Story gathering, sharing, making, and

telling are powerful tools for helping

organizations increase internal and

external understanding of their values,

products and services, and culture.

Corporate StorytellingPerspectivesHilary McLellan Many organizations are turning

to storytelling as a way toleverage their human capital moreeffectively. As Peter Giuliano ofthe Executive CommunicationGroup explains, "Using a narrativeapproach is what helps make infor-mation tangible and memorable."(Steen, 1999) Stories provide manyadvantages, including the following:

• Stories show us patterns, andthey help us to make connections.

• They are tools for empowerment.

• Stories originate in problematicsituations; they show the wayout of these situations.

• Great stories provide us with aroad map or treasure map, whichoutlines all ofthe actions andtasks we have to accomplish inorder to complete the journeysuccessfully.

• Stories also provide a toolkitfor solving all ofthe problemsthat have to be dealt with alongthe way.

• We tell stories to eliminatesuspects: who did what when,or what caused this technicalflameout?

• Good stories make you feelyou've been through a satisfying,complete experience.

• Stories are a form of "expertsystem" for remembering andintegrating what we learn.

• Stories are thought machines,by which we test out our ideasand feelings about some thingand try to learn more about it.

• Stories help us to identify andunderstand the forces impactingupon us.

Jungian and cognitive psychol-ogists (notably Roger Schank)claim that stories are a funda-mental part of human intelligenceand imagination. We start withthe mythic story patterns thatappear in our dreams. Then, aswe gain experience, we createstories to help us remember our

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experiences. Stories provide a convenient tool forremembering things.

According to Rafe Martin, "Narrative is a complex,powerful, and mysterious tool, certainly one of theoldest technologies on the planet. Deep in the psyche,the world itself is a tale. Every story partakes of thismystery; every telling renews some recognition of thisfundamental delight. At a practical level, stories provideus with given ways to organize, test, and simulate in themind universal patterns of thought and behavior."

Stories serve many purposes in organizations,including story gathering, story sharing, story making,and storytelling. Let's explore how these story appli-cations can be used in organizations.

Story GatheringStory gathering refers to activities such as getting

the lay of the land and getting feedback from usersand customers. Examples of this include user stories(now often documented on the World Wide Web) andworkplace anthropologists gathering stories in theirresearch documenting user behavior.

There are other kinds of stories. For example, whatare the stories customers tell about a product? Weoften hear testimonials featured in ads, but recentlyquite a number of companies have started to harveststories from customers to use in advertising and pro-motion. As Kelley (2005) explains, "Companies fromDell to Starbucks have lots of corporate legends thatsupport their brands and build camaraderie withintheir teams. Medtronic, celebrated for its productinnovation and consistently high growth, reinforces itsculture with straight-from-the-heart storytelling frompatients' firsthand narratives of how the productschanged—or even saved —their lives." Kelley reportsthat Medtronic employees often turn to customerstories as a way to re-inspire their work.

One ofthe most exciting examples of story gatheringcomes from Coca-Cola. The company has established aspecial attraction in Las Vegas, centered upon stories.The World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas is a combinationtheater, museum, and store. It has a replica Coca-Colabottle 100 feet tall where you can take an elevator ride.A storytelling theater shows a range of Coca-Cola adsas well as true stories about Coca-Cola from customersaround the world. You are invited to tell your story,too —a small studio is set up to record people tellingtheir stories about their own Coca-Cola memories,providing potential additional stories for the theater.

Coca-Cola hired renowned storyteller DanaAtchley to advise on how to showcase stories in theWorld of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas. As described athttp://www.nextexit.com, Atchley recommendedusing digital media to capture stories about eachvisitor's special experiences with this famous softdrink. These memories are brought to life throughseveral short two- to three-minute video vignettesthat are shown in the storytelling theater. Twenty-four separate stories are rotated, so each visit willoffer new tales to view.

One ofthe most memorable visitor stories at theWorld of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas, was told by a womanabout her father, who served in the army in Burmain World War IL This soldier took six bottles of Coketo war, drank five, and saved the sixth as a good luckcharm. He planned to drink it at the end ofthe war,but when D-day came, his Coca-Cola bottle hadbecome such a beloved symbol of home that he tookit back to Indiana, where it still rests, unopened, onhis mantel, in a place of honor.

