Conversations
with Stephen Denning
What's
the Best Way to Share Knowledge?
Steve Denning
Asks AOK Members to Help Solve a Story-telling Problem
 Introduction
We welcome the return
of Stephen Denning, former program manager, knowledge management
at The World Bank, and well-known author of the The
Springboard, which inspired thousands around the world
to attempt storytelling as a tool to affect change in organizations.
Steve has the somewhat
less -- but important to us -- distinction of being the "father
of the AOK STAR Series Dialogues. A colleague of Steve's, Michel
Pommier, was a member of AOK two years ago when he suggested
to Steve that they test a  manuscript
they were working on using a Discussion Group managed by AOK.
They did, and it launched what is now known as the STAR Series
Dialogues. The success of Steve's first moderated discussion
and the high profile of Steve Denning made it easy to recruit
successive volunteer luminaries to these discussions.
Now, Steve has returned,
ready to test a draft of a subsequent storytelling book -- The
Squirrel: The Seven Highest Value Forms of Organizational Storytelling.
In a way, it's a "how to" book to help people put
into practice the power of storytelling they only heard about
in Steve's first book.
Be one of Steve's
collaborators, and you will soon be an accomplished storyteller
using a tool that can transform complex thoughts into change
agents at work and in your personal life. Enjoy!
Steve Denning's
problem
I have a knowledge
sharing problem.
Jerry Ash thinks
that the problem might be of wider interest and has kindly invited
me to share it with you and get your advice over the period September
30 to October 11, 2002.
As some of you know,
from 1996-1999 in my work in KM at the World Bank, I stumbled
on the power of a kind of story -- springboard stories -- stories
that can communicate complex ideas and spark action. When I started
writing a book about my experiences I was advised that no one
would be
interested in my story. Happily, they were wrong and the eventual
book, The
Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era
Organizations
continues to reach
readers around the world.
From 2000 to 2002,
I have been coaching executives in other organizations how to
craft springboard stories in many different organizational environments,
and I have learnt a great deal about what works and what doesn't
and what are the most common pitfalls of attempting this. I also
came across six other high value forms of organizational storytelling
that deal with other central management challenges:
- how do you get
people working together?
- how do you share
knowledge?
- how do you tame
the grapevine?
- how do you communicate
who you are?
- how do you transmit
values?
- how do you lead
people into the future?
My knowledge sharing
problem is: how do I communicate what I have learnt? It's fine
if I can sit down with someone and spend a couple of days going
through these ideas. But what if I can't? How can I communicate
this knowledge in writing?
The insights can
be summarized in an analytic framework, but in this format, they
represent a set of relationships that are not particularly easy
to digest and implement:
http://www.stevedenning.com/Excerpt%20Table%20Sep%203%2002.pdf
One approach would
be to expand this material into the format of a standard business
book, spelling out the twelve steps to craft a springboard story,
or, the six steps to tame the grapevine. The material involved
here can be
seen at:
http://www.stevedenning.com/Excerpt%20Appendices%20Sep%203%2002.pdf
When I started down
this track, some of the feedback I received was: isn't this also
quite difficult to digest? Why don,t you communicate it through
a story? Given my background, I couldn't think of a good reason
not to at least try.
The difficulty I
faced in following the format of The Springboard is that
whereas my work in 1996-1999 was in a single organization and
fairly naturally formed a coherent story of an organization going
through major change, my work in 2000-2002 is a sprawling adventure
covering many organizations and many different kinds of experiences.
It doesn't naturally and easily form a single coherent story.
So then I was advised:
why don't you write in a fable like Who Moved My Cheese?
or Fish! or The Goal? These books have apparently
reached large numbers of readers.
Could a fable be
the answer to my problem: what's the best way to communicate
the powerful new uses to which storytelling -- one of the oldest
of all human tools -- is now being put in the modern economy?
Over the centuries,
animal fables have reached diverse audiences with difficult and
complex messages. Aesop and La Fontaine did it with a menagerie
of animals, Franz Kafka with insects, George Orwell with pigs,
James Agee with cows, James Quinn with a gorilla and Spencer
Johnson with mice.
I decided to try
my hand at a story using squirrels.
