The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  In this way, explanations can come to represent lenses through which we view the world. Every time we make plans or take action, our choices are based on a mental model or story in the back of our head that leads us to believe that the action being taken will lead to the desired result. Having the correct explanation for phenomena is the key to accurate knowledge and wise action.16

  Tell the Knowledge-Sharing Story with Context

  Knowledge-sharing stories typically are told with considerable contextual detail. Detail enables listeners to conduct case-based reasoning, that is, determine whether it is appropriate to reason from one case to another in a new context.17

  In this respect, the knowledge-sharing story is the opposite of the springboard story discussed in Chapter Three. Whereas the knowledge-sharing story is focused on enabling the recall of the story on future occasions, the springboard story is aimed more at generating a new story in the minds of the listeners about what they might do in their own setting. If you tell the springboard story with a lot of detailed context about the surrounding sights and sounds, you use up the listeners' precious mental space, thus reducing the likelihood that they will imagine new stories in their own contexts. The springboard story itself is a catalyst. Enabling the listeners to remember it is secondary to the primary goal of sparking a new story and consequent action. The springboard story is mere scaffolding that can be set aside once the listeners' stories have been generated. By contrast, remembering the story itself is the raison d'être of the knowledge-sharing story.

  Draw on Narrative Fragments

  Although we continually draw on past experience, many situations have no exact counterpart. When Klein studied the work of firefighters, there was never an entire fire that a commander saw as an exact copy of a previous one. Years of experience were blended together in their minds. Some aspect of the incident, not the entire fire, would ring a bell—for example, the firefighter notices billboards high on the roof of a building on fire and remembers a case where billboards came crashing down, and so he moves the crowds of spectators back in case these billboards fall.18

  But the fragment of experience that is relevant to the case at hand is usually just the starting point for the solution, not the solution itself. For instance, in the story about the surgeon who looked for bubbles to find an infant's breathing passage, the solution derived from a story about an adult, not a newborn infant. It was about an accident, not a birth. It was about someone else's actions, not his own. In the original story, the bubbles were present of their own accord, while in the case at hand, the surgeon had to invent his own method of generating air bubbles. When someone extracts the fragment from the original story and adapts it to a different situation, new knowledge is created.19

  Use Stories to Make Sense of Events

  Stories about the past enable us to make sense of the past and so move into the future. Thus, juries in legal trials find it difficult to hold all the evidence in their minds at the same time. Instead, they tend to organize the evidence into a story, which then makes the task of recalling and understanding further evidence easier. Jurors compare the stories presented by the prosecutor and the defense attorney and accept the claim that more closely matches the story that they themselves have constructed.20

  People who have had a hard day's work doing different tasks often gather in a coffee shop or a bar to swap stories of their different adventures, just as mothers in a park may gather on the benches to swap stories of their efforts to get their children to go to sleep. In the social vetting process of telling and listening to and commenting on the stories, the stories may get further refined, sometimes becoming “tricks of the trade.”21

  Listening to these stories isn't merely entertainment: it leads to the acquisition of vicarious experience by those participating. The limitation of sharing stories in an informal setting is that those who don't hear the story can't learn from it. This limitation was overcome by the Xerox Corporation in its Eureka program, in which photocopier technicians were given two-way radios so that they could be in constant contact to share experiences; the most useful of the stories were vetted and made available on the Web to the entire workforce of twenty-five thousand technicians.22

  Expand Experience Through Storytelling

  Experts typically make decisions by recognizing patterns from cues, as when a photocopier technician recognizes that the reversing roll needs repairing, or a nurse recognizes that a newborn baby is suffering from a pneumopericardium, or the hosts of Car Talk recognize a familiar problem with a ‘69 Toyota.

  Experts tend to see the pattern almost instantly, test it for applicability, and apply it if it fits. If it doesn't fit, they try a different pattern to see whether that fits. It's usually only if there is no obvious pattern that an expert stops to carry out a rational comparison of alternatives. Rational analysis is more commonly applied by novices who lack experience or by groups that want to develop a shared understanding of the approach to be followed.23

  An expert's ability to understand the past depends partly on recognizing common patterns and partly on the ability to run mental simulations. The photocopier makes a certain noise when it jams, and so this is what must have happened. The newborn infant is turning a certain color and showing no heartbeat, so that is what must have happened.

