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Narratives as opposed to stories have a sense of closure to them, a finality where the plot and moral are fully explicated, and it is this singularity of plot, moral, and meaning that concerns Boje. Antenarrative, in the form of stories, exists in a world of multiplicity, which recognizes that numerous diverse stories live within organizations, migrating from place to place, and bumping into one another. The problem with traditional narrative analysis is that it focuses on identifying a single story to characterize an organization and event, thus creating in van Maanen's (1988) terminology a "realist" tale. Similar to Deetz' (1995) notion of discursive closure, narrative creates a totalizing tale of "how the organization is" and does not create the space for stories of dissent and opposition. Antenarrative keeps multiple, often conflicting, stories alive within the organization's discursive environment. For example, Boje's (1995) analysis of Disney adopts an antenarrative approach by using deconstruction to highlight how other stories co-exist with the "official" story regarding Walt Disney's influence in the organization.

Second, antenarrative is more speculative than narrative because it occurs in the flow of experience before narrative closure. Boje (200Ia) explains: "[A]ntenarrative gives attention to the speculative, the ambiguity of sensemaking and guessing as to what is happening in the flow of experience. It answers the question, "what is going on here?" Antenarrative is constituted out of the flow of lived experience, while narrative method is more meta; it is about the storytelling that came before. Narrative is post, a retrospective explanation of story telling's speculative appreciations" (p. 3). Boje (200Ia) plays with the meaning of "ante" as a form of speculation that has to do with gambling, making wagers, and bets. When "ante" is understood in this sense, a story becomes a bet about the kind of sensemaking needed in a situation, and organizational members place bets by constructing stories; yet, a particular story may or may not be useful to create sense in a moment, and losing the bet means the organizational member loses the ability to connect meaningfully to the emerging situation.

Incorporating antenarrative into managerial practice introduces significant differences from the traditional narrative approach to storytelling. Antenarrative requires managers to recognize the multiplicity of stories living and being told in organizations. Just like the myriad of storytellers who emerge after a tragic event "to explain what happened, who done it, why they done it, and what caused whom to do what, and how it will all end" (Boje, 2001b, para 11), there are also multiple storytellers within organizational life, who offer varied and many times conflicting interpretations and accounts of situations. Rather than view stories simply as persuasive tools where managers privilege their own story and impose it on their employees, managers who take antenarrative seriously should acknowledge the diversity of stories lived and told and develop constructive ways of weaving the differing stories together to create new ones.

If storytelling is a collective enterprise, co-creating stories productively depends on the manager's ability both to construct messages that follow another's messages and to generate messages that can be followed by others. Shotter (2000) astutely observes, "[WJe must both be able to 'follow' others in our talk entwined activities, and also, act and speak in way that they can also 'follow.' To do this, to follow another person's utterances, and to grasp how they relate to their activities, we must actively adopt a responsively-expectant attitude toward them. Besides noting the reference of their utterances to the current context, their content, we must also note their point, the changes in that context toward which they 'gesture' in the future" (p. 120). Unlike traditional storytelling where other organizational members become a passive audience for the manager's story, storytelling as a collective activity means other organizational members also have a story to tell and managers need to weave their own and other stories together by following the utterances of others as well as performing utterances that allow others to follow them. Given that organizational life is chaotic, fragmented, and nonlinear, it is more likely for managers to connect to this conversational maelstrom by developing a variety of stories that might allow them to pick up, and work with the fragments of stories within conversation.

The shift to collective story telling suggests a move away from teaching managers to convey their stories in an engaging, enchanting way to motivate employees, toward helping managers discern how best to fit their stories with others in the flow of conversation. This requires managers developing a situated sensibility regarding how to introduce a story into conversation as well as to follow, change, and elaborate the stories of others. Boje (1991, p. 124) hints at this ability in his discussion of terse storytelling, "it is not the fact that the story is terse and abbreviated that counts, it is the fact that the teller picks one aspect to abbreviate ("You know the rest of the story.") and another to accentuate ("It's the same old story, except this time we found them together")." Yet, little research has explored how managers might proactively and collectively tell stories in ways that produce positive change. One opportunity for addressing this issue is to explore how managers use antenarrative to guide their work life. This requires that managers have been trained in and use stories as a way of making sense of their work life. One management consultancy firm that trains managers to use of stories and story making as part of their managerial practice is the Kensington Consultation Centre (KCC) in London.

