From: eleach [mailto:
eleach@mgmt.dal.ca]
Dear Mila & Teresa:
I read the Denning book below in the context of knowledge sharing and
found it useful. Given the context is the World Bank you may find both
the context and pedagogy useful.
Ed
Denning, S. (2000). The Springboard: How storytelling ignites action in
knowledge-era organizations: Butterworth-Heinemann.
EXTRACT FROM THE AUTHOR
In this book, I describe the success that I had with telling stories
face-to-face with listeners in a live performance, along with the very
limited success that I experienced in using stories in print or video.
I found that a certain sort of story enables change by providing direct
access to the living part of the organization. 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 recreate their organization.
Storytelling enables the individuals in an organization to see
themselves and the organization in a different light, and accordingly
take decisions and change their behavior in accordance with these new
perceptions, insights and identities.
The standard management manual, written in the rigid grip of theory,
relies almost entirely on analytic thinking. This book is about
understanding relationships through stories, from the point of view of a
participant who is living, breathing and acting in the world.
It tells how storytelling can enable a leap in understanding so that the
audience intuitively grasps what the change involves, why it might be
desirable as well as pointing to how an organization or community might
change. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives
and new worlds, and is ideally suited to communicating change and
stimulating innovation.
I discuss here the discovery of the power of storytelling and the
mechanisms by which it operates, thus remedying the neglect of
storytelling, but not so as to jettison analytic thinking. I propose
marrying the communicative and imaginative strengths of storytelling
with the advantages of abstract and scientific analysis.
By a springboard story, I mean a story which enables a leap in
understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an organization or
community or complex system may change. It can enable listeners to
visualize from a story in one context what is involved in a large-scale
transformation in an analogous context.
They were stories that were told from the perspective of a single
protagonist who was in a predicament that was prototypical of the
organization s business The predicament of the explicit story was
familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it was the very
predicament that the change proposal was meant to solve.
The stories had a degree of strangeness or incongruity for the
listeners, so that it captured their attention and stimulated their
imaginations.
Speed and conciseness of style were keys, because as an instigator of
change, I was less interested in conveying the details of what exactly
happened in the explicit story than I was in sparking new stories in the
minds of the listeners which they would invent in the context of their
own environments.
For the same reason, the stories all had happy endings: this seemed to
make it easy for the listeners to make the imaginative leap from the
explicit story that I was telling, to the implicit story that I was
trying to elicit in their minds. In focusing on this facet of the
transformation, I am conscious of having done scant justice to the
broader story of what was going on in the organization, of which I was
only a part.
-----Original Message-----
From: Management Education and Development Discussion
[mailto:
MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU] On Behalf Of Charles Wankel
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 7:58 AM
To:
MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
Subject: Re: Help with cross-cultural stories!!!
Mila and Teresa
Aren't many Harvard and other case studies sort of stories of
management in various cultural contexts? I recall in the late sixties
and
early seventies many books on "comparative management".
A must see site on global mindsets is:
http://www.leadershipandchangebooks.com/Leadership-and-Change-Books/Mana
ging
-With-A-Global-Mindset.htm
You might consider how Tuck aims at changing "thinking and
behavior
from 'international' to 'global.'"
http://www.dartmouth.edu/tuck/news/media/pr991007_2020.html
Cybercollegially,
Charles Wankel
St. John's University, New York
-----Original Message-----
.... We are currently conducting a in-depth research on teaching
international management through storytelling. Our main objectives are
to
know, to understand and to value how stories from other countries help
us to
build a global mindset as well as to train global leaders.
....
Mila Gasco
Open University of Catalonia
and Teresa Torres
Universitat Rovira I Virgili