What Happened? – Developing ability in reflexive narrative

Pela sexta vez no Brasil, a professora e Fellow do Schumacher College e da Escola Schumacher Brasil, Patricia Shaw estará em São Paulo compartilhando sua experiência e prática durante o workshop ‘What happened? Developing ability in reflexive narrative’.

“Tell me a story” – a child begs a parent and listens to the magic that unfolds as someone makes a shape emerge and move through the messy, fluid multiplicities of human experience. Children are drawn into the complex ways of being a person in their world with stories heard and stories told.

As adults we continue to use our capacity for narrative ways of making sense. We do so to sustain identities, illuminate histories, change our own and each other’s minds, make next steps seem sensible or foolish or even dangerous. We do this all the time, but in this workshop we will ask what is involved in bringing a honed sensibility and consciousness to this capacity. When does ‘telling a story” into a public realm really matter politically? It matters when something striking happens that sends ripples of responses through a community, an organization, a neighborhood, the media… We can say a ‘critical incident’ in the life of this web of relations has occurred, disturbing existing stabilities and opening the possibility for change…and with this movement comes all the feelings of risk, hope and anxiety ….. Acting into such a situation ‘reflexively’ is what this workshop is all about.

We will start with an example of such a critical incident and unfold ‘live’, with some of the protagonists, a story of what happened. We will use this to understand what makes a narrative ‘reflexive’ and we will surface and explore together the many issues of a political and ethical nature which are entangled in this activity. From here participants can bring a heightened attention to exploring their own examples.

SOBRE PATRICIA
Patricia Shaw é Fellow e professora da Schumacher College, e faz parte do conselho da Escola Schumacher Brasil. É professora convidada na Copenhagen Business School, na Dinamarca e professora visitante na Escola de Negócios da Universidade de Hertfordshire, onde ajudou a fundar um doutorado profissional com uma abordagem da complexidade em mudança organizacional. Tem mais de 30 anos como consultora em diversas organizações, tendo contribuído para uma prática de consultoria renovada pelas ideias das ciências da complexidade. Patricia é autora dos livros Changing Conversations in Organisations (2002) e Working Live: Spontaneity, Risk and Improvisation in Organisational Change (2006), ambos publicados pela Routledge.