THE SITE: KENSINGTON CONSULTATION CENTRE

The management of people involves . . . having to interrelate and co-ordinate all the different stories that each person in the organization brings with her/him. This is the nub of the management of people: managers not only having to manage their construction of themselves as managers within the context of the achievement of their own personal goals but also the management of other people's construction of themselves in the workplace in relation to the goals of the organization as well as their own personal goals and circumstances. (KCC MSc student paper)

The preceding epigram highlights a distinctive social constructionist sensibility that construes management as a social activity constructed through communication and involving the coordination of actions, goals, and contexts within a continually emerging human system. This sensibility informs the approach developed by the Kensington Consultation Centre (KCC), a London-based training center for managers, consultants, and family therapists. Established by Co-Principals Peter Lang and Martin Little in 1985, KCC adopts a systemic social constructionist approach, which explores the linguistic aspects of human systems and develops practical theory to create linguistic differences that dissolve problems and facilitate forward movement among persons. KCC's approach has a unique communication flavor as it draws on philosophical treatments of language and meaning as articulated by Wittgenstein (1953), Harre (1986, 1994), Ricoeur (Kearney, 1996), Dewey (Tiles, 1988), and Bateson (1972), as well as contemporary communication theory such as the rhetorical-responsive/ participatory-wholistic approach developed by Shotter (1993, 2000) and Coordinated Management of Meaning Theory (Pearce, 1989; Pearce & Cronen, 1980).

KCC provides managers and consultants training in systemic social constructionist theory and practice through its School of Organization and Management Studies. In affiliation with the University of Sunderland, KCC offers a diploma and Master of Science degree (MSc) in Systemic Organization and Management Studies. The diploma and MSc programs are structured in a modular fashion where participants complete several modules such as Manager as Consultant, Systemic Research Methods, and The Reflexive Manager, as well as a week-long summer residential management workshop over a two-year period. Participants are awarded a Diploma in Systemic Management upon completing the required modules and the written assignments for each module; individuals must complete the specified modules and assignments as well as a 15,000-word dissertation to be awarded the MSc. The written assignments and dissertations are designed for participants to learn from material in their own working context as a means to achieve a relevant integration between theory and practice. During' the 1990s, over 150 people have enrolled in the MSc systemic management course and over 2000 people have participated in systemic management workshops and trainings in the UK and Scandinavia.

The present study focuses on one core practice emphasized in KCC's managerial development programs: systemic story making. An awareness of this practice emerged through my ongoing participation in KCC systemic management summer schools. I attended my first management summer school in 1994 as a participant and have served as a resource person for the last seven summer schools. The significance of this practice to KCC's approach to management became clearer to me as I attended six other workshops in systemic management offered by the Co-Principals of KCC as well as five MSc program modules during a recent university sabbatical.

The research methods for this study are both participatory and ethnographic. It is participatory in the sense that the research project resulted from my ongoing participation in the "KCC network" and that my actions have prompted others within the network to reflect on their understanding of systemic social constructionist theory and practice (see Ashcraft, 1999, Heron & Reason, 1997 for a summary of the qualities of participatory action research). It is ethnographic in the sense that I am interested in the ways that members of the KCC network understand the meanings, interpretations, assumptions, and processes associated with systemic story making. In addition to extensive field notes from summer schools and workshops, several additional sources of information were collected. I downloaded program and course descriptions from the KCC website, obtained KCC marketing materials for the last 10 years, and acquired copies of the systemic management curriculum. I also contacted KCC staff members and tutors directly to locate several conference papers and unpublished manuscripts they had written and collected all articles about managerial practice from Human Systems- a journal published jointly by KCC and the Leeds Family Therapy & Research Centre at the University of Leeds. Finally, I collected all 27 MSc dissertations and projects that were on file at KCC.

My analytic strategy consisted of three stages. First, I began by analyzing the MSc student papers to explore the stories students told about how they lived systemic story making in their managerial practice. Following a close reading of the MSc dissertations and projects, analytic memos for each paper were generated that focused on the way the terms story, systemic story making, and hypothesizing were used in the paper and created a list of queries regarding my curiosity about their use. Second, a description of systemic story making including its assumptions, key concepts, and techniques using iterative inductive methods was constructed (Strauss, 1987). Third, once I felt that my description of the assumptions, key concepts, and techniques associated with systemic story making were internally coherent and exhaustive and the connections among them clear, member checks were used to assess its validity (see Lindlof, 1995, pp. 237-242). Based on the feedback solicited from three members of the KCC network, the description of systemic story making was revised and finalized. I then searched the workshop field notes, conference papers, and published articles, and when appropriate, identified examples and quotations that clearly illustrated and explained the identified concepts and processes associated with systemic story making. These three stages are presented in detail in Appendix A.

