ABSTRACT
Media organizations experience paradoxical demands in being organized for print production with a daily deadline and simultaneously striving to be ‘digital first’ and produce and publish stories on a continuous basis throughout the day. By building on literature on paradoxes, our assumption is that such contradictions and conflicting demands should not be approached as anomalies to be solved or removed but rather be kept open and alive. Generative metaphors can be a powerful device for facilitating organizational change by situating paradoxical demands, enabling imagination and collaborative experimentation in order to not only cope but also co-construct local solutions to recurrent tensions in everyday practices. In this chapter we describe efforts involved in introducing the metaphor flowline in three medium-sized newspaper organizations with the aim of aligning their production and publishing processes to readers’ consumption of news. We argue that while a deadline-governed workflow implies a ‘dead if not finished’ reality, flowline brings forth a new ongoing and open-ended reality of ‘deliver when finished’ that allows paradoxical demands to be transformed into new possibilities for action. Finally, we provide guidance for how managers can construct their own local flowline.
