Narrative Change
How Changing the Story Can Transform Society, Business, and Ourselves
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Texas prosecutors are powerful: in cases where they seek capital punishment, the defendant is sentenced to death over ninety percent of the time. When management professor Hans Hansen joined Texas’s newly formed death penalty defense team to rethink their approach, they faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet while Hansen was working with the office, they won seventy of seventy-one cases by changing the narrative for death penalty defense. To date, they have succeeded in preventing well over one hundred executions—demonstrating the importance of changing the narrative to change our world.
In this book, Hansen offers readers a powerful model for creating significant organizational, social, and institutional change. He unpacks the lessons of the fight to change capital punishment in Texas—juxtaposing life-and-death decisions with the efforts to achieve a cultural shift at Uber. Hansen reveals how narratives shape our everyday lives and how we can construct new narratives to enact positive change. This narrative change model can be used to transform corporate cultures, improve public services, encourage innovation, craft a brand, or even develop your own leadership.
Narrative Change provides an unparalleled window into an innovative model of change while telling powerful stories of a fight against injustice. It reminds us that what matters most for any organization, community, or person is the story we tell about ourselves—and the most effective way to shake things up is by changing the story.
Customer Reviews
great book!
My favorite take always from this book is how many narratives there are in our society and how much we do not realize these narratives are controlling us and our actions. One major take away I have from this book is that we do not always have to follow our societal traditions or norms or have to do things the way that everyone else does things. I can apply this to my future life as breaking out of my glass shell and doing things the way I feel is right for me rather than following everyone else’s footsteps, such as the way I design my home or even plan my wedding. There many lines that stuck out to me while reading this book, but I’d have to say the line “We may not be conscious of the controlling narrative, but it provides us with deeply held, unquestioned ways of thinking and acting. We do not question our own actions; we just assume we are supposed to do things in a particular way. ” stuck out to me a little more than some other because it sounds so deep and is an eye-opening perspective. I think future readers of this book will understand why this line stood out to me as it made me realize how much of my actions are being controlled by narratives when I don’t even realize it.