From: R Ramamurthy
rramxx@vsnl.com
In connection with the discussion on this subject, here is an article which
is an abridgement of one written by Denning in the year 2002:
R.Ramamurthy
Story Telling
Stories, specially the real-life ones, can be powerful tools to change
organizations, as well as to preserve them. This realization comes at a
particularly useful time for many large organizations - most of which are
facing the inevitability of undertaking major change if they are to survive
in a rapidly changing marketplace, yet finding it difficult to implement
such change in a consensual manner. Indeed, the paradox facing these
organizations is that major change is irresistible, but the organizations
themselves often seem almost immovable.
The Use of Stories to Change Organizations
Stories enable a leap in comprehension 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. This can occur
much more rapidly and easily than by providing detailed abstract and
analytical information about the proposed change.
Stories enable listeners to extrapolate from a scenario in one context to
what might be involved in implementing the change in the analogous context
of the listeners' own environments. The story enables them to grasp the idea
of a community of practitioners and the function of a knowledge base, not
only very simply and quickly, but also in a non-threatening way. In effect,
it invites them to see analogies from their own backgrounds, their own
contexts, and their own fields of expertise.
Comparison with Abstract Definitions
Compare stories to abstract definitions as a way of introducing a complex
change concept. The definition is unintelligible except to someone who
already understands the subject. By contrast, this story of a task team
leader in Madagascar is readily comprehensible:
In late 1998, a task team leader, while in Madagascar, was able, within a
couple of days, to get expert advice from a community of his colleagues in
order to solve a problem with a client.
Often the changes that need to be implemented in large organizations are
complicated, having many dimensions and facets. Not all of them may be fully
understood when management embarks on the change process. The dilemma for
leaders in such situations is how to mobilize enthusiasm for a complex idea
that even they only partially under-stand. Often the attempt to explain the
idea can kill enthusiasm before implementation even begins.
How Stories Work to Catalyze Change
Of course, storytelling is not a panacea for organizational change, nor is
it a substitute for changes in strategy, programs, budgets, incentives,
personnel, measurement and all the many actions needed over a period of
years to transform a large organization. Storytelling is, however, a tool
that can be used to elicit decisions to implement such measures in the first
place. It can help the instigator of change communicate the change idea at
any level. It can assist in mobilizing large numbers of employees, including
entrenched managers, to support changes that will initially seem strange and
threatening.
There are a number of reasons why stories can be effective to change
organizations.
(a) Storytelling is natural and easy. The ability to tell and follow
a narrative is a capacity that happens at such an early age - around the age
of two or three years - that one is tempted to call the capability innate,
or at least a natural, one. Listening to stories is what most of us
experience as invigorating and refreshing and energizing. We find the
telling of stories inherently pleasurable. Stories invite the listener to
visualize a different world, and in the imagining, to add value to the
activity. The shared imagining of the teller and listener creates a common
space. As the storyteller watches the reactions of the listeners, he
instinctively builds on and emphasizes the elements that are resonating with
the listeners, thereby encouraging the phenomenon of co-creation. The
audience senses that the story-teller is interacting with them, and they
respond to it with more reactions. The phenomenon is natural, spontaneous
and pleasurable.
(b) Stories show the connections between things: A good story holds
disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action.
(c) Stories help cope with complexity: The world is a complex place.
Stories provide a simple way that has been used to communicate the
complexity of the world.
(d) Stories bypass defense mechanisms: People can't always see where
a good story is heading. Their standard analytical defenses are thus usually
in neutral during the hearing of a new story. The mind is not critiquing it,
but following it, and projecting on to it. This enables a more participatory
spirit towards understanding what is involved in it.
(e) Stories are energizing: Analytic, abstract, step-by-step
explanations are often tiring. By contrast, when the listener discovers the
implicit idea in a story, energy is generated.
(f) Stories can enhance or change perceptions: If an idea is big,
bold, and different it is initially going to look very illogical because of
the perceptual fields of the listeners. A story is thus a way of making a
strange new idea familiar and comprehensible and acceptable to a potentially
resistant audience.
(g) Stories are easy to remember: Stories enable people to
reconstruct complex events. In a story, the narrator provides the causal
sequence. Once the listeners grasp this sequence, they can make sense of a
wide range of phenomena and events by drawing on their own experience and
tacit understanding.
(h) Stories are inherently non-adversarial: The natural approach to
listening to a story is to go along with the storyteller and see where the
story leads. By contrast, when we are confronted with an abstract
proposition, we tend instinctively to accept or reject it based on how it
fits with our pre-existing conceptual schema.
(i) Stories engage our feelings: Because stories are in their nature
about the irregularities in our lives, things that catch our attention as
being different from what is expected, and they arouse our curiosity.
How Stories Work: Stories aimed at eliciting change in organizations do not
achieve their impact through any detailed information contained in the
explicit story. There are two stories that the story-teller is trying to
generate in the listener. One is the explicit story that the listener hears
coming from the lips of the storyteller. The more important is a story that
the listeners themselves will invent - a new story of how something similar
could occur in the listeners' own lives and work environments that will
respond to the specific features of their context, their problems, their
hopes, and their aspirations.
The value of a story to elicit change is thus only as great as the thoughts
in the audience that it elicits, the insights that it inspires and the
positive energy it generates in the audience. If it is fully successful, it
will trigger in the minds of the audience a story which creates a new sense
of meaning for the listeners, a new organization-life-story.
Important elements of the story:
The story must be understandable to the audience it is being told to. The
story must grab the hearts and capture the imagination of the audience.
Stories should be told from the perspective of a single person.
That person should be typical of the organization's business. In particular,
it should reflect the core activities related to the part of the
organization where the change needs to take place. The story should have a
degree of strangeness for the listeners. This interrupts the thought process
of the listeners either because there is a new event that is not expected,
or because an expected event that does not happen.
Stories that depart from shared norms of experience and prevailing frames in
four ways are: (a) the actions described are difficult, (b) the situation
poses a predicament that cannot be handled in a routine manner, (c)
unexpected events happen in an otherwise normal sequence of events, and (d)
something about the situation is unusual in the narrator's experience. An
interesting story of this sort is a threat to one's model of reality or
frame, which means that interesting stories are cues that evoke mixture of
fear and curiosity.
The story must not only be fresh, but also strangely familiar.
The story should embody the change proposal to the fullest extent possible.
The story should, to the extent possible, be a true story.
The story should be reasonably recent.
The story should be told as simply and as briefly as possible.
- Condensed from an article "Using Stories to Spark Organizational Change"
by Stephen Denning, Program Director, Knowledge Management, World Bank,
Washington D.C., in the Journal of Stroytelling and Business Excellence, of
Storytelling Foundation International
(From "Quality Info", a fortnightly newsletter, dated 1st June 2002)
R Ramamurthy
Bangalore
rramxx@vsnl.com