CONNECTING MANAGEMENT, STORIES, AND CHANGE

Systemic story creation was initially developed as a tool for therapists and consultants to broaden their ways of working with clients. Lang and McAdam (1995) highlight that helping professionals, such as therapists and consultants, typically have explanations and theories that inform how they relate to their clients. Drawing on Wittgenstein (1953), these explanations and theories may be viewed as having "grammars," rules for meaning and action, which guide how they interpret every action and how they go on in conversation with the client. Clients are also seen as having a unique grammar that informs how they live with others. When therapists and consultants have an impoverished grammar of practice, a limited number of explanations or theories for working with a client, or when they become wed to a single way of working, they are less likely to act in ways that connect with a client's grammar. Entering the grammar of a client is important because positive change is accomplished by working within the grammar of a client, as opposed to colonizing the client's grammar by imposing the therapist's or consultant's grammar.

A systemic story facilitates entering a client's grammar because it is a story that values, respects, and incorporates the differing stories other members in a human system have created. Systemic story creation is a conscious process that gives attention to the unique details of a situation from the perspectives of differing members within a system. Systemic story creation began with the Milan family therapy group's notion of hypothesizing which is a means for therapists to articulate possible connections among communication, context, and meaning within a human system and maintain curiosity while learning about a client (Cecchin, 1987). In the mid-1990s, KCC staff members shifted from using the term "hypothesis" to "systemic story creation" or "systemic story making" because they were concerned that the term "hypothesis" was derived from a discourse of scientific objectivity, where therapists, like scientists, stood apart from the system they were investigating and tested the truthfulness of their hypotheses. The notion of systemic story making or creation foregrounds the poetic dimension of our social worlds, where people are viewed as co-creating their experience with others and the stories they create to guide action may be viewed as more or less aesthetic and useful, not as objective definitive truths.1

Since systemic stories take into account the various voices of participants within a human system, managers are more likely to develop lines of action that connect with the grammar of other organizational members because they have created a story that resonates with the stories of other organizational members. For example, one MSc student talked about how she used systemic story making as way of developing a richer understanding of the reasons why her manager would not provide needed secretarial support to her department. The student created a systemic story that took into account that her manager was very new to the position, did not know very much about the department, and had previously worked in a very hierarchical bureaucratic department within the organization. Based on this story, she recognized that having a conversation where she made arguments for why she required additional secretarial support would be counterproductive because it might threaten the manager's authority by highlighting the manager's lack of knowledge regarding the department (i.e., If you really knew the needs of the department, you wouldn't oppose offering additional secretarial support) and undermining the manager's hierarchical power (i.e., In bureaucracies, lower-level employees do not challenge upper-level manager's decisions). The MSc student connected with the grammar of her manager by framing subsequent conversations as a "helpful exchange of ideas" and adopting a more subordinate position in the conversation by asking questions about her manager's perspective.

Students in all 27 MSc dissertations and projects suggested that managers will be better able to enter the grammar of the people they are working with and coordinate their action with others if they create systemic stories that reflect the detailed complexity and uniqueness of the situation. According to one MSc student, "What one is able to do as a manager, how one is able to put one's construction into operation, is dependent upon the context into which one is acting. The context includes not only what is being managed, what the rules and legitimacies of the situation are, but also who is being managed and the stories they bring with them and how the manager manages her/his self within this set of interactions." Systemic stories should give attention to the unique details of lived experience by engaging the living unity of reasons, feelings, beliefs, and emotions individuals experience. For example, Lang and McAdam (1995) point out that the seemingly innocent act of labeling an experience as either rational or emotional fragments the unity of the experience by framing it as either rational or emotional as opposed as opposed to looking at the complex interplay between emotion and reason as it unfolds in conversation. The more managers pay attention to the unfolding unity comprising situated experience, as opposed to fitting situated experience into universal pre-existing categories, the more likely they are to take actions that pick up and extend the stories and grammars that others are using within a situation.

