Storytelling

Storytelling is a good tool when talking about knowledge sharing and experience transfer. It is motivating when you listen to a good story, and in my mind more fun.

Stephen Denning is saying : ” Storytelling gets inside the minds of the individuals who collectively make up the organization and affects how they think, worry, wonder, agonize, and dream about themselves and in the process create – and re – create – their organization”.

He also say: “Storytelling is natural and easy and entertaining and energizing. Stories help us understand complexity. Stories are inherently non – adversarial and non – hierarchical. They bypass normal defense mechanisms and engage our feelings”.

” When the story does it’s job, the listeners minds race ahead, to imagine the further implications of elaborating the same idea in other contexts, better and more intimately known to the listeners. In this way, through extrapolation from the anecdote, the recreation of the idea of knowledge management can be successfully brought to birth, with the concept of it planted in listener’s minds, not as a vague abstract inert thing, but an idea that is pulsing, kicking, breathing, exciting – and alive”. ( Denning 2001, referred from Inger Lise 2008)

Denning say’s; ” If the storyteller has the reader’s full attention and can refer to a world with which the reader’s are intimately familiar, they can be transported quite quickly to the new mental habitat”.

Good stories are an important inspirational source for people, it could for example be implemented in knowledge sharing or to gain new wisdom . People can recognize episodes from stories and they can draw their own pictures from them.

David Gurteen say’s that we should tell people the true story and let them  find the essence from the story in their own picture. It is all about in how you engage people to come up with their own thought’s and idea’s. ( D.Gurteen, pers. from Inger lise 2007)

“It’s now become a huge issue, knowledge and learning; it’s THE issue for a firm – I can’t imagine anything more important: how do we learn and where do we learn and in what form ? Information is an article in a book or paper – it’s frozen knowledge. Knowledge is what a person knows, an individual, or maybe what groups of people linked together know. It aggregates into capability, the capacities of organizations”. (Brown, Denning, Groh, Prusak; referred from Inger Lise 2008).

Inger Lise E. Greger, MSc. Change Management