Narrative Change: How Changing the Story Can Transform Society, Business, and Ourselves

Hans Hansen

Jul 2020 · Columbia University Press

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

This book explains the challenges and struggles of implementing narrative change. Everyday we go through routines that we consider narratives. This book gives you insight on how to recognize, change, and implement new narratives into your life. I would recommend this book if you want to change narratives in your personal or professional life.

About the author

Hans Hansen is associate professor of management in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, where he is also the director of the Center for Innovative Organizations, and an Embrey Human Rights Fellow at Southern Methodist University. He is coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organization (2008).