PERFORMING SYSTEMIC STORY MAKING

While story making may be something that people do all the time to make sense of their unfolding lives, systemic story making is different due to its focus on how people create moments of consciousness to punctuate their lived experience. One KCC staff member described systemic story making as "taking a detour from the flow of experience" whereby persons take an alternative route to reflect on what is emerging among people in conversation. Managers frequently use words like "surprises," "puzzles," "contradictions," "dilemmas," and "resistance" to characterize those interruptions in the flow of experience that trigger systemic story making. Several MSc papers also highlighted the importance of cultivating a style of managerial practice that intentionally creates interruptions in the flow of experience. For example, several managers highlighted how systemic story making became part of their managerial practice when they planned meetings, structured training, and coached/mentored other employees. One manager talked about how he had team members write their observations about their work experience in "reflective diaries" that subsequently became the focus of discussion in team meetings about how to improve the work process.

Performing systemic story making requires a unique set of abilities to create useful and coherent reflections on lived experience. Three distinct abilities seem to be important for creating systemic stories: (1) appreciating connections among stories lived and told, (2) taking one's self into account during the process of story making or self reflexivity, and (3) introducing difference in emerging stories. Table 1 summarizes these three abilities and highlights parallels between these abilities and an antenarrative approach.

Appreciating Connections Among Stories Lived and Told

Systemic stories are created using the "stories lived" and "stories told" regarding experience (Pearce & Pearce, 1998; Pearce, 1994). Stories lived refer to the details of our experiences and actions whereas stories told refer to the descriptions and interpretations that persons create regarding their lived experience. The stories told are particularly important because they influence how managers will relate to others in conversation by affecting how they make sense of their experience and what they see as the pattern of moral compulsions to act in particular ways.

People tell stories . . . about lived episodes . . . [T]hey also bring stories about relationships to various persons, stories about professional commitments, stories about the organization, autobiographical stories, etc. Persons use these stories to make sense of what others are doing and to guide what they themselves do. These stories bear the grammatical abilities of persons. (MSc course handout)

Systemic story making involves appreciating the connections among stories and told. Are there contradictions between the stories we live and the stories we tell about our experience? What are the relationships among the varied stories we can tell about a situation? Do certain stories we tell such as organizational culture or personal identity stories carry more conviction than others?

Systemic story making requires individuals to develop a "multi-verse" of stories to describe situations and to discern which stories are most useful for constructing new meanings and realities. This parallels the antenarrative assumption that organizational life is multiple-numerous stories can be told about events and situations- each creating a different type of sense making activity. Moreover, the speculative nature of antenarrative implies that certain stories will be more useful than others in making sense of situation and connecting meaningfully to the emerging situation. To create this "multiverse" of stories and discern which stories may be most useful at that moment requires two different kinds of abilities. One ability requires a kind divergent thinking where individuals explore multiple stories that connect actions, persons, and context in different ways, while the second ability reflects a form of convergent thinking where individuals determine which stories offer the "best fit" as a means of making sense of and acting into a conversation.

Exploring multiple stories. A frequent theme in the MSc papers is the importance of adopting an irreverent (Cecchin, 1987), curious (Lang & McAdam, 1995), or ironic stance (Leppington, 1991) when making systemic stories. When managers become wed to a single punctuation of an event, they tend to act in ways that confirm certain stories and hypotheses and close off other possibilities for creating new meaning and action. By embracing irreverence, curiosity, and irony as touchstones for conversational practice, managers acknowledge that any telling of a story is inherently partialother perspectives and points of view exist that tell a different story about lived experience. Using stories and hypotheses as a way of becoming inquisitive about a system elaborates the range of possible moves one can make in conversation, "I am freer to ask things developed in one way rather than another without becoming attached to a hypothesis and then finding evidence to support it" (MSc student paper).

KCC has developed several techniques to help managers create systemic stories. A common practice during managerial training workshops is to have participants take different positions for inquiring into and understanding a situation. For example, a rolling role play was conducted among summer school participants where groups of four or five people were given a work team situation involving female managers, one of whom was black.2 The black worker was 32 and the white co-workers were in their 60s. In round-robin fashion, participants went around in their group, spoke in the voice of one of the co-workers, and made a brief statement summarizing their view of the situation (i.e., "As a young black woman, I feel that my co-workers can't relate to my struggles"). The round robin went on for several turns, giving each participant a chance to speak in the voice of several different team members. At the end of the exercise, each group developed a story of what was going in the work team that incorporated all the team members' voices. A variety of systemic stories were created accounting for the situation that used various combinations of gender, race, length of tenure in organization, age, and the like as explanations of the relationships among team members.

