Appealing to the senses

Karuna Ramanathan explains why storytelling is a powerful tool in KM and presents his successful ‘251 model’ approach

Since the beginning of time, storytelling has been used to inspire, communicate, and transfer knowledge. As a narrative technique, storytelling has been popularised1 by academics, consultants, and, increasingly, by KM practitioners seeking ways to persuade their fellow workers to communicate. The books out there on storytelling for organisations tell us that it is a natural and flexible delivery approach for learning, performance, communicating leadership effectiveness, and change management.

Storytelling can be an important leadership development tool; a process or methodology that enables organisations to develop their next-generation leaders. Stories invoke emotion, and by that very quality, transcend intellectual acceptance and agreement. In short, storytelling and stories are a powerful tool for the manager, and therefore a key leadership skill. This is an important consideration for the knowledge practitioner – in promoting storytelling as a knowledge creation and transfer initiative that the management team should endeavour to promote and practice.

With this as a backdrop, the challenge is how to capitalise on stories and storytelling for knowledge transfer within an organisation. This is not a theoretical issue. Rather, it is a practical problem.

Everyone has a story to tell
Let’s start with the simple notion that everyone can tell a story, and we very often do, in the course of our social interactions in our families, within our communities and with our friends. As we become more conscious about our stories, our vicarious roles as characters in those stories provide our audience with more clarity about who we are, why we are here, and how we should or would like to act in the world.2

Throughout life, we collect stories, inventing some and being handed stories by others. One way of grouping stories is to consider where they come from – namely, official, invented (adapted), first-hand experiential, secondhand, or culturally common. Each time a person tells a story, it is a re-creation3.Since the mind is associative, and the intent or context of the story may change with every new attempt to re-tell the story, what is significant and what is insignificant will shift, and several stories may blur together from the viewpoint of the storyteller.

Storytelling studies indicate that around 10 per cent of the communication comes from content, and around 90 per cent comes from the tone of the voice, accompanying gestures and eye contact (Denning, 2002). Just as we remember stories that our grandparents and parents narrated to us when we were young, the stories that we heard when we first joined the organisation as young men and women remain etched in our conscious memory. Senior managers will be able to recall stories from the past, especially those that might have influenced them in terms of their behavioural development, or in a simpler sense, how they turned out years later.

My interest in storytelling surfaced some years back, when I started my journey to acquire a formal education in KM, believing that theory underscores practice. A key issue in KM literature in the early 2000s was the exasperation behind and the futility of knowledge sharing. Many promoted the polarised view that there was no such thing as knowledge sharing, because it was simply impossible to motivate employees to share. Some citied knowledge as power,4 or as a valuable commodity, and suggested that people in general do not share what is valuable to them, preferring rather to trade or transact on it. Some cited organisations as knowledge markets5 and their people as either knowledge buyers, sellers or brokers. Looking back, the era some 10 to 15 years ago was about knowledge as a stock, a tangible good that could be transferred based on a utility equation.

Tempting as it was to have written off knowledge sharing as futile, I started to reflect upon my experiences onboard the ships that I had served on. I realised that storytelling was something that came naturally to all of us. I was able to recall many instances where I had either heard or shared stories of my own. I decided that we all tell stories socially, although it is likely not something that we have been taught how to do. Notwithstanding the few who declare themselves as professional storytellers. I had the privilege of being in the company of some of these highly energetic and eloquent storytellers at the Asian Storytelling Congress in 2009 in Singapore. Here, I was also invited to discuss storytelling. It became very apparent to me that the power of stories to take one on a journey either back to the past or into the future from a fictional perspective belonged to the consummate few, who I am sure spent a lot of time developing their abilities. They are, in my mind at least, verbal actors who are able to use sound, diction, lexical choice and other language mechanics to hold an audience spellbound. I seriously doubt that knowledge workers would want to attempt to develop such admired skills.

