Storytelling for Decision-making
Storytelling is central to the human experience. Individuals, families, communities, organizations, and governments use stories to align goals, make strategic decisions, and motivate others to take action. What makes a story powerful and persuasive depends largely on how well the storyteller understands their audience’s cultural values.
My research on the use of storytelling for decision-making has focused on organizational and technical decision-making within a variety of social and organizational contexts. It intersects my research on new technologies and on building teams and data. These different contexts provide insight into how people use stories to make decisions about how to work, play, build, design, and relate to one another and to the technologies that make up a part of their social and cultural world.
Selected Works
Narratives and the Internet
Osburn, Laura. “Between network and story: Analyzing hyperlinks and narratives on websites about Tibet.” In Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus, edited by Gregory Grieves and Daniel Veidlinger, 40-57. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Busch, Laura. “To ‘Come to a correct understanding of Buddhism:’ A case study on spiritualizing technology, religious authority, and the boundaries of orthodoxy and identity in a Buddhist web forum.” New Media and Society 13, no. 1 (2011): 58–74.
Narratives and Building Teams
Osburn, Laura; Gina Neff, Carrie Sturts Dossick, Chris Monson, Heather Burpee. “Narrative Infrastructure in Decision-making: How teams use stories and sensemaking for strategy.” Engineering Project Organization Conference, 2019.
Narratives and Data
Neff, Gina, Anissa Tanweer, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, and Laura Osburn. “Critique and contribute: A practice-based framework for improving critical data studies and data science.” Big Data 5, no. 2 (2017): , 85-97.