Author:

Christopher Myers – Johns Hopkins University

Interviewers:

Teddy Carter – University of Alberta

Meenal Banga – University of Texas at Austin

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211058426

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• What inspired you to investigate storytelling as a tool for vicarious learning among the air transport crews?

This one started out inductively. I had made arrangements to go and observe in this context. I knew I was generally interested in some of the questions around their knowledge and expertise. I thought it might be more about mentoring or even leadership. But when I got into the site it became apparent that what was jumping out and happening in a very pronounced way was this storytelling that the crews were engaged in. It fed into this conceptual puzzle that was emerging as I went into the context – the idea that everything they were doing shouldn’t work from the understanding that we had of learning processes and organizations. They didn’t segment tasks based on people’s expertise, they didn’t have a ton of opportunities to interact with large groups of their colleagues or gain immediate feedback or reaction to work that they were doing, and they were distributed geographically and across time in terms of the shifts that they were working. The patients that they were called on to treat were non-routine.

So, everything about it was puzzling from my read of the literature. The stories started speaking to me as a way that they were navigating around some of these tensions. Pretty early on in the observations, that just started coming up again, and again. I decided to focus in on those storytelling practices as a way to understand how they were navigating these tensions of their work.

• How far along in this inductive process did these storytelling practices start standing out to you?

This actually started as part of coursework that I was doing. I had done an initial foray into the site to familiarize myself a little bit. Probably in the first week or two of more formally observing their practices, this really started to stand out and was coming up again, and again, and the notes that I was taking, and the things that I was observing, and as I was bouncing back and forth with others, who are doing this field methods course, you know, really started to emerge as something that was potentially quite novel and interesting, from a literature standpoint. And so I focused in on that pretty quickly. I tried to stay open throughout but that was really what was exciting in the context.

• So this began during your PhD coursework?

It did. This has been a longtime project. So it started midway through my second year in the doctoral program, and then grew into part of my dissertation, and then kind of spun out into the article.

• What led you to focus on specific elements of story performance such as the location, and triggers of storytelling interactions? Was there a specific moment that you figured that this is what you needed to zero down on?

Yeah, this came from that iteration between literature and context. If you look at classic studies of storytelling and organizations, you take Orr’s work on the Xerox repair technicians, they just sort of took apart the Xerox machine sat in front of it and told stories until they fixed it. And so, as I queued in on stories, I remember thinking, “oh, this will be great, because they’ll be telling the stories in the helicopter, and that might even get recorded because everybody’s wearing a microphone. This will make my data collection really easy, because they’ll all get recorded”. And then I got there, and that was the time when they told stories the least. Going back to the literature, this was a bit of a puzzle. They weren’t doing it the same way that we’ve seen people do it in other contexts.

I started to try to pay attention more it not being the obvious answer of when we’re performing the task, we’re telling the stories. So when is it? And I started noticing things like there was one physical location right inside the helipad doors, where people would stop and tell stories all the time. So what was it about that location? It was when we would just sit. A lot of these air medical team shifts, there would be a long stretch of silence, or people just working independently on computers, especially overnight. But then what would make them suddenly perk up and start telling a story or interacting? I tried to start documenting and noting what these things were that were kicking off the storytelling interactions. It seemed like that was something that was happening very differently from our existing understanding.

• Were there any challenges or obstacles that you encountered during the data collection process that you did not anticipate? If so, how did you address them?

Field work is constantly unpredictable. This setting in particular was very unpredictable. There were some pure logistical challenges of learning the context and learning the terminology. It took a while for me to fully understand all the words that people were saying about things because you’ve got all of the medical terminology plus all of the aviation terminology.

Some of the things that made it an unpredictable context also made it unpredictable for doing research. Sometimes shifts would be ten to twelve hours of sitting around. Other times, you might not get back until six or eight hours after the shift group was supposed to end, because you got called out for a flight late in the shift. Managing that was interesting.

I would say that the biggest challenge in some ways was that what I was studying was this inherently rare phenomenon of a team member taking a lesson from a past, someone else’s past transport experience, and being able to use it to help in a future transport experience where that experience base is fairly small to begin with. So trying to find direct evidence. I saw the stories being told. People would say how much they were learning from the stories. But really seeing something happen, get told as a story, and then that story get used to treat another patient differently; trying to capture the whole lifecycle of that was almost impossible, just by nature of what I was studying. The reviewers were looking for that kind of evidence, that sort of end to end evidence. And so that was one of the big challenges because this was a low frequency event. It really ended up taking a long time in the field, to be able to be around long enough to kind of see the full lifecycle of a story from when it happened to the story being told to others to it being used or implemented in treating another patient.

• Did you ever feel like “I’m just going to change my context – this is too difficult”?