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Several of the techniques for generating multiple systemic stories from training events also emerged in the stories of MSc students. For example, one of the techniques that MSc students frequently reference is the domains model. Borrowing from Maturana (Maturana & Varela, 1980; 1987), Lang, Little, and Cronen (1990) suggest that human activity can be conceived as existing in three domains: (1) production-the accomplishment of the task, (2) explanation-the generation of accounts articulating why a system is performing the way it does, and (3) aesthetics-whether actions are being performed in a beautiful or elegant manner. When exploring multiple stories, individuals can use these three domains as resources for generating differing explanations of the situation. For example, a departmental manager in a social service organization used the domains model to determine how to manage a black worker who claimed that other white team members acted in a racist fashion even though the department had vigorously implemented an anti-racist policy. In the domain of production, she created a story regarding her responsibility as manager to implement the anti-racist policy while ensuring a good standard of social work practice and service delivery in her team. In the domain of explanation, she explored the consequences of what might happen if she took particular kinds of actions (i.e., would the white workers leave). In the domain of aesthetics, she wrestled with her personal and professional values she wished to embody such as her belief in respecting all individuals and a commitment to a culture of caring and support. Each domain creates a different set of stories for making sense of the situation. After exploring these different stories, the manager created a systemic story about her work responsibilities, which said that she must keep departmental productivity up while enforcing the anti-racist policy.

A variety of techniques besides the domains model were mentioned for creating and generating systemic stories that explore experience from a variety of perspectives, positions, and angles. For example, some managers created distinct stories about the episode, relationship, organizational culture, their personal and professional life script, and wider societal norms using the Coordinated Management of Meaning hierarchy (Pearce & Cronen, 1980). Others used the notion that organizational insiders and outsiders commission any task and that exploring their stories about what needs to be accomplished is useful. Identifying the individuals or groups who one was accountable to while performing their work may be helpful in generating stories (Lang & McAdam, 2001). Still other managers talked about Stamp's (Rubin, 1998) tripod model of tending, trusting, and tasking, Morgan's (1999) organizational metaphors, and Cronen, Pearce, and Snavely's (1979) conversational typology as techniques for generating multiple stories.

Creating a story of fit. While a variety of stories can be created to punctuate the meaning of lived experience, a systemic story has a particular quality that distinguishes it from other stories. Four criterion seem to be used by managers as they decide among competing systemic stories: (1) specificity, (2) respect and appreciation, (3) actionenabling, and (4) difference.

First, systemic stories should be specific and incorporate the details of the stories lived and told from different positions within a system. During one of the trainingworkshops, a KCC staff member stated, "If we are living in a co-created world, the question for a manager is how to open up a space to improvise in the story. As managers, we want to get episodic material. We tell managers that they need some information but they need to move into the story telling." When managers "move into the storytelling" they enter a world where they talk in detail about characters, chains of actions, plot, setting, and meaning. Storytelling facilitates exploring the specific connections between the pattern of communication in the episode and the surroundingcontext such as personal and professional identities, the relationships among people, organizational norms, and the like.

Second, systemic stories should respect and appreciate persons' positions in the situation. KCC staff and students talk about respecting the unique coherence of a system by articulating stories of perfectedness, "Stories of perfectedness are about how things fit together in the way they do and what are the good reasons people do what they do. Stories of perfectedness are an explanation that connects up the information you have collected . . . You try to connect up things in an effort to respect everyone's position in the system. What is the logic of this particular system? The good reasons for what they are doing?" (KCC staff member). For example, a manager in a social work agency initially created a story that his staff would resist proposed changes in workingpractices designed to cut costs and improve efficiency. To explore what informed this initial stance, he considered the staff's commitment to providing a high standard of service and the social work philosophy of enablement, empowerment, and advocacy for the client. As a result, he reframed the staff's resistance as anxiety to maintain the high standard of service and to continue the staff's roles of empowerment, enablement, and advocacy. The manager has created a systemic story that appreciates the good reasons that staff members are acting in the way they do-they are committed to delivering high-quality service. This means that no staff member is negatively connoted. Creating a systemic story that respected and appreciated the staff members and their actions, moved him to respond to his staff as loyal, concerned people as opposed to troublemakers.

Third, systemic stories should enable managerial action. It is not surprising that in each of the 27 MSc papers, the creation of systemic stories moved managers from a position of being "stuck," they didn't know what to do next, to being able to take constructive action because, "story creation is a means of positioning yourself as means of taking action" (KCC staff member). Systemic story making was used in a variety of contexts such as coaching, making requests for additional resources, decision making, and strategic planning. Common to all these contexts is the belief that it is helpful for managers to create and sustain particular positions in subsequent conversations with their subordinates, peers, upper-level managers, and clients. According to several MSc students, the fundamental question for managers is "What shall I do?" and systemic stories should not only provide useful punctuations of the unique coherence of a situation, but also clues about how to act next.

