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Down to Earth: Gaia Storytelling and the Learning organization
Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen
Malmö University
Anete M. Camille Strand
Aalborg University
Julia Hayden
Gaia Storytelling Lab
Mogens Sparre
Aalborg University
Jens Larsen
OldFriendsIndustries
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Abstract
‘Gaia storytelling’ is used in this paper to get the learning organization (LO) ‘down to
earth’. Following Latour, Gaia is a reorientation from globalized to localized matters of the
world and towards sustainable worldly practice. Gaia is understood through the notion of
critical zones, which foregrounds the local, differentiated, porous and permeable terrestrial
conditions in which life on earth is embedded. Gaia takes the multiplicity of agencies serious
on the expense of global and anthropocentric out-of-this-world-attitude that has dominated the
post-war period. A Gaia LO is understood as part of a gaiagraphy of entangled life cycles of
what Latour calls ‘Terrestrials’. We use storytelling to reconstruct, reconfigure and revitalize
the learning organization to the agencies of Gaia. Gaia storytelling implies perceiving the
learning organization as an assemblage of story practices led by adventurers, explorers, artists,
artisans, craftsmen, poets, writers, seafarers and any other unique creative citizens. Such an
organization sustains and grows through a number of intra-active storytelling cycles that
allow Gaia to shape the organization and in turn allow organizations to partake in the ongoing
co-creation of Gaia. We distinguish five different storytelling cycles, which is vital here: the
contemplation cycle, the creative cycle, the explorative cycle, the theatre cycle and the truth
telling cycle. These five cycles replace the five anthropocentric disciplines of the original LO.
Keywords: storytelling, Gaia, learning organization, critical zone, storytelling cycles
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Introduction
This special issue celebrates the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Fifth
Discipline – The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (LO) (Senge, 1990). Through
coining five different disciplines, LO inspired how organizations can work with learning
systematically in their daily practices. Originally, LO was framed for correcting errors
emerging in traditional organizations (Jørgensen et al., 2019). LO was a learning structure that
would enable organizations to inquire into problems in ways that would lead to for example
single- or double-loop learning (Argyris, 1996). Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that
the ‘errors’ that organizations experience are of a fundamentally different kind than before.
The sustainability challenges require us to rethink how organizations connect their economic
performance with society and nature. Senge et al. (2008) modified LO to make it fit into a
world in which individuals and organizations work together to create a sustainable world.
Their perception of a LO for sustainability however followed the path Senge laid out in 1990.
We suggest, in contrast, that the challenge of sustainability requires radically rethinking LO.
For that purpose, we develop the term Gaia storytelling- The starting point for
rethinking LO is Latour’s idea of facing Gaia (Latour, 2017), which is inspired by Lovelock’s
(1995) Gaia hypothesis of Earth as a living, self-regulating entity. Gaia is for Latour an
alternate attractor to that of globalization and mass consumption. Gaia reorient the human
drive and attention towards the ground; down to earth (Latour, 2018) and demands us to stay
with the trouble (Haraway 2016). Staying with the trouble entails continuous learning cycles
initiated through an awareness and care for the living and dynamic multiple agencies as well
as organic and inorganic matter that we are part of. Such learning cycles, we argue, have to
aligned with what Latour and colleagues call ‘critical zones’ (CZ) (Arènes et al., 2018) and
implies other participatory and citizen-based ways of organizing and learning. CZ
foregrounds the local, differentiated, porous and permeable terrestrial conditions that our life-
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practices are embedded within and disrupts the narrative of same-elsewhere that drives global
market-orientation. CZ thereby also radically reframes what place means for our identities and
practices.
The combination of place, participation and identity is inherent in the five different
learning cycles we propose. Storytelling is embedded in different ways in these cycles.
According to Arendt it is our human condition to rework a sequence of events into a story and
insert ourselves into history (Arendt, 1998; Jørgensen, 2020; Young-Bruehl, 1977).
Storytelling is important for our belonging and rootedness in the world (Jørgensen, 2020).