I think there are certainly a range of contexts in which one could study storytelling. If you look where it’s been studied in the literature you’ve got Xerox, you’ve got office teams. I think for me there was always something happening there. There was always a real sense that, “okay, I’m observing this process here. How do I document it? How do I understand the best way possible, given the setting?”

I think there’s a richness that emerges from going deep into a fairly unconventional environment. From a 30,000 foot view it might not seem like the best choice. There were only 22 people working in this organization. When we think about doing interviews, you’ve got wonderful studies that are being done, where you interview 100 to 150 people and really develop rich typologies or categories that way. That was just never really on the table for this context. It’s much smaller and so it took a different approach, perhaps more observational, supplemented with the interviews and trying to triangulate between. But I think the richness helped me see things that we wouldn’t have been able to see elsewhere.

• Do you feel like there’s value in studying unconventional sites in terms of your experience as a researcher, or in terms of getting published?

There’s been a lot written about the value of extreme contexts. They highlight practices that are likely happening elsewhere more subtly, or that blend in better because the consequences aren’t as stark. The generalized setup with these air medical teams of distributed work that is increasingly complex and non-routine is something that we see everywhere.

It was very interesting to be in the back half of the review process when the pandemic broke out, because suddenly the generalizability of the work stopped being as farfetched. When I started on this project, it was a question of how generalizable it is to study teams that don’t see each other ever, but are doing complex work. Well, then the pandemic breaks out. Now the thing that made this site particularly extreme is the default way of working for many people in the world.

I think there’s value always in studying extreme contexts, because what’s extreme today may be totally normal in five or ten years. So waiting until it’s the normal way of working to start studying and understanding it puts us behind the ball as a field that’s trying to offer useful insights.

• Did you find any challenges in gaining access to this extreme site?

Interestingly enough, I did not. This was not the first site that I attempted. I got turned down by an ambulance service. I knew I wanted to do something in the healthcare space. It’s a space that I grew up in, I have some familiarity with it. I thought, “oh, this will be a good context for the kinds of things that I’m interested in”. It was very fortunate that the primary site where I conducted this research had an established observer program. They had a mechanism for people to come in and observe flights, even down to the logistics of having extra flight suits and helmets and a name tag that says observer. There was a mechanism in place there. They had emergency medicine resident physicians from the University Hospital who would fly along with them. They had all the structures in place, and that facilitated access. So, though it is certainly an extreme work environment, there were a lot of mechanisms in place that supported me being able to be an observer. And once I was in with this one site, it created opportunities to learn more about the industry more broadly. I actually ended up conducting observations and some interviews at another site as well that I used to compare and contrast. That really helped me better understand what was happening at my primary site. Those access points all followed from being able to gain access to this initial site.

• What advice would you give to other researchers who are interested in studying storytelling or knowledge transfer in high stress work environments?

I think it’s going to be one of the big pressing questions as the way of working continues to shift and settle. I think, coming out of the pandemic, it’s clear that we’re not all going to go back to co-located, in-person team settings. How we think about transferring experience is going to be critically important. Storytelling will always have a role to play there. I think in many ways the role that it plays in transmitting that knowledge is still under-theorized. We know a lot about the value of stories, and about the transmission of culture and values of an organization. I think our understanding of transferring technical know-how will continue to evolve and grow and be enacted in a lot of different ways through different media.

• Is there a story you can share about gathering data in this context that you think would be instructional for PhD students interested in doing work in extreme settings?

I think my advice is twofold. Number one is you have to go for it. So this was a cold email. I had been rejected from the ambulance site that I wanted to study, and had asked around for folks who had taken this course and found field sites to use and had gotten the advice that sites that are affiliated with the university might be more amenable to having a student come in. These sites get the educational mission. I looked to see if there were any university ambulance programs, and there weren’t, but there were these air medical programs, and I took a chance and sent a cold email, and got this very positive response that they were very interested in learning more about their own practices and improving and had this established mechanism and were open to doing it. So the first bit is, go for it. You never know what context will be open to you.

And the second is using the opportunity of a PhD program to do this kind of work. For me, I know that I would not be able to do the work in the same way that would generate rich insights now given time constraints and other obligations. When I was a PhD student and had the ability to be gone for between twelve and twenty hours – who knows how long it’s going to be depending on the shift. I think that created the opportunity to gather this unique data that I wouldn’t be able to do in the same way now. I think I’d have to do it in a more time bound and structured way that might not have revealed quite the same set of insights.

Interviewer bios:

Teddy Carter is a PhD candidate in Strategic Management and Organization at the University of Alberta. Her/Their research explores the intersection between Indigenous Ontologies and institutional theories of organization.

Meenal Banga is a PhD student in Strategy at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores strategy questions from a cognitive perspective. She is particularly fascinated by cognition and its profound influence on strategic decision-making and innovation.