Storytelling has been a powerful tool for centuries used in different cultures to share history and experiences. Stories enable us to communicate ideas that go beyond the rational and structural; they help us to imagine and represent the difficult. As a co-creative process, storytelling builds cultures of engagement naturally through the shared context and sense of shared meaning that results.
As a leadership tool, stories can be used to communicate ideas, norms, and values, and to facilitate unlearning, which is necessary to create space for developing cultures of innovation and continuous improvement. Stories can help to frame and re-frame information, making them a valuable tool for development, transformation, and innovation. Leaders who use storytelling successfully, recognize the impact it has on creating an organization that is participatory, resilient, reflective, flexible, and innovative.
The purpose of this chapter is to present and illustrate the use of storytelling as a leadership tool to develop work cultures in schools built on trust, courage, and dialogue to support sustainable quality in education. In the first part of this chapter, readers will develop an understanding of what is organizational culture and how it can be developed to support the systems of work to foster sustainable quality development in schools.