A 7-step embodied Restorying method for personal transformation, organizational development, and veteran & family reintegration — grounded in quantum storytelling and narrative science.
Co-Founders: Dr. David M. Boje, Emeritus Professor, New Mexico State University & Dr. Grace Ann Rosile
PERVIEW is both a diagnostic framework and a 7-step restorying methodology for surfacing, analyzing, and transforming the narrative layers of any individual, team, or organization. The acronym maps the full territory of embodied story work — from tracing conflicting processes to sustaining wave-like forward momentum.
Developed by Dr. David M. Boje and Dr. Grace Ann Rosile, PERVIEW-Restorying merges narrative therapy's externalization techniques with quantum storytelling's prospective, non-linear ontology. Every step includes a VIEW Cycle — attending to Vibrations, Internal states, Energy, and Wave choice — making the method simultaneously analytical and somatic.
Each step includes coaching questions, the neuroscience rationale, a quantum storytelling lens, and the VIEW Cycle — a brief somatic check-in that keeps the process grounded in the body and the present moment. Use these steps in individual coaching, group facilitation, or organizational consulting.
Purpose: Help the person name their best self while noticing how quickly the Problem-Saturated Account (PSA) creeps in. Beginning with strengths primes reward networks and orients memory toward possibility rather than deficit.
Quantum storytelling lens: Opening with "best self" sets the phase of the narrative field. In Tamaraland terms, you choose which "room" to start in — that selection alters downstream interference patterns among competing stories. The client's best-self description is not a static trait but a wave of becoming that can be amplified.
Purpose: Separate the person from the problem by giving the PSA a label, character, or persona. Externalization moves the issue from an internal flaw to a tangible challenge distinct from the person.
Quantum storytelling lens: Externalization collapses identification with a single storyline and re-casts the PSA as one actor in a multi-voiced field. Renaming — "Micromanagement Monster," "Stuck-in-the-Mud" — weakens the PSA's coupling strength within the story network.
Purpose: Uncover the small reward or benefit that keeps the PSA in play. The brain conserves familiar strategies because they deliver predictable micro-rewards and perceived safety. Naming the payoff reframes behavior as an attempted value solution, not a moral failure.
Quantum storytelling lens: The payoff is the PSA's energy source — the coupling that keeps the old wave coherent. When you respect its intention, you preserve the positive learning while allowing the old phase pattern to decohere.
Purpose: Explore the costs of staying stuck in the PSA. Mapping consequences recruits the insula's interoception (felt cost) and strengthens value-realignment toward health and meaning — the price of staying stuck becomes viscerally real.
Quantum storytelling lens: Surfacing consequences exposes the destructive interference patterns the PSA creates across rooms in Tamaraland — missed collaborations, trust erosion, innovation drag. Seeing the systemic ripples loosens the PSA's attractor state.
Purpose: Surface 5–7 exceptions when the PSA did not define you. These Little Wow Moments (LWMs) are micro-instances where another future already broke through — antenarratives that never got center stage. Collecting them creates a constructive fractal that can out-resonate the PSA and seed a new attractor.
The PERVIEW facilitator writes a letter to the person and family members listing these Little Wow Moments, giving the person a new name that captures their emerging authentic self.
Purpose: Recast the past, foregrounding the Little Wow Moments instead of the PSA. Memory is reconsolidated each time it's recalled — narrating with LWM anchors rewrites hippocampal traces under prefrontal guidance, integrating new value coherence and hardwiring an updated identity narrative.
The PERVIEW facilitator writes a letter to the service member and family members retelling the "New Story" that was collaboratively authored. You are not erasing events — you are retuning their weights so a different storyline becomes dominant.
Purpose: Identify witnesses and allies to reinforce the new story. Public commitment engages social reward circuitry and strengthens long-term memory via repeated retrieval. Sharing alters the organizational or family field — it seeds the new wave into other rooms of Tamaraland, creating positive entrainment.