Fourth, systemic stories should overlap as well as also introduce difference into an existing set of stories. To create change means to work within another person's grammar, which involves both connecting to the person's grammar as well as introducing some difference that elaborates the grammar and open up new possibilities. Take the following example:

Over a period of 24 hours three nurses came to see me about what they viewed as "serious problem with the management of one of their patients.". . . all of the nurses told similar stories about how a young male patient and his girlfriend were "withdrawn" and "very private" and appeared "not to be coping to what was happening." They all said they could not get through to either of them. They all felt "stressed" about this and also felt "helpless." They felt they did not have anything to offer. They wondered if I could help . . . I was asked if I would go and see the patient and his family.

I declined to go and see the patient or his family and chose to see the clinical ward sister who had been one of the nurses who had come to see me. I hypothesized that if I could enable her to consider the situation from more of "a meta position," this could enable her in turn to help her staff. I hypothesized that if I got involved in this situation one possible "reflexive effect" would be that the story told could be "this situation really is a problem, Shirley has got involved!" I therefore considered "the art of the nudge," "What is the smallest thing that I can do that will make a difference?" (MSc student paper)

The story characterizing the situation is a story of managerial responsibility where managers should provide assistance to staff when requested. Yet, honoring the request and taking action directly with the family would sustain a problematic pattern that diminished the nurse's ability to manage challenging situations. The manager connected to the story of managerial responsibility by offering assistance but simultaneously introduced a difference by nudging the nurse toward autonomy and self management rather than comply with the request to meet the family.

Self Reflexwity

An antenarrative approach emphasizes the rich diversity of ways to story organizational experience and recognizes that story making is a collective process among organizational members. While an antenarrative approach recognizes that organizational members are active participants in the co-construction of stories, it does not explicitly address the issue of the consciousness of organizational members as they co-construct stories with one another. Systemic story making directly acknowledges the role of self reflexivity in the story making process. Self reflexivity involves appreciating that your participation in a conversation shapes the way others coordinate their actions in conversation and the kinds of emotions, feelings, and attitudes that get constructed. "All stories told, are told from a perspective and any manager blind to the perspective s/he brings to the sets of interactions interrupts the learning to be gained" (MSc student paper). The importance of self reflexivity is emphasized in many of the managerial training events offered by KCC, "What managers need to do is develop self reflexivity so they can criticize the lens they bring to the situation. What contexts do you act into and out of? How does this influence your analysis?" (KCC staff member). Managers are not neutral third-party observers to experience; rather, they actively participate in its construction, which requires them to pay attention to the consciousness of their management and the management of their consciousness (MSc student paper).

Creating self reflexivity moves managers to develop strategies for maintaining a critical reflective distance from the unfolding experience. Managers describe the way they create the space to become aware of their position within a system using a variety of metaphors. For example, one manager talked about getting into her "mental helicopter" so she could observe herself reflexively from the domains of production, explanation, and aesthetics. Another manager likened the process of creating self reflexivity to being a "small foreigner," an outsider that pays close attention to how his/her actions are perceived by others while another manager used a war metaphor and talked about "retreating from the hand-to-hand combat in order to take snapshots of myself managing in relation to others." Despite the diversity of images and metaphors that MSc students use to create self reflexivity, all the images provide a means for students to create pictures of their place in the system.

Creating a sense of self reflexivity involves cultivating an awareness of actionconsequence linkages. For example, one manager talked about he regularly took the time to consider the repercussions of his words on the work team. The result was rather than buy into the team's negative attributions about "inconsistency" in upper management behavior, he broke the cycle of negativity by viewing changes in behavior as being responsive to changing circumstances. This subsequently changed the tenor of the interaction between him and his senior manager from being adversarial to being more understanding of the complex environment upper management was engaging. Recognizing action-consequence linkages is an ongoing process, "I have learned that there is no time when I am not managing either myself, my Managers or other Staff. . . On the basis of observing myself in action in the context of the workplace the links between these actions and their consequences become more visible" (MSc student paper).

