Storytelling

 Recently I came across this piece of innovation that has the potential to change all our lives!

We all have the light bulb moments. My idea about Storytelling, Myths & KM was brilliant- but was it my idea in the first place, or just an unconscious compilation of things devoured on Twitter and in blogs?

I hope, I could make some interesting connections to the mind, but on Storytelling itself has been written the amount of quite some wheels.

But I am going to write this post anyway, because I am getting paid for it in a way, yes, but also for good reasons: With Social Media we live in times, where a probalistic approach helps to cope with information overload (so take this post simply as a retweet of good stuff by others) and it seems that the memory horizon in KM is frustatingly poor (JKM, homepage of author) Our own medicines tastes too bitter to us?
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Applications of Storytelling in Knowledge Management is a nice intro-presentation, while Larry Prussak gives a complete lecture on Storytelling and Ewen le Borgne has taken stock on Storytelling.

So I can pick the cherries, and I do so from Telling Tales by Stephen Denning (HBR).

At a time when corporate survival often requires disruptive change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways. Mind-numbing cascades of number or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even the most logical arguments usually won’t do the trick. But effective stroytelling often does.  Which reminded me on one of my failures: KM on slides has no value.

Is this new in Ericsson? Actually not, I see the relation towards Use-Case production.
Cite's Noel Tichy in The Leadership Engine: "the best way to get humans to venture into unknown terrain is to make that terrain familar and desirable by taking them there first in their imagination." Rembember Cognitive Load Theory? Imagination!His (Dave Snowden's) hypothesis was that you could attach a positive story to a negative one in order to defuse it, as an antibody would neutralize an antigen.
Dave had found purely positive stories to be problematic. ... listeners would respond to such rosy tales by conjuring up negative "antistories" about what must have actually happened.These are only some gold nuggets from the recommended article, perhaps the biggest one:

Do I have to start running around telling and digging for stories everywhere now? Why not start lean, before going in tough next time, with all argumentational and numerical guns blazing, start off with a story making you point – for sure better than saving the reference cases till the end, when the real story is that everyone just wants to break away anyway.

regards

gerald