storytelling emerges from places: how landscapes, lakes, streams, hills, forests and mountains connect with traditions, stories, practices and identities. A methodology of Gaia storytelling employs practical experiences embedded in places to rework our relations to place in a sustainable way. Modern life conditions have alienated us from local places in favor of globalization. Gaia storytelling implies rediscovering places as well as ourselves. Gaia storytelling in organizations connects organizations with places and are built from those places.

Read more about Gaia storytelling in our recent article “Down to Earth: Gaia Storytelling and the Learning” published in The Learning Organization. Below is a short summary of the text:

“‘Gaia storytelling’ is used in this paper to get the learning organization (LO) ‘down to earth’. Following Latour, Gaia is a reorientation from globalized to localized matters of the world and towards sustainable worldly practice. Gaia is understood through the notion of critical zones, which foregrounds the local, differentiated, porous and permeable terrestrial conditions in which life on earth is embedded. Gaia takes the multiplicity of agencies serious on the expense of global and anthropocentric out-of-this-world-attitude that has dominated the post-war period. A Gaia LO is understood as part of a gaiagraphy of entangled life cycles of what Latour calls ‘Terrestrials’. We use storytelling to reconstruct, reconfigure and revitalize the learning organization to the agencies of Gaia. Gaia storytelling implies perceiving the learning organization as an assemblage of story practices led by adventurers, explorers, artists, artisans, craftsmen, poets, writers, seafarers and any other unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through a number of intra-active storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape the organization and in turn allow organizations to partake in the ongoing co-creation of Gaia. We distinguish five different storytelling cycles, which is vital here: the contemplation cycle, the creative cycle, the explorative cycle, the theatre cycle and the truth telling cycle. These five cycles replace the five anthropocentric disciplines of the original LO.”