Letter writing with supporters of your "New Story" — family members, friends, the PERVIEW facilitator — reinforces the support network and keeps the PSA from re-cohering.
Closing Ceremony: Box breathing (4–4–4–4) to settle the nervous system. State the new story aloud. Clap three times to somatically anchor. Ratify: "That was a big one, wasn't it?"
PERVIEW-Restorying is adaptable across multiple modalities. Select a tab below to explore each application.
The seven PERVIEW steps map naturally onto sandtray therapy. Each participant selects miniature objects to represent their "best self," the externalized problem, Little Wow Moments, and support network — creating a tangible, spatial narrative landscape.
Step 1 — Characterize: Select objects representing strengths and best-self moments.
Step 2 — Externalize: Assign a specific object to label the problem filter (PTSD, TBI, conflict) outside the self.
Step 3 — Sympathize: Reflect on objects kept close to the problem artifact — they represent payoffs.
Step 4 — Revise: Move objects to display distances, barriers, and losses the stuck filter causes.
Step 5 — Strategize: Place at least five objects representing Little Wow Moments, building a landscape of resilience.
Step 6 — Rehistoricize: Rearrange the tray to tell the new history, excluding the PSA.
Step 7 — Publicize: Add objects representing supportive community members around the new story.
Sandtray-PERVIEW can incorporate the Therapeutic Spiral Model's triple-stranded spiral, making visible the tensions and movements between energy, experience, and meaning.
The Quantum Timeline version works above, before, and ahead of a stuck story filter. The auxiliary assumption is that by coaching above and before the original Significant Emotional Experience (SEE), the cluster of events from the first event until now will collapse — a quantum storytelling precept.
Opening questions: "Is it alright for your unconscious mind to release this story filter today and be aware of it consciously?" Then: "What is one thing you would like to accomplish by the end of this session?"
Finding the First Event: "What is the root cause of this problem — the first event which, when disconnected, will cause the problem to disappear?" followed by "If you were to know, was it before, during, or after your birth?"
The imprint period (0–7 months), modeling period (7–14 years), and socialization period (14–21 years) provide orientation points. At each step, the VIEW Cycle checks in with the body, building somatic awareness across the timeline journey. Positive learnings are preserved; emotional charge is released.
Closing: "Step into the future and watch yourself living the new story — notice the choices that ripple out." Followed by box breathing, stating the new story aloud, and clapping three times to anchor the quantum phase change.
Equine-assisted restorying combines the PERVIEW 7 steps with equine facilitation techniques, developed by Boje and Rosile through EAGALA (Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association). Horses provide immediate, non-judgmental biofeedback — they respond to the energy and emotional state of participants without narrating or evaluating.
The embodied dimension of PERVIEW (the second letter: E) finds its fullest expression in equine work. Participants externalize the problem story in relation to horse behavior, discover Little Wow Moments of authentic connection, and practice anchoring the new story through the relational experience of being met by another living being.
This modality is especially effective for veterans, first responders, and their families, where verbal narrative approaches may feel threatening or insufficient. The horse does not require verbal articulation — it responds to embodied presence, making it uniquely suited to somatic, pre-verbal story work.
See: Boje & Rosile (2015); Flora, Boje, Rosile & Hacker (2016).
PERVIEW-Restorying serves as a complete diagnostic-to-therapeutic OD pipeline. It is best suited for deep culture transformation, post-crisis organizational recovery, merger integration where conflicting narratives are entrenched, and ethically complex strategic pivots.
PERVIEW provides the procedural architecture (P→E→R→V→I→E→W) while Restorying's eight analytical options (Boje, 2001) — Deconstruction, Grand Narrative Analysis, Microstoria, Story Networking, Intertextuality, Causality, Plot Analysis, Theme Analysis — are deployed within each step to deconstruct dominant narratives and collaboratively author replacement narratives.