  The ability to run such mental simulations in new situations is what distinguishes experts from journeymen. Journeymen have mastered some routines, and their actions are smooth: they show many of the characteristics of expertise. But if pushed outside the standard patterns, they have difficulty improvising. They lack a sense of the dynamics of the situation. They have trouble explaining how the current state of affairs came about and how it will play out.24

  The more we can expand our array of experience, the more we are able to develop an understanding of the dynamic of what's involved. This is how journeymen move up to the level of genuine expert. The acquisition of experience can be accomplished directly or virtually by listening to the stories of earlier experiences.25

  Use Groups to Accelerate Storytelling

  Within a well-functioning community of practice, the interchange of experience is often rapid. The stories are likely to exist in a state of continuous flux, with fragments and allusions, as people contribute bits, often talking together. For example:

  In 1999, I attended a session of one community of practice in the World Bank concerning public enterprise reform. The group had invited one of its clients from India to make a presentation about their experience in public enterprise reform. This in itself was remarkable for the World Bank at the time; it would have been unthinkable just a few years before. Until the knowledge-sharing initiative, World Bank staff had tended to see themselves as experts—people who told their clients what to do—rather than as participants in a mutual learning experience. But here the community was explicitly trying to learn from the client's experience. The other striking feature of the discussion was the repeated interruptions and questions from the audience. “Did you try this?” “Did you examine that?” “Did you notice this impact?” Rapid-fire questions bombarded the presenters. To a nonspecialist the discussion would be very esoteric. But even a nonspecialist could feel the excitement in the air. These were people who were passionate about their subject. The session had no formal outcome, but those who were there ended up with a richer understanding of what worked—and what didn't work—in public enterprise reform.26

  Make Sure to Capture the Stories Shared

  When knowledge-sharing stories occur in mere fragments, barely intelligible to outsiders, capturing them can be a major challenge. Most of the expert participants at the discussion may get it, but the organizational value may be lost unless the learnings are gathered for later transmittal.

  People who listen to stories have the problem of not hearing in the first place and then of forgetting what they heard. It's an old Talmudic saying that we see things not as they are but rather as we are.27 That is, we observe the world through
a set of mental filters that focus our attention on the things that we have come to see as important. We overlook new elements because they do not fit our existing mental frames. Even if we do observe what is in front of us, memory is treacherous.28

  If this isn't the first telling of the story, there's also the risk that it may have evolved significantly through leveling and sharpening. Each time the story is told, the teller adjusts it in subtle ways to meet the current context. Over time, through multiple tellings, the story can change significantly. As the story changes, so memory of the events changes.29

  It is therefore important to take steps to improve both the registering of the initial story and its later recall. At knowledge-sharing sessions, things typically happen very fast. A person taking notes can't be fully following the discussion. A person fully following the discussion doesn't have time to take notes. Where feasible, routine audiorecording of sessions should be considered, provided that the recording itself does not get in the way of interchange.

  In addition, other steps can be taken to enhance story capture:

  Using narratives to summarize: Where complex issues are discussed over an extended period, for instance, at an off-site workshop, the amount of material can be daunting. Getting the group to craft a story of the event before leaving can result in participants' leaving the session with a shared narrative that weaves together many disparate insights. This can lay the foundation for improved future collaboration.

  Transcribing: Where sessions result in significant learning, recordings can be transcribed and then lightly edited to remove inconsistencies and nonsequiturs.

  Hyperlinking: The transcribed text can be hyperlinked to reports and references so that a slender document can become a web with rich content.

  Corroborating and verifying: The person responsible for capturing should also explore the need for corroboration so that mistakes or misunderstandings are not disseminated.

  An aspect of knowledge capture of particular importance to organizations is what to do about experienced staff who leave the organization and walk out the door with highly valuable know-how in their heads that may be crucial to the future work of the organization. This chapter's template lays out steps that can be taken to use storytelling to capture this know-how before it is lost.30

  Creating Context for the Knowledge-Sharing Story

  Most knowledge management programs expend great energy on improving the supply of knowledge, while leaving demand to take care of itself. Unfortunately, the demand side is often the more serious problem. Thus, what enables the transfer of knowledge in the photocopying story at the start of this chapter is the desire of the technician to hear the users' story. He insists on hearing it directly from the users to avoid distortion. Similarly the surgeon dealing with the newborn infant in danger of dying from a blocked windpipe learned the trick of looking for air bubbles by asking the paramedic how he managed to get the tube in. In those cases, the people who possessed the relevant knowledge had no trouble telling the story once asked—but someone had to ask.