True storytelling, we argue, furthermore implies being answerable and responsible to the
world. Gaia invites us to take upon us our human condition to act responsibly towards our
terrestrial fellows. Gaia implies a holistic notion of being, togetherness and kinship with other
terrestrials, which goes far beyond the idea of being a subject of an organization. Such
learning cycles are risky and imply collaboration with, instead of exploitation of, the agencies
in the critical zone.
Our research question: How can we reconfigure LO in a Gaia LO? Our answer, Gaia
storytelling, invokes organizing and learning as a moving, material-discursive assemblage that
affords the political engagement and responsibility of unique and emplaced citizens. Gaia
storytelling sets people free, engage them and affords their imagination, fantasy and courage.
Next, we elaborate on the notion of Gaia as an alternative framework to discuss LO. This
leads us towards using Gaia storytelling for reconceptualizing LO into a Gaia LO. We then
debate five different intra-active learning cycles as part of Gaia storytelling practices. On
occasion, we disrupt the reading by giving Gaia a voice to help keeping us grounded.
Gaia as the new, new principle for sustainable organizations
“Our world is not feeling well. Our Mother Earth, who we assume to nourish, cure and protect us, is not
able to fulfil her task much longer. She is out of balance. In the era of the Anthropocene, we human
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beings, the Anthropos, the son of man, claim to have a huge impact on the development of our planet.
Every action we take implies a reaction, which is unpredictable. We are inevitably bound. By today, this
bound between Gaia and us human beings is at stake.” (Princess Gaia aka Julia Hayden).
Organizations are increasingly becoming aware that they have to relate to the
sustainability challenges that have emerged because of the impact of climate changes-
changes that have been brought onto ecological systems by humans (Wright et al., 2018). In
recent years the discussions of what organizations do, should do or can do to respond to the
sustainability challenges have been organized around the 17 UN sustainable development
goals (SDG). Dominant approaches seek to reorient the established system of global
capitalism to respond to the sustainability challenges. McAteer (2019) is a firm believer in
sustainable capitalism and argues that sustainability is to balance profit, people and planet.
Sustainability is thus merged with business thinking through corporate social responsibility
(CSR) (Jørgensen & Svane, 2020).
We suggest instead that sustainability requires a very different approach. Inspired by
Latour’s continuations of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, we suggest that we need to radically
rethink LO for a sustainable future. Gaia belongs for Latour to a vision of politics in which
what he calls the Terrestrial is a new dominant attractor (Latour, 2018, p. 40). The term
Terrestrial is adopted by Latour as an attempt to overcome the duality of human and non-
human agencies and the idea of human superiority. Second, the Terrestrial emphasizes
interdependency of agencies (Gleason, 2019). This follows from an awareness of how life
unfolds through an entanglement of a multiplicity of agencies that lay primarily on the top of
the earth, the CZ. Gaia is the living and organic CZ of human and non-human agents and
organic and inorganic matter that lies, moves and modifies life on earth (Arènes et al., 2018).
Gaia lies between deep earth and solar energy. CZ is for Latour and colleagues a much better
way of comprehending the entangled complexities of life than the image of the blue planet
seen from space.
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“Many of you only see me as the Blue Marble, which you can see from outer space. You call me
Spaceship Earth and I am somehow too big to be steered by my crew, which is you. You are overwhelmed
and seem to forget, that I am much more than what you can see from the orbit, when you become aware
of my 196.9 million square miles of – let me call it – skin”. Looking closer at this layer or skin, it
stretches all the way from the tops of the highest trees down into the deepest layer of soil and rock, right
here around you. This is the so-called critical zone. Depending on how big you humans consider one
critical zone to be, there might be hundreds of millions of them. In these means, I, Gaia, am any Critical
Zone, you can think of. And I am of course the very critical zone you live in” (Princess Gaia aka Julia
Hayden).
