NARRATIVE THERAPY AND BENCHMARKING

Narrative Therapy and Benchmarking in measuring Department Performance

[Institute Name]

Narrative Therapy and Benchmarking in measuring Department Performance

Benchmarking is the comparing and measuring of a hospitality firm's business processes against the best practices of those processes by any organization in any industry in the entire world. The objective of benchmarking is to accelerate organizational learning in order to achieve a break-through in performance. To engage in this approach to self-improvement, a firm must first identify its own value-adding activities or processes that create its value chain. Then specific areas should be pinpointed for improvement (Camp, 2009).

Next, star performing firms in any industry are examined to identify what it is they do to create their outstanding results. The focus is upon practices, processes, and operational methods for it are these aspects that enable a firm to identify how to apply their findings to their own activities. A weakness of this approach is that adopting the best practices of another may permit the firm to improve performance — and perhaps even match that of the benchmarked firm — but it rarely leads to superior results. Benchmarking should be done against non-competing firms so that innovative concepts are uncovered and unworthy practices are more easily identified and avoided.

Narrative therapy is a therapeutic technique which encourages people to analyze the dominant story of their lives and to construct more positive stories for themselves in the future. As is evident in the techniques already reviewed, narrative learning has very strong links to both adult development and transformational learning. As a means of understanding adult development, a narrative framework sees the life course as an unfolding story, one constructed and interpreted by the individual. While the sociocultural-historical context interacts with and to some extent shapes the life course, the meaning of our life experiences constitutes our particular developmental trajectory (Tapson, 2005).

In contrast to stage and phase theories of adult development, most of which have an end state (such as Erikson's [1963] final stage of ego integrity versus despair, for example), life narratives are retrospective, always in process, unfolding. And as Rossiter and Clark (in press) point out, development from a narrative perspective can be “empowering. While we do not have control over many of the events or circumstances of our lives, we do have some choice as to how we interpret them. If something unpleasant happens it is not imperative that we will see ...