Turning unhappy endings into stories of power: grief and forgiveness in organizations

This workshop explores the difficult experiences of grief in organizations. We will explore both the story of power and the power of story in situations of loss, defeat and disappointment; and look for ways to overcome these difficult experiences as a community and as individuals.

What doesn't kill us, doesn't always make us stronger; if we do not find ways to recover, it might even make us weaker and less equipped to cope with adversity. We run from grief and forgiveness and have difficulty letting go, because in organizations grief mostly remains quiet, unseen and denied. Difficult experiences, defeats and losses might lead to a feeling of powerlessness and smallness, they might impact our self-worth and our trust in other people, especially those in power.In the workshop we will use storytelling and storylistening techniques to step into our power even when we need to go through grief.

In organizations, grief often isn't tangible. It's not necessarily about a loss in the »real world«, it might be about a loss of an idea, a dream, an ideal, a perception – a loss of a story we believed in and built our world around. Grief is also about longing and yearning for something we cannot have or we might never get. In situations of grief over ideas we have about power we long for somebody powerful to take care of us and protect us, we also feel lost and out of control. Grief is also a big part of forgiveness.

For forgiveness to happen, something has to die. In organizations, what has to die is the idea of who we were as an organizations. The old story needs to die and be buried before the hew story can be born.We might use different storytelling techniques to explore; participants will get the opportunity to explore their own situations of grief and forgiveness at work (with an emphasis on boundaries and not opening what we cannot close within the 90 minutes), we might discuss a case-study of a client, and use action based techniques of storytelling to bring about new endings to difficult stories.

Tough times: how to look up when you´re face down

If we are brave enough often enough, we will fail. When we strive for something that matters to us, the only certainty is that we will face adversity, fear and failure. Every story worth telling has difficult parts in it. This is the part of story we very often leave out, try to forget and deny as soon as we get out of it. And yet, this is the part where the magic happens – our failure and our crisis is a start of a revolution. To re-author our future, the first and necessary step is to own the hard parts of our story.

We will dive into the Rising Strong™ process, developed by the researcher/storyteller dr. Brené Brown. People as story-making animals will, in the absence of data, inevitably make up stories. When times are tough, the stories we make up will either keep us down or support us in rising stronger. In the process of rising strong, we go through three steps that correspond to the Hero's Journey. Act 1 is the reckoning, where we get curious about our emotions when we get triggered. Act 2 is the rumble, where we really dive into the meaning behind our SFD (shitty first draft) of the stories we make up. This is the hard part, facing the challenge and overcoming the crisis. What used to work does not work anymore and the rumble requires that we change. Act 3 is the revolution. We take the learnings from our story and let the process become practice. We have owned our story and now hold the pen to write the ending.

The Rising Strong™ process can be applied to anything from seeing our boss frown to a major business loss, from failing a deadline to mass lay-offs, from a hurtful comment of our spouse to dealing with death of a loved one. The process is the same.