Stories within a story: parables from “The New Zealand Experiment”

Organizations are immersed in their myths and stories which they proclaim through their annual reports, budgets and other formal and informal communications and enact through their “biography”. These stories are seen as “stories within a story”. Organizational stories are governed by a dominant myth that bounds and constrains the context and content of the organizational learning. Argues that myths are founded in paradox. Story types that challenge the myth (parable above all) surface the assumptions underlying the paradox, leading to a higher level of learning or consciousness and, ultimately, a new myth. Examines the dominant business myth within recent (post‐1984) New Zealand experience, a period of radical restructuring, called internationally “The New Zealand Experiment”. From this repetoire of stories, several parables are chosen which demonstrate the role of parable in perplexing paradox, thereby generating new and surprising learning. Suggests that there exist “peoples of paradox”, communities of place and practice, operating out of alternate myths, with the capacity to enlarge the learning/consciousness space, and to develop higher levels of learning, or “third‐loop learning”. The challenge for organizational learning and research is to integrate insights from the study of narrative and organizational learning to better understand how this higher consciousness can be fostered. This is the territory in which the quantum leaps for business will take place.