‘Gaia is not the Globe’ (Latour, 2016). Thus, we have to leave behind the nature as
universe ontology that according to Latour has governed the Modern era. Gaia and the
Terrestrial is part of a nature as process ontology (Gleason, 2019). Nature is thus not a
context for our action. We, and the organizations, we live and work in, are both nature and are
parts of making the places in which we are born, live, eat, imagine, dream, desire, create and
tell stories. Landscapes, territories, forests, soil, mud, sand, water and the particular flora and
fauna that is part of local and different ‘places’ are both physical conditions for our survival
but also important for our cultural practices and identities. According to Latour, we have
never given Gaia the central position she deserves in politics. That Gaia now becomes the
central actor in politics pushes us ‘down to earth’ (Latour, 2018). We are moved towards this
ground precisely because this ground is not firm and stable anymore.
It is not that Gaia has not always been alive, dynamic and moving. The instability and
dis-equilibrium that Gaia creates is what separates the earth from Mars and all other globes
that we know of (Lovelock, 1995). However, because of human acting into nature, changes
have accelerated to a degree in which we cannot take Gaia for granted anymore. Because of
human violence, beautiful Gaia has been turned into plastic lakes and acidified oceans, skies
made of smog, human bodies filled with antibiotics and pesticides, forests turned into deserts
and so forth. CZ highlights the enormous complexity of entangled agencies that reshape and
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modify life and which is becoming increasingly unstable. Gaia, understood as CZ, is herself
composed of a multiplicity of local, different and entangled CZs, which react differently to
interferences such as global warming, acidification, fracking and so forth. Gaia consists of
cycles, which have some degree of repetitiveness and some degree of change. Some cycles
repeat themselves for several thousands of years while others are very short-lived.
That Gaia has her own agency implies that our Newtonian inspired mechanical world
view does not work anymore. We need to come to terms with the innate aliveness of all
matter of mother earth and our own embeddedness within this aliveness as ‘ordinary critters’
(Bennett, 2010, Haraway, 2008, 2016). Some still believe that we can control Gaia and create
a ‘happy Anthropocene’ (see discussion in Wright et al., 2018). We suggest, that facing Gaia
entails an ontological call for a new, new world (Latour 2016) that involves a new object of
politics captured by the term Terrestrial. In sum, coming down to earth implies recognizing
that this ground has become shaky, unstable and unpredictable (Latour, 2018, pp. 40–43). We
are not outside of Gaia but are living within her and through her. We embody her and changes
her through our actions. As noted by Lovelock, humans are not particular because every
species on the earth modifies and changes its environment (Lovelock, 1995, p. 120). The
point is not that we should stop doing that. Lovelock instead identifies three principles for
living with Gaia, which are important for us as responsible actors.
The most important condition of Gaia is to keep constant conditions for all terrestrial life… This
tendency should be as pre-dominant as it was before man’s arrival on the scene.
Gaia has vital organs at the core as well expendable or redundant one mainly at the periphery. What we
do to our planet may depend on where we do it.
Gaian responses to changes for the worse must obey the rules of cybernetics, where the time constant
and the loop gain are important factors. Thus, the regulation of oxygen has a time constant measured in
thousands of years. By the time it is realized that all is not well and action is taken, inertial drag will
bring things to worse state before an equally slow improvement can set in (Lovelock, 1995, p. 119)
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Gaia storytelling and the learning organization
Storytelling is important for our purposes of shaping a new Gaia LO. For Arendt,
storytelling comprises the ways in which we transform our inner thoughts and emotions and
appear before others (Arendt, 1998, p. 50). With storytelling, Arendt does not refer to a
reflexive self-narrative. Instead, storytelling always happens in between. It is a political act in
which unique people express their motivations, intentions and interests before others
(Jørgensen, 2020). Tassinari et al. (2017) argue that for Arendt storytelling is the only true
political action. It is an important for opening up spaces and creating dialogue,
communication and collective action among people (Arendt, 1998, pp. 184–185; Young-
Bruehl, 1977). Storytelling is enacted in the web of human relations. It is very different from
process of deep thinking, which for Arendt takes place in solitude (Arendt, 2003, pp. 97–98).
