The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  An alternative method is by way of observation—a kind of anthropological method. Go and live with the community, and observe it in action to see how it functions and gather the stories that the members tell each other. If you are careful to blend into the scene and spend enough time there, you may get to know how that community functions. You can then construct stories that approximate the stories that people in that community use. You get inside the idea of what's going on.

  Then there is role playing. Given that knowledge-sharing stories are often about mistakes, there's likely to be a lot of ego at stake. There may be negative repercussions within the organization for exposing mistakes. So when people tell stories about their mistakes, they're often so busy presenting their public identity as competent individuals who don't make unintelligent errors that they may not get around to revealing what actually happened. Role playing allows participants to adopt a throwaway identity (for example, play-acting how an organizational team would normally handle a particular problem) that can free them to present the truth of what actually happens.

  A what-if discussion can also be useful. What if we'd done this? Or what if we hadn't done that? This frees up everyone to tell stories not about what actually happened with all the emotional attachments associated with having made mistakes, but about what might have happened. The stories can be open because no one is risking self-image. Although the topic is something that didn't actually happen, talking about it can shed light on what did happen, as well as on how things could be different in the future. In the process, participants reveal what they really know.34

  You can also make progress by asking experts how novices might get confused if they were undertaking the task. If novices were by some chance pressed into service during an emergency, would they see this in the same way that the experts did? What mistakes would they make? Why would they make them? This approach can elicit useful understanding of what experts know that novices might not.35

  Finally, thinking and doing can be combined in a kind of cycle. We try something, and it doesn't quite work right. We think about it and then imagine how it could have been different. We try that out and see what happens. It seems to be working better. So we try it out again, and we see what happens. Our concrete experience leads to reflection on what worked and the construction of a story leading to further active experimentation. It's the combination of storytelling and active experimentation that leads to insight.

  Special Kinds of Knowledge-Sharing Stories

  Although stories often help people make sense of the world, three common kinds of stories are generally unhelpful:36

  Scapegoat stories: “It's all your fault!” Scapegoat stories assign all the blame to others and turn them into villains. Inevitably it's not true: they aren't all to blame. But both tellers and hearers are likely to think, “They are stubborn: we are principled,” or “They are weak: we are appropriately flexible.” In an organizational setting, this frequently occurs when the finger-pointing starts after a disaster. When such stories emerge, it's often time to rethink your own role in creating the situation.

  Victim stories: “It's all our fault!” In this version, tellers and hearers assign all blame to themselves. In an organizational setting, this tends to occur after a string of failures and the organization loses confidence in its own ability to perform in the future. When such stories emerge, discussing the organization's strengths can be helpful.

  Stories of helplessness: “There's nothing we can do!” Very few situations really leave nothing for the participants to do, whether the situation is personal or organizational. Even people facing imminent death can take steps to make sense of life. And those who tell stories of helplessness are generally not facing imminent death. Such stories are typically a pretext for inaction. When you encounter them (or find yourself telling them), you need to start thinking realistically about what can be done.37

  Official Versus Underground Know-How

  The idea that much knowledge resides in stories has not yet received universal acceptance, as shown by the experience of Gary Klein and four associates in trying to prepare a document that would record what had been learned at a conference:

  The presenters had all submitted abstracts of their talks, but the documents were tedious to read. The organizer wanted a more useful record of the proceedings. So Klein and his associates agreed to participate in each of five concurrent tracks at the conference and prepare an account of what was said. As it turned out, each time a presenter showed a slide about a major idea, everyone in the room would start writing furiously, while Klein and his associates would just sit back. Every time a presenter told a story, Klein and his associates would be writing furiously while the audience would just sit back. By the end of two days, Klein and his associates had assembled a wonderful set of stories, brimming with insights.

  Klein comments: “We know that all the official viewgraphs listing the five key steps to do this or the seven ways to do that are fairly useless. You can exchange these slides from one session to the next, and no one would notice. These slides are filled with useful tidbits like, ‘Keep the lines of communication open,’ and ‘Don't wait too long when problems are building up.’ Presumably these bits of wisdom are going to help those who keep trying to close lines of communication and who insist on waiting too long whenever a problem is detected.”

  Klein gathered together the stories that he and his associates had heard and put them into a thirty-page conference “proceedings.” The conference organizer was delighted with the product and wanted to expand it into a book. But the project fell apart when the document was sent to the presenters for clearance. The presenters were shocked that the official record didn't focus on their abstract conclusions; they didn't want to be remembered as people who “just swapped stories and anecdotes.” Klein's efforts to prove that the presenters' slogans were of little value compared to insights of the stories were to no avail, and the conference “proceedings” could not be released.38

  Most useful knowledge thus lies not in the bland generalities that are bandied about so often in organizations and at conferences but rather in the interstices of the narratives and anecdotes that show how problems actually get solved in a real-life context.