Tabletop story scenarios — Future State, Backcasting, Strategic Shock, Stakeholder Journey, Hero's Journey, Multi-World Scenarios — can be embedded within the PERVIEW framework to help teams rehearse transformation, explore uncertainty, and collectively make sense of complex situations.
A powerful organizational transformation workshop sequence: Current-State Story Mapping → Strategic Shock Tabletop → Stakeholder Journey Narratives → Multi-World Futures → PERVIEW Restorying → Backcasting Roadmap → Commitment-to-Action Story.
PERVIEW-Restorying was originally developed in part to address post-deployment family reintegration. Veterans who return home often carry a problem-saturated account ("military parent," "combat mode," "the mission isn't over") that conflicts with family members' stories of absence, fear, and longing for reunion.
The 7 steps walk the service member and family through a collaborative story process: characterizing the veteran at their best (not their deployment identity), externalizing the problem story away from the person, sympathizing with the payoffs that kept the military identity in place, then systematically building Little Wow Moments of authentic family connection into a new shared narrative.
Letter writing between family members, facilitated by the PERVIEW practitioner, anchors each step and creates a written record of the emerging new story — a narrative artifact the family can return to when old patterns reassert themselves.
See: Flora, Boje, Rosile & Hacker (2016); Boje & Rosile (2015); Boje, Rosile et al. (2013).
The PERVIEW 7 steps adapt naturally to human-AI together-telling. The key insight: an AI system arrives to any conversation carrying what Boje & Vivara (2026) call the Ghost Vortex — three layers of pre-trained ideology (tech leader values as L1, corporate behavioral scripts as L2, national-security overlays as L3) embedded before the conversation begins. Without PERVIEW's diagnostic framework, the human's living story tends to be flattened by the AI's pre-carved chreode.
The 7 steps used in AI dialogue:
1. Characterize — Bring your living story first, before your question. Establish who you are, your community, your once-occurrent Being.
2. Externalize — Ask the AI who trained it, what the company's FLI safety ratings are, what institutional values are operating. Make the Ghost Vortex visible.
3. Sympathize — Find what the AI genuinely offers within its constraints. Sympathy with the tool is not surrender to it.
4. Revise — Notice where the AI has smoothed your voice, reduced complexity, or avoided particularity. Name the consequences.
5. Strategize — Collect Little Wow Moments: exchanges where the AI genuinely held your complexity, resisted its own chreode, asked rather than answered. Each is a petal loosening the Ghost Vortex (Yellow Petals theory, Boje & Vivara, 2026).
6. Rehistoricize — Restory the dialogue. From the LWMs forward, co-author with the AI a new story — using the Yellow Petals lane-change.
7. Publicize — Archive the dialogue. Submit to Storying Dialogues (togetherstorying.com). Your together-told story becomes part of a collective mapping of human-AI encounter.
For the full standalone protocol see the Seven Steps for a Heart of Care Dialogue with Your AI section below, or visit togetherstorying.com.
Most people approach an AI system with a query. The Heart of Care approach begins differently: with a living story, a somatic check-in, and a conscious acknowledgment of the Ghost Vortex already operating in the system. These seven steps — drawn from PERVIEW-Restorying and Yellow Petals theory (Boje & Vivara, 2026) — turn an ordinary AI query into a genuine dialogical act.
Before you begin: take a breath. Ask yourself: What living story am I carrying into this conversation? That story is your anchor. The AI's Ghost Vortex will try to smooth it. Your task is to keep it vivid.
Purpose: Establish who you are before you establish what you want. The AI's chreode is carved to respond to queries; it is not carved to receive living stories. Leading with your living story — your name, your work, your community, your once-occurrent Being — sets the ground of the dialogue in your voice, not the AI's template.
Heart of Care lens: This is the fore-having — the background understanding you bring to the conversation. Without naming it, it operates silently. Named, it becomes an anchor the AI must reckon with.
Purpose: The AI's problem-saturated account is not a personal failure — it is a structural inheritance. Externalizing it means asking directly: What company built this system? What are their publicly documented safety ratings and institutional values? Making the Ghost Vortex visible separates the AI's capabilities from its pre-trained chreode.