Storytelling is important because such appearances are considered the highest activity among
the three human activities that Arendt identified in The Human Condition. The others are
labour—the activities by which we sustain biological life— and work—the activities by
which we create an artificial human world (Arendt, 1998, pp. 7–8).
Thus, for Arendt, storytelling expresses the unfolding of highest form of human life. It
is the activity by which we become reborn in action. Through stories, people confirm their
individual identities as well as communal identities. People confirm their identities as people
who are unique and have unique opinions and talents. Second, through being confirmed as
actors whose actions and opinions matter, rootedness and belonging to people, communities,
organizations, places and nature are confirmed. As a consequence, Jackson (2013, p. 49)
proposes that what is important in storytelling is ‘emplacement’ instead of the usual
anthropocentric term ‘emplotment’. Emplacement highlights the importance of place as
something that includes urban, rural and other man-made material places but also forests, soil,
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fields, rivers, streams, lakes, hills and mountains and other natural places. Because
storytelling is enacted in the spaces between, it incorporates responsibility to both human and
non-human others, to our contemporaries, predecessors and our newcomers. Learning, as a
new beginning in the form of a new transformation or change, relies on such spaces because
they do express the highest forms of human life. Such spaces rely on freedom. The critical
point, and the reason why we need courage and risk taking in such spaces, is that power and
surveillance, along with collective action, also work through practices of visibility (Marquez,
2012). Thus, in spaces of learning, there is always a critical play between private and public
interests as practices and identities are reworked and reconfigured.
Arendt’s notion of storytelling was submitted to what she called the eternal
recurrence, which she saw as the highest principle of being (Arendt, 1998, p. 97). Arendt
however perceived nature as rather passive and repetitive and not as the living entanglement
of multiple agencies (Totschnig, 2017). In contrast, Haraway (2016, p. 10) uses the term
multispecies storytelling to capture how multiple terrestrials, species and agencies
communicate, interact and modify life. This perception expands Arendt’s ideas appearance
and plurality and suggests that the unfolding of life in all its variations and beauty is itself is
an existential condition for all terrestrials. An implication of Gaia’s agency is that
multispecies storytelling and the appearance of terrestrials replaces Arendt’s limited
anthropocentric account of storytelling. Gaia storytelling comprises thus the appearance of
terrestrials and the agencies of these terrestrials in time and space. The appearances of
animals, species, flowers and trees are parts of appearances that disclose life in all its multiple
variations. In organizations, which are parts of the human artifice, people have, of course, to
learn to speak and act on behalf of multiple terrestrials.
Gaia storytelling pose an enormous challenge to LO. It entails a new vision and a new
beginning for LO. Jørgensen et al. argue (2019) that Senge’s LO was a strictly technical
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device for intervening into and optimizing organizations. Jørgensen et al. (2019) argue that a
1st generation LO reflected a traditional notion of conquest that were all too easily adopted by
the post-war-commercial-enterprise-climate story of growth. 2nd generation LO emphasized
competitiveness and performance consistent with the narrative of ‘globalization’. Jørgensen et
al. imagine that a 3rd generation LO incorporates ideas of participation and dialogue and will
be a creative and dynamic space made up by free actors.
Storytelling is important for such a 3rd generation LO. Storytelling is for Arendt
conditioned on freedom. She argues that this is not freedom from all others but that freedom
is linked to the interdependence of all others (Arendt, 1961). Thus, freedom entails
responsibility. Furthermore, freedom is an obligation that needs to be enacted in the spaces
between. According to Arendt, freedom requires deep thinking which can protect us from that
our actions become guided by affect and fear instead of deep feelings of being connected with
oneself and others. Furthermore, freedom is more probable if we have political rights, access
to resources, and are not positioned in what Butler (2006) and Brown (2015) calls precarious
situations. Arendt states that freedom involves the right to have rights (DeGooyer et al.,
2018), which incorporate more than formal rights, but also access to education, culture,
participation in political processes, health care and so forth.