  This is particularly the case with the unofficial underground knowledge of an organization—the rumors, gossip, and heterodox ideas that flow along the grapevine. Some of this underground storytelling is negative and undermines the management and the organization. Some of it is potentially valuable—sometimes, as I outline in Chapter Eleven, even more valuable than the officially accepted knowledge of an organization.39 Whether good or bad, the underground flow of stories is central to the health of an organization, and the question of what a leader can do about it is the subject to which I now turn.

  An Approach for Saving the Knowledge of Departing Staff

  Many organizations face the risk of loss of knowledge with the retirement of seasoned staff. Although there is no way to capture or codify such knowledge completely, steps can be taken to palliate any institutional damage from these departures:

  Assign junior staff to work with and be mentored by the most valuable senior staff. This is usually the best way to ensure knowledge transfer, although it requires careful advance planning and may involve significant resources.

  Encourage retirees to remain members of networks after retirement, offering the incentive of obtaining work as consultants.

  When prospective retirees have specific and rare expertise that is of high value to the organization, arrange interviews with them before departure:

  If possible, arrange one or more interviews well before the expected departure date.

  Prior to the interview, make an assessment of what knowledge is of particular interest and value to the organization and outline the interview. Leave the door open to serendipity. Allow the interviewee to add anything she or he deems fit.

  Have one or more experienced interviewers who are intimately familiar the topi
c conduct the interview.

  Make an audiotape of the interview. Transcribe the tape, and have the interviewee review and edit the transcript for accuracy.

  Hyperlink the interview transcript to written reports, data, issues, projects, or items specifically mentioned in the interview.

  Include the expert's phone number and e-mail address and a brief biography in the transcript.40

  9

  Tame the Grapevine

  Using Narrative to Neutralize Gossip and Rumor

  ”Wisdom cries out in the streets, but no man regards it.“

  William Shakespeare1

  When knowledge management was being introduced under my leadership at the World Bank in the late 1990s, I was convinced that the program was soundly based. Unless the World Bank, as a development institution, learned to share its knowledge, it was doomed to irrelevance.

  Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, agreed; in October 1996 he'd announced his strong commitment to implementing a knowledge-sharing program. We were going to become “the knowledge bank.” Colleagues who shared the vision were full of energy and enthusiasm. What I hadn't realized was that for the next couple of years, as we were implementing the vision, a significant number of people would stay on the sidelines, surreptitiously second-guessing and undermining everything we were trying to accomplish.

  Open conflict would have been one thing. I could have confronted it, presented the solid reasons for implementing the change program, gotten decisions made, and moved on. But surreptitious resistance was something else. Everything looked calm. People appeared to be supporting the program. But below the surface, the rumor mill was going full tilt. It took the form of gossip, snide remarks, imagined bad news, and attempted character assassinations of the proponents of change. Some sections of upper management were even actively circulating the canard that I was “trying to launch Star Wars.” It was difficult even to learn about, let alone deal with, this groundswell. And as the designated leader of the change, I was the target for much of the flow.

  The gossip and rumors were prompted not by any rational analysis of the costs, benefits, and risks of getting the World Bank to share its knowledge but rather by a lack of understanding as to what was involved in the new strategic direction, disagreement over how quickly to implement it, and anxiety as to whose careers, budgets, or turf might benefit or suffer. The underground criticism made it difficult to get the cooperation needed for the enterprise-wide program that we were undertaking.

  What to do? At the time, I had no idea. I could see that denying the rumors and gossip would give them credibility. Asking how they got started would ensure their spread. Ignoring them altogether risked allowing them to grow out of control. So not knowing what to do, I went about the business of implementing the knowledge-sharing program, answering any explicit criticisms, but largely ignoring the rumors and gossip and hoping they would in time go away. I was eventually vindicated in the sense that knowledge sharing did finally succeed.2 But the rumors and gossip were a significant distraction, a handicap to moving forward rapidly with implementation of the program.

  Since then, I've discovered that the torrent of gossip and criticism that pours from the rumor mill is the normal organizational response to any effort to launch basic change. Whether you're the head of the organization desiring to take it in a new direction or an insurgent aiming to persuade the leadership of the organization to change, you will always find a significant number of people who don't agree. Maybe they have a personal or professional interest in the status quo. Maybe they disagree with the reasons for change. Maybe they would like to take the organization in a different direction. Perhaps they are just wary of any change. So although you have mobilized an energized army of champions to lead the change and patiently explained the basis for it, some holdouts will always hug the sidelines, surreptitiously using the grapevine to undermine and even sabotage the transition.

