Adrian Trenholm

Story and knowledge transfer / management

June 17th, 2005

Johnnie Moore has a nagging doubt about the story thing :

It might be this: an awful lot of storytelling is done after the event. Stories rationalise action. If they are great stories, they sometimes provoke action, setting in train some more actions which will later be post-hoc rationalised as another story… Somehow it feels like storytelling is being reduced to a calculated exercise in getting people to do things.

I share Johnnie’s doubts about stories as “the next big thing,” another means to manipulate others, but that’s a problem with the use we make of story, not with story per se .

Yes, meanings are made out of stories - sometimes even meanings which the storyteller did not anticipate - but that’s fine, so long as the storyteller accepts that expanded meaning gracefully. Of course, some stories are just plain dull.

But a good story remains one of the best, time-tested ways to transfer knowledge, and contributes to greater retention of that knowledge by listener or reader than almost any other method. Which is why CIO on Knowledge Management , urges us to:

Tell stories. KM experts agree that tacit knowledge (the 85 percent of human understanding that resides in someone’s head as opposed to an external place) is the most valuable type of knowledge. But getting at tacit knowledge is complex. Melinda Bickerstaff, vice president of knowledge management for Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), an $18 billion drug manufacturer, has people tell stories about their experiences (such as winning Federal Drug Administration approval for Sustiva, an anti-HIV medicine) as a way to exchange lessons learned.

In-house journalists take detailed notes during the proceedings and then write up a report in article format, no slides allowed. “There are 16 dimensions to a story and only one or two to a PowerPoint,” says Bickerstaff. Writing an article as opposed to a bunch of bullet points allows the synthesizer to weave together themes into a complex whole that more fully reflects the tacit knowledge of the people who worked on the problem.

So what if “weaving together themes into a complex whole” is post hoc rationalisation of action? That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

PS I may have pulled Johnnie’s remarks too far out of their original context - a post on seth Godin’s All marketers are liars . Go and read Johnnie’s post if you haven’t already - it’s great - and all the comments too.

Entry Filed under: Thinking , Speaking , Writing