Press Play to hear this interview that was recorded as a conference call on 1/15/2008 with storyteller Steve Denning about how storytelling can be used to effect change in any work place setting.

Steve Denning writes…
In 1998, I made a pilgrimage to the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, seeking enlightenment. As program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I’d stumbled onto the power of storytelling. Despite a career of scoffing at such touchy-feely stuff—like most business executives, I knew that analytical was good, anecdotal was bad—my thinking had started to change. Over the previous few years, I’d seen stories help galvanize an organization around a defined business goal.

In the mid-1990s, that goal was to get people at the World Bank to support efforts at knowledge management—a pretty foreign notion within the organization at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the need to gather the knowledge scattered throughout the organization. They didn’t listen. I gave PowerPoint presentations that compellingly demonstrated the importance of sharing and leveraging this information. My audiences merely looked dazed. In desperation, I was ready to try almost anything.

Then in 1996 I began telling people a story:

In June of last year, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and got the answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember that this in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it took place in a tiny place 600 kilometers from the capital city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn’t in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn’t available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become.

This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum. So I began to wonder how the tool of narrative might be put to work even more effectively. As a rational manager, I decided to consult the experts.

At the International Storytelling Center, I told the Zambia story to a professional storyteller, J.G. “Paw-Paw” Pinkerton, and asked the master what he thought. Imagine my chagrin when he said he didn’t hear a story at all. There was no real “telling.” There was no plot. There was no building up of the characters. Who was this health worker in Zambia? And what was her world like? What did it feel like to be in the exotic environment of Zambia, facing the problems she faced? My anecdote, he said, was pathetic thing, not a story at all. I needed to start from scratch if I hoped to turn it into a “real story.”

Was I surprised? Well, not exactly. The story was pretty bland. There was a problem with this advice from the expert, though. I knew in my heart it was wrong. And with that realization, I was on the brink of an important insight: Beware the well-told story!

More musings…
In his most recent book The Secret Language of Leadership and his other books, Steve Denning explains how a simple story could communicate a complex multi-dimensioned idea, not simply by transmitting information as a message, but by actively involving the listeners in co-creating the reality of the idea in the context of the particular organization where the story was being told. Their active participation as listeners helps reinvent the organization and create new identities for the organization and themselves. In this way, the story embodied the concept of knowledge management, and was able to transfer knowledge.

The experience of using the oral culture of a modern organization to embody and transfer knowledge has antecedents in the past.

The force of organizational storytelling

Using the magic of narrative to lead from wherever you are
and handle the principal challenges facing all leaders today.

There are good reasons why business communications are persistently analytic. Analysis is the key to good theory, precise thinking, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery. Analysis cuts through the fog of myth, gossip and speculation to get to the hard facts. Its strength is its objectivity, its impersonality, its very heartlessness: it goes wherever the observations and premises and conclusions take it. Analysis isn’t distorted by the feelings or the hopes or the fears of the analysts: analysis gets us relentlessly to the bottom line.

Yet the very strength of analysis — its heartlessness — can be a drawback when it comes to communicating with human beings. Analysis might excite the mind, but its heartlessness is hardly the route to the heart. Yet it is the heart that we need to reach to get people enthusiastically into action. Endless mind-numbing cascades of numbers can result in dazed audiences and PowerPoint burnout. At a time when corporate survival often entails disruptive change, leadership is about moving and inspiring people — often to do things that they are not by habit or by predisposition inclined to do: just giving people a reason simply does not work.

Hence the current business interest in storytelling. Good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, but they are typically approved on the basis of stories. A story can translate dry, abstract numbers into compelling pictures of how the deep yearnings of decision influencers can come true.

There’s a lot more stuff on my website, if you need more.
http://www.stevedenning.com/leadership.htm
http://www.stevedenning.com/innovation.htm

Steve offered my listeners 38 free leadership and storytelling gifts at:
http://stevedenning.com/launchgifts.html

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