The Power of Antenarrative in PR: Transforming Organizational Storytelling

In a recent article, Sonya Sandham makes the case for antenarrative in PR and organizational storytelling, and challenges two key assumptions that many PR practitioners continue to hold. I wanted to explore the potential use of antenarrative, drawing on Sandham’s ideas.

Storytelling has long been recognized as a cornerstone of effective PR. It helps organizations resonate with stakeholders, foster trust, and shape brand perception. However, the traditional approach to storytelling often assumes that clarity and coherence are paramount, aiming to streamline messages into neatly packaged narratives. While this method has its merits, it overlooks a critical tool in our storytelling toolbox: antenarrative.

Antenarrative (a term coined by scholar David Boje in 2001), a concept referring to narrative fragments that precede and shape emergent storytelling episodes, offers a fresh perspective for PR professionals. By embracing the complexity and fluidity inherent in antenarratives, organizations can enhance sensemaking, deepen stakeholder engagement, and navigate the challenges of a digital, interconnected world. As Sandham argues, “Emergent storytelling episodes provide a more nuanced understanding of stories that are part of sensemaking in organizational communication, which is non-linear and more likely to be networked and distributed in our digital age.”

Further, antenarrative cannot operate alone, as Sandham affirms. Rather, it should function with other concepts. “Putting antenarrative alongside concepts such as ‘listening’ and ‘engagement’ helps to improve organizational storytelling to work toward more effective organizational communication practice and respond to the challenges of complexity in storytelling, entanglements of the porous organization, and digital disruption,” she asserts.

Rethinking Traditional Storytelling Assumptions

Sandham identifies two key assumptions that often underpin conventional organizational storytelling:

1. Clarity as the Ultimate Goal: Organizations typically prioritize reducing complexity, presenting messages in a linear and straightforward manner to ensure clarity and comprehension. While clarity is valuable, it may limit the ability to reflect the dynamic and multifaceted nature of real-world organizational contexts.

2. Stories as Singular, Controlled Narratives: Traditional storytelling often focuses on the narratives organizations create about themselves. Divergent interpretations or mixed messages are frequently dismissed as "noise," perceived as distractions from the central narrative. With a linear approach, there is typically a narrow view of audiences, Sandham suggests. When “controlling and shaping the story to reflect the organization’s preferred perspective,” we, as PR professionals, “minimize variables such as voices and maximize structures such as plots or storylines to leverage the power of storytelling for the organization.” In other words, this “linear mode of communication is an oversimplification of storytelling in practice” (Kent, 2015).

Antenarrative challenges these assumptions, Sandham contends. It acknowledges that organizational storytelling is not static but an evolving interplay of fragmented narratives, perspectives, and interpretations. Recognizing and leveraging these fragments allows organizations to engage more authentically with their stakeholders, fostering richer and more adaptive storytelling.

Expanding Sensemaking with Antenarrative

Sensemaking is a crucial function of organizational storytelling, helping stakeholders understand and navigate complex scenarios. Research highlights, Sandham points out, that “that not all sensemaking fits into the single-story framework.” Antenarrative broadens the parameters of sensemaking by:

1. Acknowledging Complexity: Instead of striving for oversimplification, antenarrative embraces the messy, dynamic nature of organizational realities. This approach resonates with audiences who are accustomed to the complexity and ambiguity of today’s digital environments.

2. Facilitating Emergent Narratives: Antenarrative allows organizations to identify and amplify emerging stories that reflect stakeholder concerns, interests, and values. These narrative fragments can evolve into meaningful episodes that align with organizational goals while addressing stakeholder needs.

3. Enhancing Prospective Sensemaking: By listening to emergent storytelling episodes, organizations can anticipate future trends, concerns, and opportunities. This proactive approach enables PR practitioners to craft narratives that are both relevant today and resilient in the face of tomorrow’s uncertainties. And, for most of us in PR, proactive strategy is a central tenet of our practice, so such an approach aligns with what we’re already doing.

Listening and Engagement: Keys to Effective Antenarrative Use

Implementing antenarrative effectively requires a shift in organizational mindset and invites situating it alongside listening and engagement as central practices. First, though, let’s take a look at the concept of engagement.