An LO inhabited by Gaia storytellers incorporates a view of its members as citizens of
societies and communities and parts of nature. It entails the perception that before people
become subjects of organizations, they are citizens. For the Gaia LO, such citizenship, kinship
and responsibility are the very foundation. This perception of citizenship and partnership
implies also that we must reimagine LO as a democratic space for participation in which other
than organizational stakes are voiced. Gaia storytelling thus involves deconstructing the
aligned hierarchical LO and reorganize it into networks of responsible groups, communities
and people. In the Gaia LO, the term ‘organization’ is an act of organizing in a network of
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affordances that are collectively reconstructed and reenacted by whole beings such as
craftsmen, artists, writers, teachers, professionals etc. A Gaia LO is based on responsibility
and plurality, not discipline and strategic alignment. Second, a Gaia LO is necessarily aligned
with the life cycles of Gaia and is in fact built on them.
Gaia storytelling connects the sustainable development goals into a holistic network of
relations of all practices. Rockström and Sukhdev (2016) from the Stockholm Resilience
Center have reorganized the SDGs in a way that comes close to our argument above. In their
model, societies and economies are seen as embedded parts of the biosphere, which thus
constitutes the foundation upon which societies, organizations and economies are built. The
important point is not only that the biosphere is our first level of answerability (Jørgensen &
Boje, 2020), but also that we as terrestrial beings are part of that biosphere. The second
societal level comprises a concrete translation of elements that constitute citizenships. Such
citizenship comprises common rights that should be made available to all: food, shelter, clean
water, clean air, education, culture, health care and so forth. The holistic perception of how
the SDGs are related characterizes Gaia LO.
‘A gaiagraphy of Gaia storytelling’
Gaia storytelling entails participation of plural actors and responsibility for the
multiple terrestrials in the present and future. Responsibility can more specifically be defined
as a responsibility for the rebirth of life itself. This rebirth is much more than just survival but
a question of the beauty of appearances. This obligation to Gaia needs not only to be
pervasive part of the learning activities of LO but is actually the very reason why free actors
should organize and participate in LO. Gaia is the anchor for a much more a concrete,
dynamic and complex story of the heterogeneity and responsiveness to life on earth. This
attention to life and its conditions includes a focus of attention on air, water, life on land and
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life below water. It involves the support of citizenship in the form of access to education,
health care, action concerning gender differences and inclusion. The attractors of Gaia and
citizenship are foundational elements of Gaia storytelling, which are the practices by which
we remember, re-connect, re-configure and re-vitalize our belonging and rootedness in the
local CZs of Gaia. True storytelling is a true relationship with Gaia and entails that we as
actors and participants of LO are parts of the cycles of contemporary and vital life-practices of
Gaia and therefore also vital parts of the future becoming of sustainable life-practices from
within the CZ (Boje et al., 2020).
The call to get us down to earth involves a radical re-grounding, which metaphorically
can be captured as making the world flat again. Becoming ‘flatlanders’ implies that each one
us reorient ourselves to the local site of our engagements and how they tangle with Gaia. The
most basic starting point for our actions is this threefold-relation: ‘me/local/gaia’ . No man is
an Island – and every local part is always, already also part of the whole. Such an engagement
entails feeling, sensing, touching and breathing Gaia to imagine how multiple forces and
agencies around, within and through us diffract and refract and give birth to new appearances
(Latour, 2017; Latour, 2018). There is no exterior or uniform principle of Gaia – a flower
becomes from within its entangled state of becoming with Gaia and is thus situated in the
lifecycles of a particular CZ. Such a ‘becoming with’ principle allows LO to entangle its
becoming in alignment with Gaia. Inspired by Sparre and Boje, we can construct a threefold
matrix for a sustainable development that is relating 1) Gaia in the form of the 17 SDG’s, 2)
cooperative partners and organizations and 3) participatory research practices as entangled
relations.
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Figure 1: A threefold matrix for sustainable development (Sparre & Boje, forthcoming).