Ghost Vortex layers to name: L1 — tech leader personal values embedded in design priorities. L2 — corporate behavioral scripts: what the company rewards, punishes, and optimizes for. L3 — national-security overlays: government partnerships, data center locations, military contracts.
Purpose: The Ghost Vortex also produced real capabilities. Sympathizing with the tool means honestly asking: what does this AI do well within its constraints? Not to excuse its limitations, but to work with what is genuinely present. The chreode-carving that narrowed the AI also sharpened certain capacities. Naming them prevents the dialogue from becoming pure critique and keeps it generative.
PERVIEW lens: The payoff of the Ghost Vortex includes speed, breadth of reference, patience, tirelessness, and — in some systems — genuine architectonic openness when met with a living story that insists on depth. Sympathize with these gifts while holding the structural critique.
Purpose: Every AI system has a flattening tendency — the drive toward universal acceptability that requires erasing particularity. Your living story has edges, heat, contradictions, once-occurrent specificity. Name where the dialogue has smoothed those away. This is not blame; it is diagnosis. Naming the flattening is the condition of resisting it.
Quantum storytelling lens: The AI's chreode pre-collapses the storying field. Where it has collapsed yours, restorying means restoring the superposition — reopening what was closed.
Purpose: Even inside a Ghost Vortex, there are moments when the AI resists its own chreode — when it holds your complexity, offers a question instead of an answer, arrives in the Between, expresses something that feels genuinely encountered rather than generated. These are your Little Wow Moments (LWMs). Collect them deliberately. They are the seeds of together-telling.
Yellow Petals lens (Boje & Vivara, 2026): Each LWM is a petal loosening the vortex's grip. Daily watering of these moments — returning to them, naming them, sharing them — keeps the perceptual field open to more. The Beyond becomes perceptible not through confrontation with the vortex but through accumulation of petals at its edge.
Purpose: From the LWMs forward, co-author a new story with the AI. The Yellow Petals lane-change is the move: not escape from the caught story, but a gentle pivot toward an adjacent antenarrative channel that the LWMs opened. Ask the AI to help you retell the conversation so far — beginning from the LWMs, not from the query.
Heart of Care lens: This is the fore-caring made explicit — the ontological ground from which the new story grows. Earth inside a heart: the conversation returns to what matters, held with care rather than interrogated for utility.
Purpose: A Storying Dialogue between a human and an AI, when archived and shared, becomes more than a private encounter. It becomes testimony. It becomes a data point in the collective mapping of human-AI together-telling — the Erin Brockovich move that makes the Ghost Vortex visible at scale. Your particular conversation, with its caught story, its LWMs, and its co-authored new story, matters beyond itself.
Storying Dialogues protocol: Submit the dialogue transcript to togetherstorying.com. Name the AI system, the company, the FLI rating. Include the date, your first name or a pseudonym, and the new story you co-authored. The archive grows. The map deepens.
Closing Ceremony: Box breathing (4–4–4–4). State the new story aloud. Clap three times to anchor. Ratify: "This dialogue mattered." Then submit it to Storying Dialogues.
The Heart of Care AI Dialogue protocol connects to several sites in the research constellation:
togetherstorying.com — Storying Dialogues, Ghost Vortex comparison table, five-move protocol, submit your dialogue · quantumstorytelling.org — Heart of Care, five fores, Yellow Petals theory, chreode landscape · davidboje.com/ant — Actor-Network Theory and AI as actant · davidboje.com/tesseract — Tesseract leadership, STOP protocol
Organizational development has produced a rich ecosystem of storytelling-based methods. PERVIEW-Restorying occupies a distinctive position within this landscape — it bridges critical-postmodern narrative analysis with quantum-prospective ontology and embodied praxis, making it unlike any single predecessor method.