  I further discovered that the grapevine is at its most dangerous after the decision to proceed with the change program has been made. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out, this is when the initial excitement of a new vision has worn off, the practical difficulties of implementation are being resolved, and the full benefits of the change are still not fully realized.3 I could have moved much more quickly and efficiently had I understood how stories define an organization's culture. Once I grasped the power of narrative, I could see how narrative tools could help me deal with and even tame the grapevine.

  The Stories That Form the Corporate Culture

  Corporate culture, says Edgar Schein, is “a pattern of basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”4

  Any group that has been together for a significant time tends to develop a shared view of the way the surrounding world works, of the methods for problem solving that have been be effective in that world, and of the appropriate ways of acting in that world in the future. When this shared view of the world has been in place long enough and is reflected in the actions of the members of the organization, it tends to be taken for granted. It comes to constitute the unspoken know-how or culture of that organization.5

  Knowing how to speak and act in an organization is what makes its members different from recruits or outsiders. But the know-how involved in a culture is not merely about having access to facts. It also includes a capacity to speak and act accordance with the expectations and norms that are in play there.6 Being part of a corporate culture thus involves much more than an observer's intellectual understanding of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable ways of speaking and acting in that organization at that time. A true member is able—without thinking or referring to explicit criteria—to speak and act in the expected way.

  What makes certain speech or behavior acceptable or appropriate in any particular organization? While successful learning from prior experience is one source, other aspects of an organization's culture are decidedly less rational. Personal or institutional histories, turf wars, career gaming, custom, or mere thoughtlessness often play a part. These aspects are communicated in narratives that constrain behavior, even creating path dependency. Larry Prusak discusses one example from IBM, when he was executive director of the Institute for Knowledge Management:

  I was on a number of committees, acquisition committees at IBM, and very often in these discussions, someone would say: “We tried that and it didn't work.” Now, what they said was true. We had tried it and it hadn't worked. And that didn't mean that it would never work. But the story they were telling and the way they were telling it bounded the behavior. It constrained behavior. It was as though they were saying, “The Bishop wills it” or “God wills it.”

  IBM tried three times to buy a telecom firm, and each time it was a disaster. Does that mean necessarily that the fourth time it will also be a disaster? Not at all. There is no logic behind it. But the story is powerful and it becomes embedded in legends and myths. There are opportunity costs since people's careers were killed because they did this. The associations of the story become so powerful that it constrains behavior, often to the detriment of what could be done. The story itself becomes a powerful factor.”7

  Understood But Unwritten

  Organizations usually have a remarkable degree of consensus as to what behavior is acceptable and what isn't, even though the relevant norms are rarely, if ever, written down or codified.

  How does it happen? Ethnologists have shown that culture is transmitted not in formal doctrines or official processes but mainly through stories—anecdotes, jokes, epigrams, or proverbs.8 These pithy utterances are unapologetically ad hoc. They often recount prior successes or failures.

  “Somebody did this one time in this organization and got fired!” There's emotional power there. People think, I'd better not do that or I'
ll be fired! Or: Somebody did this and got promoted. Then people think, Well, maybe I should do that! That's the way to get promoted.9

  The utterances reflect not something that has to be argued for, but rather life as it is lived there—a commonsense apprehension of the way things are. The stories pass on obvious realities, which any wide-awake person who took the time to look would grasp.10 Some examples:

  Procter & Gamble: “What P&G knows more than anything else is TV. No brand manager at P&G ever got fired for recommending a 30-second TV spot.”11

  IBM: “You can't open an office in Kuala Lumpur.”12

  World Bank: “Why would we spend resources on sharing knowledge? We're a bank. The World Bank. Got it?”

  Talk in this maddeningly knowing tone occurs continuously all over the organization—before, during, and after department meetings; in cafeterias, at breakfasts, lunches, receptions, and dinner parties; in corridors and around the office coffee machine or watercooler; by e-mail and in telephone conversations—in effect, wherever the members of an organization get together and start talking. The subject matter of the narratives may include who is getting along with whom, or not, and why, or who is considering what move to make, or who or what is being viewed favorably or unfavorably by the top, or how the organization is reacting to external developments—in effect, anything that might shed light on what is going on in the organization and what may happen next. The stories may at times be mere idle talk and at other times be launched with a specific agenda—measuring who's up and who's down, exploring what others know, testing opinion, identifying possible alliances or detecting possible conspiracies, advancing a cause or undermining a competitor's career.