‘Our iceberg is melting’: Story, metaphor and the management of organisational change

Abstract

This article offers two contrasting readings of the business novel Our iceberg is melting: Changing and succeeding under any conditions (J. Kotter and H. Rathgeber. 2005. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan), which was written to advocate Kotter's approach to organisational change management. The orthodox reading draws on the modernist paradigm which assumes that organisational change can be actively managed. This reading analyses how the structure, themes, tropes and metaphoric representations employed in the book reinforce its underlying message. It assumes that readers will accept this message and adopt the advocated change management approach. The alternative reading is more critical. It questions the idealistic representations of characters' roles and behaviours, and demonstrates how organisational actors may subvert the book's story and metaphoric representations to resist change. This article demonstrates through the two readings that story and metaphor as tools to facilitate organisational change open up space for differing interpretations, which may not match the authors' intent. It concludes that story and metaphor can reinforce a book's underlying message, but that their ambiguity and interpretative flexibility always allow for unintended, dissenting and potentially subversive interpretations.

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