subject: Guideglines for Storytelling in Organizations [print this page] Guideglines for Storytelling in Organizations
Process
Group Storytelling involves a group of people who can recall portions of knowledge from the past and describe them in their own words. It provides a natural way for users to report their experiences with process and activities. As stories are built collaboratively, they correspond to the collective knowledge of the process. Story telling is a vital knowledge management tool.
An episode is defined as a set of events and their relationships. An episode description falls into one of three categories, which are reported version, true version, and known version respectively.
Sharing stories helps in the search for new fitness peaks, since stories provide the rationale behind exploration, and serve as tags in guiding evolutionary process of co- evolution of the organization in the fitness landscape.
Formal stories are seen as a means for communicating the management's visions about the company future as well as the set of values, which the company emphasizes. Connects people and motivate actions. Formal stories can have the form of the management's speeches at employee meetings, vision and value statements in internal brochures, and books written by the management. Through formal stories, management influences organizational culture.
The reported version is generated when participants externalize knowledge about the events they have witnessed. The goal of the tuning/recalling process is to approximate the reported version to the known version. To generate a true version from an incomplete known version, conjecture must be added, speculating about missing information. A good story combines the objective with the subjective, the rational with the emotional.
Stories by strategic leaders promote perspective making, taking, and shaping. Engaging in dialogue and exchanging stories are two mechanisms by which cognitive co sensuality is achieved producing an organizational identity and a shared life story.
Group storytelling is a more appropriate process than individual storytelling in contexts where there are several people involved in the execution of a project. The group will build collectively a story about a work done by its members. Each participant performed a role in the project, for which the story will be told. Therefore, the stories written by a team will probably contain details (tacit elements of their knowledge) that are more valuable because everybody has the opportunity to present their views of what happened during the project.
Stories are told at all levels in an organization. The stories are evaluated by their recipients on criterions as verisimilitude, and to whether the stories make sense out of events encountered by the individual.
Storytelling and other narrative techniques are particularly valuable in community formation and in providing a thread of continuity during community evolution.
By virtue of their narrative structure, stories tend to sort information into coherent patterns, such as the appropriate sequence of events or the causal order of organizational phenomena.
Story telling used as a communicative tool to share value improves collective ingenuity and knowledge of individuals. The story gives meaning to an ambiguous situation so the employee is able to act with increased understanding of the organizational cultures in future situations. These values are shaped and thus influence the organizational cultures is through the organizational stories.
In the stories, this is communicated explicitly, but also an implicit understanding is communicated in the morale of the stories, which thus contributes to an increased ability for employees to act appropriately in the organization other situations.
Myth making is an adaptive way groups in organizations sustain logics and shared meanings to make sense of events. Myths are ways to handle problematic aspects of modern organizations. Myths narrow the horizon in which organizational life is allowed to make sense. Myths collide and compete in the ongoing negotiation of power and privilege among groups attempting to determine the dominant myth-making systems. Myths create, maintain, and legitimate past, present, and future actions and consequences. Myths have live cycles of development, maturation, decline, and reformulation.
Formal and informal stories can be seen as correcting each other. If the stories that the management communicates do not correlate to the organizational reality as the employee see it, then informal stories arise between the employees to adjust for this incongruity.
To capture the dynamical nature of social systems, stories and storytelling can be used. It is through the telling of stories, about the organization's history, that strategic leaders provide a rationale for past actions and a legitimate perspective that guides potential future behaviors.
Enriches leaders' role in fostering organizational learning and adaptation using storytelling.
By virtue of their narrative structure, stories tend to sort information into coherent patterns, such as the appropriate sequence of events or the causal order of organizational phenomena.
A powerful way of making outsiders feel like insiders and imparting tacit knowledge or its emotional component is through Storytelling. Storytelling is a reference signal in the feedback loops that guides the adaptation of the system and implements social learning system.
Organization's story telling process provides a strong influence on the organizations direction, the underlying logic of that process and the interaction patterns that supports to transform over time through meme evolution. The development of stories undergoes mutation and variation being subject to mimetic evolutionary processes.
The popularity and the importance of stories have led organizations to adopt them as a knowledge management tool. Stories can foster communities, facilitate communication, accelerate organizational change, stimulate innovation, and transmit knowledge.
Advantages
Storytelling has advantages over the communication techniques commonly used in organizations, be they email, reports, or formal speeches. First, it enables articulation of emotional aspects as well as factual content, allowing expression of tacit knowledge.
By grounding facts in a narrative structure, it augments the learning will take place and be passed on.
Purposeful storytelling can deliver results that conventional, abstract modes of communications such as those mentioned earlier cannot.