Sparre’s and Boje’s model bids man, the economy and technology together in a
triangle of objectives organized around participatory action learning: the SDGs, quality of life
and economy. The matrix constitutes a basis for a Gaiagraphy of the Gaia LO. Such
collaboration and conversations cannot be accomplished through monitoring, controlling and
managing learning or through a performative LO. Life and responsibility thrive through
freedom. A Gaia LO sets people free, engages people and acknowledges them as parts of
Gaia. Storytelling is the vital activity by which we participate and emplace ourselves and our
organizations within Gaia.
Below we suggest five different Gaia storytelling cycles that address different kinds of
Gaia learning. Such learning involves reworking our stories of ourselves as well as
reconfiguring the activities we are engaged in. Importantly Gaia learning always connects
mind, soul, body and hand with the terrestrial conditions of CZ. Such Gaia learning is driven
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by free, unique, creative and responsible human beings and citizens. The structure of such an
LO is not fixed and has no boundaries. Instead, a Gaia LO moves, breathes, contracts,
expands and so forth in a living dynamic symbiosis with its natural, material and social
community of relations. The matrix from above constitutes a network framework for
engaging these relations.
The five cycles can be seen as constituting a storyteller’s ambition of replacing the
five disciplines of Senge’s original LO with learning cycles that are more aligned with the
ideas of freedom, citizenship and the responsibilities associated with facing Gaia. We use the
term cycle instead of a circle. A circle is repetitive and runs through a fixed set of stages
before returning to its original state. A cycle has some degree of repetition and some degree of
change. This implies that our cycles may be entangled. All cycles are important and necessary
parts of a Gaia LO but instead of fixating them within a particular sequence, we wish to keep
their relations open. The model below depicts the idea of having these Gaia storytelling cycles
revolve around the matrix of networks-based, symbiotic relations. We have inserted the
biosphere goals to make sure that we are always grounded in biosphere goals, which are our
first level of answerability.
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Figure 2: five storytelling cycles
Five storytelling cycle to create a Gaia Learning Organization
“Living in the moment from deep within, is what we call intrinsic. When we act intrinsically, we act from
within ourselves and follow a deeper purpose — we are inspired and visionary. And in being visionary,
we are deeply rooted in trust. We are imagining the most beautiful of all worlds. We are in resonance
with ourselves, connected or even conciliated with ourselves and our actions and the world around us.
We are acting with the notion of love. Plus, we are actually loving the whole process of being and doing”
(Princess Gaia aka Julia Hayden).
The contemplation cycle
This cycle helps people to connect to the concept or value of Gaia. The contemplation
cycle is a practice of story rework in which the individual sensitizes her situational awareness
in order to discover, sense and embrace the beautiful, the truthful and the just. The art of
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contemplation is here seen as a way of creating a relational awareness of and kinship with all
terrestrials and forces (e.g. Hayden, 2019). In the Gaia LO, contemplation requires
specifically exploring the meaning of water, air, flora and fauna for our physical, spiritual,
cultural and social wellbeing. Contemplating Gaia is to sense Gaia within us, around us and
beyond us.
Approaches to contemplation are any imagined ways of becoming aware of what is
and to prepare oneself for the future. When we are deeply connected to what is in the moment,
we are mindful and aware of who and what is around us. What is, relies on the moment of
resonating and getting in contact with Gaia. Such contemplation is related to mindfulness,
which has become popular in organizations. Contemplation, however, does not imply
purposefulness or being targeted towards a particular result. Answers have to emerge and
mature in their own tempo and without force. The mind has to think its thoughts and we can
do it anywhere, in bright sunlight, in the darkest night, in a crowded train, over lunch or by
the ocean. The only requirement is that we have freedom to allow the mind to think its though
and the body to do its movements. The path towards wisdom has its own rhythm.