Self reflexivity and systemic stories mutually influence each other. As individuals tell more varied systemic stories, they develop self reflexivity by becoming more aware of the various ways their behavior might be understood as influencing the system. At the same time, when managers make a commitment to becoming self reflexive, the systemic stories they create position themselves as an active contributing character in a story that interacts with other characters. The interaction between self reflexivity and systemic stories creates an interruption in the flow of experience for managers to reflect on their existing role in a system and to restory their experience. One manager explained it in the following manner, "Taking one step back to observe my own behavior in context opened up views and possibilities that were unavailable to me as an enmeshed participant. . . From my new vantage point I saw myself flying by the seat of my pants with all the skill of a kamikaze pilot. I construed the determination which I courted disaster as a self-destructive expression of loyalty" (MSc student paper). Telling the story of being a "kamikaze" ironically reduced the manager's insecurity about managing multiple projects with tight deadlines. he recognized that by figuratively "killing" himself to achieve his deadlines on multiple projects, he continually lived the role of "kamikaze." Once he recognized the consequences of telling this particular story, he began living a new pattern of communication with others by developing strategies to renegotiate project deadlines and responsibilities.

Introducing Difference in Emerging Stories

Boje's (2001a) notion of antenarrative emphasizes the collective nature of story telling. Each participant in a conversation has the opportunity to contribute a piece to the emerging story, to introduce new plotlines, and to create plot twists that elaborate the story in new ways. The idea that stories can emerge in different ways connects the Tamara-like quality of stories with the ways that organizational members proactively introduce difference into emerging story lines.

One of the purposes of systemic story making is to create difference within the lived experience of people-both in terms of the approach one takes when relating to another as well as the overall pattern of conversation that is created between persons. The primary way that difference is co-created among persons is through systemic questioning and offering reflections. Questions are more than information collecting devices, they are information generating and distinction-producing devices that introduce different connections into the stories lived and told. Questioning makes new connections among the stories people live and tell that introduces new details in the flow of experience from which new systemic stories may be made. Similarly offering reflections, possible descriptions of what the experience means, also provides persons additional conversational resources to make new connections and restory one's experience. The techniques of systemic interviewing (Tomm, 1988) and offering reflections (Anderson, 1990) have been covered extensively in the therapeutic literature.3 For purposes of this essay, I lift up several examples of how systemic questioning and reflections may be used to create new systemic stories.

One of the MSc students reported an instance where his senior level manager had decided to take a position in another department within the organization, but wanted to stay on till some difficulties with the present department were sorted. The dilemma facing the manager was this:

How can I tell this man that his generous offer is not going to be helpful without negatively connoting him and further disempowering him through what was left of his stay? . . . I found that this format of [circular] questioning rescued him from the potential chaos of overwhelming information and enabled him to make decisions and act. The following are some of the questions I asked: Who would miss you most if you left? What differences will there be after you leave? Who would be the least/most likely to gain from your staying? Which people in your new team are most/least likely to be upset if you delay arriving?

The manager began to see more clearly his position in the organization and with it the responsibilities he needed to exercise (i.e., I should not create extra anxiety for those who live and work in the unit by being unable to fix a leaving date). He began to consider future possibilities as opposed to present restrictions (how can I leave with the unit in such turmoil). He began to see that the unit turmoil was to some extent mirrored by his own position and that future uncertainty (even if it was his leaving) was likely to create more stability than the present confusion.

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The MSc student had created a systemic story where the senior level manager perceived staying as an "act of generosity" to the department and that MSc student's position was to create a situation where the senior level manager could reflect on the consequences of his actions. Using this story of generosity, the MSc student introduced differences into the story by asking questions that explored what would change once the manager left the department, and how members of the department he was moving to would view his "act of generosity." These questions elaborated the story of generosity by creating new connections, which moved the senior level manager to reconsider his decision to stay and simultaneously created a position for the MSc student to find ways to help the senior level manager make a smooth transition.

To create differences within lived experience, managers also reported creating reflections by asking questions or offering reflections during conversations in order to position others as observers to their experience. Several managers asked reflecting questions to get people to take an observer position to their lived experience. For example, in a social work organization, one MSc student asked her staff group, "If we have to share with clients decisions considering cost as well as service provision, what do you think might happen?" This hypothetical question placed staff members in an observing position to their own experience by asking them to reflect on the consequences of modifying the kind of information they provide to clients. In addition to questions, others created reflecting positions by using techniques such as reflective diaries and fishbowls where workers were asked to offer observations regarding what they thought was occurring and why.

