Events as Organisational Stories: an Event-Based Approach for Learning Media Production

Abstract

Google’ storytelling’, and you get 22.1 million hits (17.10.2007). By comparison, ‘shareholder value’ gets you 2.1 million (17.10.2007). Storytelling is hot, since a good story and storytelling skills can differentiate you from your competitors. The question is how to create such a story, how to advance from an informing level to an inspiring, engaging, touching and captivating story for your audience.

Projects and project management are becoming more and more self evident features of contemporary working life. Projects as temporary organizations are well suited for the needs of a rapidly changing working life. The project can be seen as a future working environment for a well trained and relatively independent, goal oriented professional. On the other hand the project and its managing methods could be considered just like a traditional bureaucratic control method with its tendency to make activities into countable units (Hodgson 2004).

In media production as well as in the production of a cultural or sports event the role of the project management is crucial (Bawdin & al 2006, 255). However the concept of the project is not an unproblematic technique by which to manage the diversity of cultural or sports events and their media productions. A project can be understood as a metaphor, which is used to make complicated and fuzzy processes look controllable and simple. Project reality is not necessary like that. To understand the diversity and ambiguity of the human effort needed to achieve something together with other people, there is a need for alternative approaches.