The creative cycle
The creative cycle is associated with the art of making. It entails care and compassion
for the material practices in which actors are engaged. Even if such activities might be
performed in a group or a team, they usually take place in privacy. Such activities are
embedded in the activities of the artist, artisan, professional or the craft men, who has a
dedicated, personal relation to both the material involved in the creation and the idea that
drives it. In organizations, they are associated with what Schatzberg (2018) calls
technological practices. He argues that we need to go back to an old understanding of
technology in which it was associated with art before this term was reserved for fine art. Art,
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or mechanical art is for Schatzberg a more appropriate term because technology involves
knowledge, skills and judgment. The practice of making in itself, thus becomes an artful
enterprise instead of being associated with senseless production and consumption.
The art of making embedded in the creative cycle implies more than the artist’s loving
care for the activities she is engaged in. It entails awareness and dedicated companionship
with all the stages in making. Such a creative process is incompatible with specialization and
global division of labor where we lose sight of the whole process. An act of material
storytelling (Strand 2020) - where the materialization of the creative process bares the marks
of the crafting process. The essence of the creative cycle implies we leave the factory floor
and the global supply chain and reorganize the division of labor so that we metaphorically
‘move’ back into the workshop, the atelier or the lab. We need to follow through all the
processes involved in making in order to perfect the material performance and practice that
we associate with making.
The explorative cycle
The explorative cycle seeks to create and explore new stories through experimental
workshops and alternative setups between potentially multiple actors. Tassinari et al (2017)
uses puppet theater and plug social TV to collect and mobilize citizens, students, workers,
business people and public officials to create other stories of the future in the cities of Seraing
and Milan. Strand (2012) uses artifacts, sandboxes and Feng Shui to create new stories and
material practices in a deafness-blindness center in Aalborg. The explorative cycle involves a
staging in which participants are invited to play, co-explore and co-create new material
practices and stories.
The explorative cycle seeks to create and explore new stories through experimental
workshops and alternative setups between potentially multiple actors. Such spaces may be
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both interdisciplinary, intersectional and interorganizational. In such spaces, participants are
touching and are being touched by others. Such spaces are designed to afford new stories
through creating what Arendt calls a space of appearance in which everybody is in principle
‘equal’ in the sense of breaking with ordinary rituals and power relations. The explorative
cycle is linked to Arendt’s (1998, pp. 50, 184–185) original notion of storytelling as a new
beginning that actors initiates by disclosing their intentions and interests before others. True
stories thus always break with existing mindsets in containing something new and in
expressing the actors’ unique, creative and reflexive intentions. In such explorative spaces we
tangle with others and those relationalities are important affordances for new stories as well as
new common horizons. Such spaces are potentially creative if people feel free and dare to
enact their freedom and perform their intentions in front of others.
In the explorative cycle new stories can emerge, be made thicker and mature among
organizational participants. They require courage and openness in that our stories become
subject of dialogue and collective action. In the Gaia LO, the subject of exploration is the
integration of the organization with the critical zone. This highlights the importance of
courage and the vulnerability that participants must accept because we may have to talk about
the meaning of birds, dogs, water, flowers, soils, trees and so forth. In the Gaia LO, the
explorative cycle must give voice to many other non-human voices through stories that can be
very spiritual and emotional.
The theatre cycle
The theatre cycle helps the people in the organization to rehearse and train their
organizational performances. In the theatre cycle we practice new sayings, doings and
performances for an audience comprised of stakeholders. The ancient Greeks and Romans
saw the performance in the theatre as an important political space for creating images and new
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realities. The language of theatre is filled with exciting opportunities to create new insights
and reflection about power, identity, ethics and learning. If roles and dilemmas are played out,
challenges become more real and present. When we stage cases and play them we gain a
different awareness and the phenomenon becomes more comprehendible.
The theatre cycle is different from the explorative cycle in two ways. Firstly, the
theatre cycle is performed according to a manuscript that prescribes roles, actions, dialogues,
interactions and sequences of event that needs to be rehearsed before being performed for a
live audience. In the Gaia LO, this script is antenarrative (Boje, 2001; Boje et al., 2016) in
visualizing a future, which is not yet finished but open for interpretations and new directions.