Storytelling in the organisation
Denning’s use of the storytelling technique to build a case for funding of KM initiatives when he was working at the World Bank introduced us to the basic utility of storytelling within a corporate environment6. The springboard story could paint a desired future, and invoke imagination and visualisation. The Denning books were instructive reads for me, and spurred my curiosity on further. For one thing, I concluded that while storytelling remained inherently social, and that all men and women were also predominantly social, our interactions at work remained professional and hierachical. It dawned on me that the real challenge was how to bridge the social practice of storytelling into the professional and hierarchical interaction spaces at work. After all, well-intended attempts to put a group of busy executives through a two-day storytelling workshop can potentially end up as a non-starter because of the common refrain that they are not quite cut out for this.

In 2008, I was out at sea on a project, and I created a simple storytelling model after observing a young man struggling to tell a story one evening, as he reflected on his recently completed adventure training. That was the start of the ‘251 model’, meaning two introductory remarks, five points, and one key lesson learnt; intended to be intuitive, using the five fingers on the palm of one hand. The young man was taught and subsequently used this format quite instinctively, and the practice has stayed on since.

Using the 251 model
This simple to use technique requires little preparation, and can be converted to written form quite quickly. There are two basic principles behind this approach. The first is that as human beings we can only manage to keep five, or slightly more, items in current memory. This then means that using the five fingers to remember these five key areas that we want to recall in our story will not require a notepad, or any other material. You can only imagine how unauthentic the storyteller will appear if he has to keep referring to index cards or a notepad as he narrates his experience. The second principle is my emerging hypothesis behind knowledge sharing – that for an individual to truly share his insights after an experience, he will have to dig into his emotional frame of reference, rather than stay at the basic and default level of his intellectual frame. In meetings and discussions, we come prepared to share our observations and opinions. These tend to be rational, scientific and well-considered. In fact, this is what modern training and education prepare us to do as managers. Very often, these observations and opinions are assumed to be explicit knowledge, and knowledge sharing is claimed. However, in a deeper sense, the real knowledge is the tacit knowledge, and this requires an emotional frame of reference. One way of training ourselves to share knowledge is to deliberately reflect on the five senses as emotion indicators – and the use of the five fingers in this basic storytelling model helps us do just that.

Using this simple model within organisations, knowledge practitioners should be able to promote organisational level stories, akin to ‘meta stories’, which transmit key organisational perspectives and values. As a military example, naval officers would have heard Nelson stories. Knowledge transfer at the system level can be activated through such key stories and these stories can foster common identity. Within an organisation, each manager can be technologically equippedto draw on iconic stories to build meaning, value, conviction and passion, and to align such stories and their own, to the mission and purpose of the organisation.

Since this simple storytelling model equips everyone to start practicing to tell stories, knowledge transfer at the group or team level can be illuminated through department level stories. Here, the stories are more localised, and are framed within the context of the participants. Such stories will provide a deeper meaning and collective insight into why things are done the way they are done within a particular department, and can be most potent during an induction programme or a retreat. When consciously attempted, these stories are akin to department histories, or as I like to label them as ‘his-stories’, which trace the origins and pathways of the department’s successes and lessons learnt, and in the process, build commitment and enrolment.

At the individual or personal level, everyone has stories to tell, and equipping everyone with a simple storytelling template such as this will build confidence in externalising knowledge. Using this simple technique, employees can voice their experiences, the only caveat being that the stories should be true and authentic. Nobody likes to be told to make up a story. Supervisors who conduct coaching conversations with their subordinates will also be able to recount their experiences through their own stories.

When more people around us know more about what we have experienced, the social fabric becomes tighter and more personal approaches to relationship management can be facilitated. These are the building blocks for effective knowledge transfer between individuals.

References

Brown J S, Denning S, Groh K, Prusak L, 2005, Storytelling in Organisations: Why Storytelling is Transforming 21st Century Organisations and Management, United Kingdom, Butterworth-Heinemann
Taylor D, 1996, The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself through the Stories of Your Life, New York, Doubleday
Edelman G, Tononi G, 2000, A Universe of Consciousness; How Matter becomes Imagination, New York, Basic Books
Citing Francis Bacon’s famous fifteenth century quote that “Knowledge is Power”
Davenport T H, Prusak L, 1998, Working Knowledge: How Organisations Manage What They Know, USA, Harvard Business School Press
Denning S, 2001, The Springboard: How Storytelling ignites Action in Knowledge Era Organisations, Boston, Butterworth Heinmann