  In fact, knowledge is useful only to those willing and able to learn, as Martine Haas discovered in her research on the impact of access to knowledge on the performance of teams in an international organization:

  Results showed that teams operating in a context that encouraged learning and innovation did improve their performance as compared to teams that didn't have access to knowledge. But when teams were operating in environments where the result of their work was predetermined, with little flexibility allowed to the team to adapt and innovate, performance didn't improve along with improved access to knowledge. In this constrained setting, access to knowledge just slowed the team down. Without a desire to learn, improved access to knowledge was a liability, not an asset.31

  Stalk Sensitive Knowledge Through a Story

  Knowledge sharing normally happens within communities or teams that already have the basis of trust. Where this basis isn't present, eliciting knowledge stories can be difficult, particularly for stories that involve pejorative details.

  If the knowledge isn't particularly significant to the acquirer, the task is easier. If I have a shorter route for getting from one location to another, you might be willing to listen to me. But if the knowledge has deep meaning for you, such as how you should exercise your profession or how you should raise your children, you may not be so willing to accept something new that implies jettisoning the elements that are part of your existing identity.

  How can you encourage people to explore new knowledge? One approach developed by Dave Snowden is to use a story as a stalking horse.32 He tells a story about one thing as a way of communicating potentially threatening knowledge about something else. Thus, when Snowden goes into an organization to coach managers on innovation, the dilemma that he faces is often the managers' lack of self-understanding of their counterproductive management practices.

  One of the things he does is to invite the participants in advance of the session to read Dava Sobel's book Longitude:33

  This is the story of the search to solve one of the thorniest scientific problems of the eighteenth century, how to determine longitude. Thousands of lives had been lost at sea over the centuries owing to the inability to determine an east-west position. To solve the problem, a prize was offered that amounted to a fortune in today's currency.

  While some of the most brilliant scientists of the day sought to find a solution through astronomy, self-taught English clockmaker John Harrison devoted much of his life to finding a solution by making an accurate clock. Harrison imagined a mechanical solution—a clock that would keep precise time at sea. By measuring the angle of the sun at noon and comparing it with that of a fixed point like Greenwich, one could calculate one's longitude. Most scientists of the day discounted the idea of a clock because there were too many variables at sea. They were certain that changes in temperature, air pressure, humidity, and gravity would inevitably render a clock inaccurate.

  After years of work, Harrison developed a series of clocks that would work aboard a ship at sea and keep time to within the tolerances required to maintain enough accuracy to figure longitude. But once he had found the solution, Harrison had to battle with the Board of Longitude and its commissioners to get it accepted and so win the prize.

  He underwent a long series of unfair trials and demonstrations. Ultimately he received recognition, after years of dealing with incompetence, stupidity, arrogance, and closed-minded blindness, and was awarded the Copley Medal in recognition of his work by the British Royal Astronomical Society, an award that was later bestowed on persons such as Benjamin Franklin, Captain James Cook, and Albert Einstein. Harrison's clock was proven accurate in 1762, but it was not until 1773 that he received the prize money.

  When Snowden arrives at the session with the managers, he asks the audience to give instances when they have treated their own staff the way that Harrison was treated by the scientific establishment, and he easily receives a large number of instances. If by contrast he had asked the participants to give occasions when they treated their own staff in a callous, pig-headed, stupid manner, he would find that participants would be offended by the question.

  Tease Out the Knowledge-Sharing Story

  Because knowledge-sharing narratives tend to be about issues and difficulties, they typically have a negative tone. In any organization, much of the challenge in sharing knowledge lies in creating settings that enable staff to talk about what has gone wrong. This can be a significant problem where overall trust levels within the organization are low.

  The best solution, of course, is to deal with the root cause and address the problem of distrust. Raising the level of trust in an entire organization is a long-term undertaking. Nevertheless, even in low-trust environments, organizations can generate communities of practitioners who trust each other, even if they don't trust the organization as a whole, as outlined in Chapter Seven.

  Regardless of the level of trust, it's impossible to say al
l we know, if only because we know what we know only when we need to know it. When asked to say what we know in general, it's natural to feel at a loss; when asked about a specific situation, by contrast, we find that our knowledge becomes available for transfer. Some methods are more successful than others in eliciting knowledge-sharing stories.

  The most obvious approach is to generate a free-form discussion in an informal setting, as discussed in the Template for Nurturing Community at the end of Chapter Seven. Get together everyone who has something to contribute in a relaxed setting and spark an interchange about how and why things happened the way they did, and what the difficulties were and how they got fixed. Make sure you have enough time, the right kind of physical space, the right participants, and appropriate facilitation skills on hand.