About PNI
What is PNI?
Why stories?
Why story listening?
What is PNI good for?
When is PNI useful?
Some aha moments?
What is PNI?
Participatory Narrative Inquiry
—
that's PNI —
is a marriage of two things. One is Narrative Inquiry, which is an academic field where researchers go out, talk to people, gather their stories (in interviews, usually), and then take them back to their researcher lairs and do stuff with them, and then they write reports and books and things, and the original people never get to see their stories again. Which is fine! That sort of research has been done for a very long time, and it's very useful. So that's half of it. The other half is what's called Participatory Action Research, or just Action Research,
in which groups of people come together to make positive change to make things better. Those two things are married in Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
When I started thinking of switching from animals to people [I was once an ethologist], I discovered Action Research and said, that's the only way to work with people. Because when you work with people, you can't just study them, because if you study them you change them. And so if you're changing people, you might as well change them in a good way, and you might as well work with them to figure out what they should be doing.
So I got very excited about that. And I read a lot about narratology and narrative inquiry and narrative analysis and all that. And then it just became obvious to me that these things [NI and PAR] needed each other. Then, over the course of many years, working with a lot of different collaborators, this work just formed itself.
Why stories?
[The reason] why anyone should be interested in stories is that it's one of the most fascinating and useful aspects of human social behavior. We negotiate meaning with each other, and we communicate with each other, using stories. We recount our experiences, and we make sense of what's been going on, and we account for our experiences. It's used for accountability. Since I was very interested in social behavior [in my prior work in ethology], this became fascinating to me.
If you want to help people do things together and be social together, cooperate, get along with each other, pursue common goals, this is one of the things you need to know about, because it is one of the ways in which human society works. And everyone is involved in it. There's almost no one on this planet who doesn't ever tell a story. It's deep down in our social DNA as a species. So it's really worth paying attention to, because you can get a lot out of working with it.
Why story listening?
Because we have become so accustomed to seeing that stories are movies and TV and books and newspapers and news programs, we've kind of forgotten the importance of listening and how much can be done by listening. How much you can learn. And when people are telling stories back and forth, that exchange is much more fruitful than just the telling.
And so when you pay attention to the listening, you actually reap benefits because you're counterbalancing a lack. You're filling a hole that affects every community, every family, every organization. That kind of brings back something that we still need. And that's why I think paying attention to story listening is really useful.
What is PNI good for?
I've worked on a lot of projects having to do with
—
in organizations, say, you have retention, employee satisfaction, you have customer satisfaction, you have working together, teamwork, collaboration, how are we getting along with —
cultural issues within the organizations. And then in communities, you have conflicts, you have —
just people getting along. You have decision making, people trying to come to some kind of consensus on what we should do next, listening to each other, trying to find a way forward past obstacles. And then there are larger levels having to do with, like, in our country, what do we want to do? What do our citizens want? How do we make our government responsive to its citizens? How do we get people not just filling in forms with their preferences, but actually participating in finding new solutions? So any kind of thing in which that's going on: that's what people are using this for.
When is PNI useful?
One of the reasons that we tell stories to each other and that we listen to each other's stories is that they are a negotiation device. So we use them to sort of come to terms with each other and get along and live together, right? So any situation in which people need to work things out together is a good situation to use story work for. So in those situations, people need to talk about what they believe, what they value, what they don't value, what matters to them, what doesn't matter to them, what their feelings are, what frightens them, what they have hopes for. And there are so many different situations in families and groups
—
work groups —
communities and organizations where people need to work out those things.And of course people can talk. There's all kinds of conversational techniques. And stories is one of them.
Trading stories, talking through stories, examining stories, playing with stories is one of the ways that you can do that.
Some aha moments?
So there's kind of three categories of aha moments that I see people have in projects. And I'm sure there's more, but these are three that come to mind.
- One is the curtain is lifted. So people think they understand a topic or an issue. Then they go through the stories and work with the stories, and they say, "Oh, it's not what we thought. It's this thing, this other thing that we weren't paying attention to. And now we understand what's really happening." It's like the curtain has opened, and we can see reality better. Something has been removed.
- The second one I can think of is like a Tardis. It's bigger on the inside than the outside. And in fact, actually, the Tardis from Doctor Who is actually a motif that has occurred many many times throughout old folk tales. And this idea of entering into something that is bigger than you thought it was goes back thousands of years. But anyway, this reaction, or this moment, is where you think you understand an issue or a topic, but once you get into it, and you're working with the stories and with people's actual experiences and their feelings about them, you discover that there's so much more to it than you realized. And then you understand it at a deeper level.
- And then the third aha moment that I've often seen is similar to the dream where you suddenly find a new room in your house, and that room is beautiful, and it has all these other doorways in it that lead to more rooms, and it's exciting. And when that happens in projects, it's that people say, "Oh, this isn't impossible. There's these other options we hadn't considered. What if we tried this? What if we made an experiment with this?" You know, "This might work." And then they get new inspiration to try new things. And often that happens when their original idea is, "Why should we even bother? We already know everything about this." And so they learn new things and they say, "Oh, wow, let's try this." So the energy that comes from that is kind of the most important part.
Other ways to learn about PNI
Taking a PNI Practicum course is only one way to learn about Participatory Narrative Inquiry. Here are some other ways.
Have a question I didn't answer? Send me an email at cfkurtz@cfkurtz.com.