One Thousand & One's Gabrielle Doonan contends that "organisational storytelling" is a powerful methodology for change managers:
Essentially, change management is replacing existing stories in people's heads with new stories about the future. Narrative and story imagery are powerful ways to paint this vision of the future.
Cognitive Edge, formerly known as Cynefin, has been exploring this methodology for organisational change and knowledge management through its exemplar Dave Snowden.
Two fellow Swinburne MFFS alumni who are experts in this field: Luke Naismith and Tetradian's Tom Graves.
Comments (1)
Dave Snowden blogged on this earlier today with the following comment:
"Telling a story has a double meaning in English, one is the innocent telling of stories the other is in the sense of political spin, telling a story to deceive. We now have a third: telling a story to reprogram your employees or maybe (if we go back around seventy years) your citizens. Another example would be the creationist museum: taking that nasty story about evolution out of people's heads and putting a nice new shiny bible story in its place.
I really hope she didn't mean it that way, but it's how it reads ...."
There's been a fair bit of discussion lately on the actKM listserv on the differences between narrative and storytelling. Storytelling is more about the Steve Denning school of crafting an effective piece of communication that will resonate with others - from spindoctoring to bulls**tting to case studies. Narrative is the collection and interpretation of various anecdotes to understand culture, work processes and emotional styles. The two are quite different. Dave's expertise is in narrative - not storytelling - although he does know how to tell a good story!!
Posted by Luke | June 12, 2007 11:54 PM
Posted on June 12, 2007 23:54