One of the most interesting techniques for fostering reflection was sharing the systemic story that managers had created about the situation with their colleagues or work team. For example, several of the MSc papers contained diagrams of "strange loops," cyclical patterns of behavior that create feelings of being in a vicious circle or double binds, regarding a situation experienced by a student (Cronen, Johnson, & Lannamann, 1982). This is not surprising as many of the KCC workshops teach participants how to construct "strange loops" as a means of understanding situations where individuals feel stuck or perceive a lack of forward progress. Moreover, the idea that showing members of the human system the "strange loop" could create forward movement by making them aware of the pattern of behavior was introduced in many of the training workshops and emerged in many of the student dissertations and papers. Many managers talked about how sharing the "strange loop" with team members created a reflective position where the entire team could think about whether this description resonated with their experience.

CONCLUSION

Systemic story making fits many of the qualities we might associate with antenarrative managerial practice. First, it acknowledges that a variety of stories may be told about organizational life and that they may be connected together in numerous ways. Much like the play Tamara where multiple possible story lines exist depending on what characters are followed, managers also create multiple systemic stories depending on how they fit various linguistic fragments together. Second, systemic story making has a collective flavor as managers intentionally incorporate the multiple voices of others into the story they use to make sense of a human system and ask questions and offer reflections during conversation that contribute to the collective story making among organizational members. Third, systemic stories are speculative in nature, a bet that this one way of telling a story about a situation may be useful for fostering change. "When you think that you have understood something, keep in mind that this 'understanding' is just for a moment" (MSc student paper). Systemic story making fits with Czarniawska's (1997) observation that creating stories within organizational experience is more like a quest than a search, "A quest, unlike a search, never ends; it alternates between striving for resolution and immediate relaunching, between the certainty required for action and the demolition of certainty that results from reflection, between the very human dreams of sitting still and moving forward fast" (p. 160).

Systemic story making takes antenarrative theory beyond simply describing the presence of various stories and their interconnections within a human system, by developing an affirmative approach to social change that focuses our attention on stories of "perfectedness" and the role of inquiry. Managers move away from a position of critique to curiosity when creating stories of "perfectedness" because they respect the good reasons that people act the way that they do. This stance is in direct to contrast to critical approaches to organizational communication and management that involve unmasking the ways that managers use power and domination to oppress others in the workplace (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). When we move to a critical stance as opposed to a respectful and curious stance, it is much more likely that we will create stories about our organizational experience that contain villains, scoundrels, desperados, criminals and heavies. Such stories, unfortunately, are likely to lead us to disrespect, devalue, and act contemptuously toward those individuals, making it more difficult to create change.

Adopting a respectful and curious position about the "perfectedness" of situations helps us look for resources from which to construct affirmative change. Cecchin (1987) observes that each system has its own operating logic that is neither "good nor bad, right nor wrong. It is simply operative" and managers need to respect the integrity of the system (p. 408). When managers move to a position of respect and curiosity, they foster change by valuing the contributions of others and working with them to create and sustain the collective resources available within a system as opposed to adopting a morally superior position and instructing others in what changes are needed and how to perform them. Managers working from a position of respect and curiosity notice what is working well within a system and use that as the basis for fostering change. Drawing on the notion from appreciative inquiry that there is always something working well within a system which gives it life (Cooperrider, Sorensen, Whitney, & Yaeger, 2001; Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999; Srivstava & Cooperrider, 1999), systemic story making elaborates the affirmative core of experience by creating multiple stories that reflect the life-generating forces within a system, each offering a unique pathway to the future.

Systemic story making also extends antenarrative theory by directing our attention to the reflexive relationship between stories of "perfectedness" and inquiry. Keeping our curiosity alive through the continual creation of systemic stories allows managers to ask more varied questions and offer diverse reflections about a system during conversation. The diversity of questions we ask and the reflections we offer broaden and deepen the new connections and differences we introduce during conversation that informs our subsequent systemic story making. Systemic questions and reflections are not asked or offered to simply state what the system is, its state of being; rather, they are offered to highlight new possibilities for becoming by challenging the existing set of stories guiding people. Challenging our own stories and the stories of others through systemic questioning and reflecting helps maintain our delight in articulating multiple stories and developing different options for meaning and action.

Systemic story making offers a practical approach for managers to make sense of their organizational experience and engage others. Systemic stories provide a type of "narrative rationality" (Browning, 1992) that allow managers to determine what kinds of action need to be performed. Since they are constructed using the unique details and characteristics of the human system that is being engaged at a particular moment in time, they facilitate managers being in touch with the "eventness" of the situation-the distinctive qualities that make it a particular kind of living unity (Shotter, 2000). Cultivating a form of rationality that pays attention to the uniqueness of context facilitates managers acting in ways that are situated within, not imposed upon, the emerging flow of experience. Rather than be guided by general decontextualized injunctions such