Why squirrels?
Squirrels sparked
my imagination in several ways. Some years ago, I was reading
that wonderful compendium known as Harpers Index and I
noticed an oddball statistic. It was the percentage of nuts that
squirrels actually recover and eat as against the nuts they bury.
I've forgotten the exact number, but it was remarkably low. The
fact, if not the number, stuck in my mind as I watched families
of squirrels run about my garden and I thought of the huge numbers
of nuts that they were continually losing. Accordingly, this
book tells the story of the transformation of an organization
called Squirrel Inc. from a nut-burying to nut-storing organization.
We follow the transformation as it goes from an improbability
(chapter 1), a possibility (chapter 2), a probability (chapter
3), a lost opportunity (chapter 9) through to the dénouement
in the epilogue.
Washington, D.C.
has the highest density of squirrels anywhere in the world. I've
always done much of my writing from a room that looks out over
several
gardens. From my window, I could see a large old mulberry tree
and it was remarkable how many squirrels ran and played on its
wide horizontal branches. From time to time, I would look up
from my writing and as I saw countless pairs of squirrels gamboling
and frolicking on this tree with such evident pleasure, my spirits
would lift. It was obvious that the long horizontal branches
of the mulberry tree made a wonderful playground for them. Then
one day, I looked out the window and saw no mulberry tree!
My neighbors had without warning cut down the tree! Since a mulberry
tree is a messy thing in a city garden, I understood their action,
but I was shocked on behalf of the squirrels. How would they
feel when they found that their mulberry tree had been cut down?
A kinder gentler
inspiration came from Grace Marmor Spruch's wonderful book, Squirrels
At My Window: Life with a Remarkable Gang of Urban Squirrels,
which meticulously records and describes the life and times of
a group of real-life city squirrels whose personalities and foibles
are not too removed from those of humans.
So I pressed ahead
with the squirrel fable, and you can find a number of chapters
at:
http://www.stevedenning.com/squirrel.htm
Editor's
note:
Scroll down the page to come to the text.
Among the characters
that one meets in my tale are:
- Diana, an up-and-coming
executive at Squirrel Inc. who discovers
the power of springboard stories;
- Whyse, an advocate
of storytelling that communicates who you are;
- Mark, who uses
storytelling to transmit values;
- Hester, who uses
storytelling to get people working together;
- Mocha, who shows
how humor can be used to tame the grapevine;
- Howe, who deploys
storytelling to share knowledge; and
- Sandra, who pursues
storytelling to lead into the future.
So my question is:
is this the best way to communicate my knowledge?
I realize that there
is a certain type of reader who reacts negatively to animal fables,
particularly the kind of reader whose real-life attic is persistently
invaded by successive colonies of hard-to-get-rid-of squirrels.
But what are the
alternatives?
One alternative
would be to transpose the story to a human context. If so what
would be a context that would be of interest to readers from
many different sectors and businesses?
Another alternative
would be to tell the story of my work in 2000-2002, accepting
the fact that it will be a sprawling story that doesn't naturally
and easily form a single coherent narrative.
Another alternative
would be to do a fieldbook of stories that I have encountered
over this period.
Another alternative
would be to go back to the standard business format, spelling
out the twelve steps to craft, a springboard story or the six
steps to tame the grapevine in standard analytic format.
A final alternative
that is sometimes suggested to me is: all of the above.
However in this case, the question really becomes in order should
they be
attempted?
So that's my problem.
I have (I think) a good deal of useful knowledge. I want to share
this with others. I get indications that others are interested
in getting access to this knowledge. What's the best way to share
this it?
I have framed the
question in the context of my particular situation and knowledge.
But the question also has a more general application. What's
the best way to transfer knowledge when you have (a) someone
with knowledge (b) the knower wants to share it and (c) there
are people who are interested in getting the knowledge? So often
in KM, we're focused on the problems of organizations where the
people don't want to share or others are not interested in learning
or the organization doesn't permit or encourage sharing, that
we don't spend any time on the (apparently) simpler problem:
when you don't have any of those obstacles in the way, what's
the best way to share knowledge?
Steve
Denning
web www.stevedenning.com
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