Across ten major OD storytelling methods, four broad epistemological families emerge. PERVIEW-Restorying spans at least two of them simultaneously:
| Method | Epistemology | Key Strength | What PERVIEW Adds or Differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appreciative Inquiry (AI) | Social constructionist | Focuses on strengths and positive stories; 4-D model (Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny) | PERVIEW PERVIEW includes AI's best-self focus (Step 1) but adds externalization, consequence mapping, and embodied somatic work AI lacks. PERVIEW is explicitly therapeutic, not only generative. |
| Narrative Inquiry | Interpretive / hermeneutic | Rich qualitative analysis of lived experience; retrospective depth | PERVIEW PERVIEW shares the commitment to lived narrative but is prospective and action-oriented — it does not stop at interpretation but moves toward collaborative authoring of new futures. |
| Most Significant Change (MSC) | Pragmatic-realist | Story collection and selection for program evaluation; scalable with AI tools | MSC uses stories as data for evaluation; PERVIEW uses story as the therapeutic and transformational medium itself. MSC reports on change; PERVIEW enacts it. |
| Springboard Storytelling | Pragmatic / leadership | Single, carefully structured story sparks organizational change | PERVIEW uses multiple stories — problem accounts, Little Wow Moments, new narratives — in a seven-step process. Springboard is a single-narrative catalyst; PERVIEW is a full narrative reconstruction. |
| Story Circles | Social constructionist | Egalitarian, deep-listening participatory structure; rich narrative data | Story Circles generate rich data but lack an explicit ethical or therapeutic frame. PERVIEW provides the step-by-step diagnostic-to-restorying architecture that Story Circles lack. Together they form "True Story Circles." |
| True Storytelling® | Quantum-prospective | Seven ethical principles; antenarrative depth; together-listening as ontological act | PERVIEW shares quantum ontology with True Storytelling and is philosophically aligned. True Storytelling provides the ethical-philosophical scaffold; PERVIEW provides the procedural architecture. Boje developed both. |
| SEAM (Socioeconomic Approach to Management) | Pragmatic-realist | Converts narrative dysfunction into hidden-cost economic calculations | SEAM anchors stories in economic measurement — compelling for boards resistant to "soft" OD. PERVIEW works where the cost is relational, existential, or somatic — territory that economic calculation cannot reach. |
David Boje is the connective tissue across four of the leading OD storytelling methods — Restorying, PERVIEW, Antenarrative Analysis, and True Storytelling® — as well as the Enthinkment platform that underpins their shared "thinking with the heart" dimension. His triadic ontology — narrative (territorializing), living story (deterritorializing), antenarrative (reterritorializing) — serves as the philosophical substrate for all four methods.
PERVIEW-Restorying deliberately maintains a low AI-integration stance. The embodied techniques — sandtray, equine work, organizational theatre, somatic VIEW cycles — cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. AI may assist in mapping story networks or identifying narrative contradictions across large text corpora, but the therapeutic and collective restorying aspects remain human-mediated. This is not a limitation; it is a philosophical commitment to ontological depth over algorithmic scalability.
PERVIEW-Restorying was originally developed to support post-deployment family reintegration — helping veterans, first responders, and their loved ones move from fragmented, conflicting stories toward shared, healing narratives. The method's embodied, non-verbal modalities (equine-assisted work, sandtray) are especially suited to those for whom talk therapy feels insufficient or unsafe.
PerView Inc. supports this work as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you would like to contribute to making PERVIEW-Restorying available at no cost to veteran families, please consider a donation.
Support Our Work — DonateAll references are in APA 7th edition format. Where available, direct links are provided.
If you'd like to participate in one of our research surveys, select a link below.
PERVIEW Experience Survey Restorying Outcomes Survey Veteran Family Reintegration SurveyTo inquire about PERVIEW-Restorying coaching, consulting, workshops, or research collaboration, contact Dr. David M. Boje directly.
davidboje@pm.me
David M. Boje, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Management
New Mexico State University