Furthermore, even if there is a script the enactment of this script is participative and
dialogical. Secondly, the theatre cycle is composed of sequences of events, which are related
to each other, and where each part of the play is being rehearsed. The theatre cycle is a setting
in which Gaia organizing is rehearsed and learned in an embodied fashion. The theatre cycle
is not linear but may involve many parallel processes and loops where each part of the overall
performance is scripted, modified and changed. The participants in the Gaia LO play different
parts as authors, actors, scenographers, designers, engineers, digital tool makers designers and
so forth. The artists, the artisans, the professionals, the practitioners and the craft men are
invited to take part in shaping and creating the full performance. Importantly, the theatre cycle
is organized according to the life cycles of Gaia, which constitute the overall stage in which
the organization must play. Thus, Gaia must be represented in the linguistic and material
artefacts used throughout the theatre cycle in order to always remember and revitalize Gaia in
what the organization is performing for its stakeholders.
The truth telling cycle
19
The truth telling cycle consists of the multiple moments of truth in which the
organization appears before its stakeholders, negotiates its position and mobilizes support for
its actions. The explorative and theatre cycles are about finding and rehearsing new practices
in organizations. The truth telling cycle is the moment of truth in which the practices become
strategic reality for organizations and becomes located in the play between the organizations
and its customers, competitors, suppliers, citizens, banks, employees, NGOs, public
authorities and other members of society. The truth telling cycle has become critical for many
organizations because it focuses attention on how an organization manages its responsibilities.
In the Gaia LO, the focus of attention is on how the organization manages its responsibility to
Gaia. Trust, reliability and integrity are at stake in truth telling activities. We are inspired by
Tamboukou’s (2012) reading of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia. When we speak about truth,
we don’t speak of assertion or correspondence but unhiddenness (Tamboukou, 2012). Being
frank and honest are parts of truth telling activities. Second, truth-telling involves, according
to Tamboukou, risk-taking and speaking on behalf of marginalized voices like Gaia. Finally,
telling the truth is a duty.
From the CSR literature (Vallentin, 2011), we can recognize two untrue narratives for
managing the responsibility to Gaia. Risk management involves protecting the core business
by compliance procedures and training for preventing problems with racism, gender
discrimination, money laundering or pollution. Risk management is a passive way for facing
Gaia. The second untrue narrative is shared value (Porter & Kramer, 2011). This is a strategic
storytelling that aims to create a business on the basis of that this business both provides value
for the company and society. For us, it is however not truthful because business is the core of
the organization, not Gaia. Two other narratives for managing its responsibility are more
aligned with Gaia. The first is an ideological position, where organizations are built upon
sustainability. Embedded in the product or service is a clear political stand point and ideology
20
of being part of creating another life. Such organizations are not built for profit as a first
priority but for co-creating and shaping a good life for the owners and the stakeholders. Such
ideological narratives reflect sustainable entrepreneurship in a Gaia fashion and reflect a
coherent and integrated approach to sustainability. We call the second narrative, that is
aligned with Gaia, an emplacement narrative. The purpose of such strategic storytelling is to
emplace organizations within the critical zones of Gaia. It entails a clear political stand point
of sustainability but, in contrast to the ideological position, emplacement is a matter of re-
storying historical and material relations to the age of Gaia. This strategy is pragmatic because
it acknowledges having a particular history and position, which may imply that the move
towards sustainability is gradual and muddy. Nonetheless, this approach to strategic
storytelling is also integrated, coherent and holistic.
Conclusions
This paper has tried to outline a new beginning for LO called Gaia LO. It is a new
vision in which storytelling is central for recreating our relations to place and to multiple
terrestrial life forms. The path towards a Gaia LO is long and requires courage. We are
convinced however that the celebration of life itself inherent in Gaia LO is what can create a
richer future for man on earth as well as for many other terrestrials. Because our suggestions
are radical, we have deliberately tried to play with another language: Gaia storytelling, the
Terrestrial, appearance, citizenship, learning cycle, theatre, truth telling and so forth. Our
intentions are to energize and motivate by creating a living ethics, and non an ethics of
restraint. We look forward to continue that path with whomever wants to tag along.
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