Sandham proffers that a common way that we, as communications professionals, conceive of storytelling is as “a planned communication practice that creates engaging content, which suggests that the content generates a positive response from the audience or meets an organization’s strategic communication objectives in some way.” This probably sounds all too familiar. She argues that this quite narrow view of engagement developed as a result of two primary reasons:

1. It is viewed as a “conduit for one-way messaging” when in practice, two-way messaging (when it actually does occur) “is performed as a top-down process of consultation or listening for organizational benefit.”

2. Efficacy of the message is measured in terms of audience response to the message, and with social media, a shift from engagement to data analytics and data extraction has occurred.

Sandham maintains that storytelling, which goes beyond this narrow view of engagement, should “deliver elements of engagement that are cognitive, affective, and behavioral.” She suggests that we take a lesson from grassroots and social activism where “storytelling approaches explicitly and implicitly recognize the participatory logic or multivocality that underpins storytelling.”

Here’s how organizations can integrate these principles into their storytelling strategies, for example:

1. Active Listening to Stakeholders

Digital platforms have amplified the voices of stakeholders, creating a rich tapestry of narratives that organizations must navigate. By actively listening to these conversations, PR professionals can:

• Identify narrative fragments that signal emerging stakeholder concerns or opportunities.

• Gain insights into how audiences interpret and engage with organizational messages.

• Build trust by demonstrating attentiveness and responsiveness.

2. Expanding Our View of Engagement

Traditional storytelling often relies on a top-down approach, as mentioned, where organizations broadcast their narratives to passive audiences. Antenarrative calls for a more collaborative model:

• Foster dialogue with stakeholders, encouraging them to share their own stories and perspectives.

• Co-create narratives that reflect a diversity of voices, fostering a sense of inclusion and shared purpose.

• From this collaboration, there should be storytelling that is focuses on multi-faceted engagement — cognitive, affective, and behavioral.

3. Leveraging Digital Tools for Narrative Discovery

Organizations have access to a wealth of data from social media, forums, and other online platforms. Advanced analytics tools can help PR professionals:

• Track and analyze narrative trends in real-time.

• Identify patterns and correlations between different narrative fragments.

• Assess the impact of storytelling initiatives on stakeholder sentiment and engagement.

The Benefits of Antenarrative in PR

Organizations that incorporate antenarrative into their PR strategies stand to gain significant advantages, but, as Sandham reminds us, there is “nothing inherent to an antenarrative approach that makes it more inclusive or demarginalizing. Rather, it is the organization’s disposition toward the use of these narrative fragments.” Thus, the organization needs to be primed by us, PR practitioners, to be on board with this approach.

And, like (too?) much in communications, antenarrative can be used negatively. “Listening for discursive shifts in ‘strategic’ storytelling to appeal to particular audiences (Boje, 2006) is one way to identify the calculated use or misuse of antenarrative to confuse and distract,” says Sandham. She cites Boje’s study of the fall of Enron and how its executives misused antenarrative (Enron “‘seduced spectators and stakeholders into willingly suspending disbelief’ that it was unsustainable practices that caused the collapse").

But, let's focus on some potential benefits:

1. Deeper Stakeholder Connections: By embracing the complexity of stakeholder narratives, organizations can build more authentic and meaningful relationships. Sandham affirms, “In practice, an antenarrative method incorporates listening that requires communication professionals to ‘suspend widely held notions of proper storytelling and learn to listen in a different way.’”

2. Enhanced Agility: Antenarrative empowers organizations to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, ensuring their messages remain relevant and impactful. Because the sensemaking process is in flux, leveraging an approach that works with such change can only help an organization. This can be invaluable in crisis communications (to which Sandham gives some attention in her article).

3. Increased Innovation: Antenarrative fosters a culture of openness and creativity, encouraging organizations to explore new ideas and perspectives. In short, it enables us to “listen to stories that do not have formal narrative structures” (Sandham, 2024). Think of the many employee or client stories that you’ve heard; they often do not follow a formal narrative structure.

The incorporation of antenarrative into our PR practices could signal a profound shift in how organizations approach storytelling, engagement, and sensemaking. By embracing complexity and relinquishing rigid control, antenarrative invites a dynamic, participatory model of communication that better reflects the realities of our interconnected world. This approach challenges us to listen differently, co-create narratives with stakeholders, and leverage narrative fragments to craft stories that are both authentic and adaptive. As organizations increasingly navigate issues of equity, inclusion, and digital disruption, antenarrative provides a powerful framework for fostering trust, agility, and innovation. Moving forward, its use has the potential to redefine organizational storytelling, not just as a strategic practice but also as a catalyst for meaningful connection and transformational change.