Additionally, the World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas,offers special events to help showcase stories. Forexample, in honor of Veteran's Day, wartime memo-rabilia is displayed including a soldier's sewing kit,a soldier's Coca-Cola ration card, playing cards, and1940s Coca-Cola ad reprints and more. The displayfeatured a reproduction of the special cablegram fromGeneral Dwight D. Eisenhower to Robert Woodruff,Coca-Cola's chairman, requesting the distribution ofmore than 5 billion bottles of Coca-Cola to Americanservicepeople everywhere.

Story SharingStory sharing refers to knowledge transfer. Story

sharing can be conceived as "bootstrapping" on otherpeople's experiences, inspiring insight, and providingcatalysts for communication. One example of this istechnicians sharing war stories. At Xerox PARC, theleadership recognized that technicians were usingtheir coffee breaks to share war stories and problemsolutions, so they tried to encourage this behavior.Other organizations might have perceived only thatthe technicians were taking long coffee breaks andsought to tighten control, thereby losing this impor-tant communication channel.

NASA has established ASK Magazine, which haswon several awards, to help people share their stories.Each issue features the following:

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• Stories by top-notch project managers at NASA,other federal agencies, and private industry.

• Best practices and lessons learned.

• Features on key project management issues.

• Tried-and-true practices from the field.

• Feedback from fellow practitioners.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), librarianTeresa Bailey has established a weekly session wheresomeone shares a story of his or her work with otherswithin the organization, followed by discussion andinformation sharing.

Story MakingStory making refers to envisioning, sense-making,

and creating narratives to test a vision or a proposedsolution. An example of this is user scenarios.

Stephen Denning (2001) refers to springboardstories, "By a springboard story, I mean a story thatenables a leap in understanding by the audience so asto grasp how an organization or community or com-plex system may change." At the World Bank, underthe leadership of James D. Wolfensohn, World Bankpresident. Denning developed a program designed touse open-ended (springboard) stories to help profes-sionals envision and test how to implement programsacross the globe.

Stories provide a powerful tool for stating andsharing your company's vision and purpose. Storiesprovide a shorthand perspective, as Welles (1996)explains, "At the heart of every good business storythere lies a truth that is simple enough for the man-agement to communicate, and so recognizable thatothers can quickly connect with it. SatCon Technology,based in Cambridge, MA, makes electromechanicalproducts for markets from aerospace to autos. SatCon'swork is complex and often theoretical, best expressed asa tangle of equations on a blackboard. But chairmanDavid Eisenhaure can reduce SatCon's mission downto a single accessible idea: 'We bring a higher level ofintelligence to machines.' As a result, Eisenhaure says,that SatCon can attract its share of gifted employees."

Tom Kelley (2005), general manager of IDEO, anacclaimed design and development company withroots in Silicon Valley, articulates the value of storymaking as a design tool, as follows:

• Storytelling builds credibility.

• Storytelling unleashes powerful emotions andhelps teams bond.

• Stories give "permission" to explore controversialor uncomfortable topics.

• Storytelling sways a group's point of view.

• Storytelling creates heroes.

• Storytelling provides a vocabulary of change.

• Good stories help to make order out of chaos.

Albert Einstein, one ofthe most brilliant peoplein the world, relied upon storytelling as part of hisintellectual toolkit. As Keith Johnstone recounts, "Wewere all warned that algebra was going to be reallydifficult, whereas Einstein was told that it was a huntfor a creature known as 'X' and that when you caughtit, it had to tell you it's name."

StorytellingStorytelling refers to framing information so that it's

understandable, meaningful, and memorable. Examplesinclude presenting case studies, real-life examples, andsimulations.

The Harvard Business School developed its famouscase study method in the years following World War II(Barnes, Christensen, and Hansen, 1987). Parallel tothis approach, the Harvard Business Review presentscase studies that can be used in HBS classes and toinform other readers ofthe publication. As the HBSWeb site explains, "The case method forces studentsto grapple with exactly the kinds of decisions anddilemmas managers confront every day. In doing so,it redefines the traditional educational dynamic inwhich the professor dispenses knowledge and studentspassively receive it. The case method creates a classroomin which students succeed not by simply absorbingfacts and theories, but also by exercising the skills ofleadership and teamwork in the face of real problems.Under the skillful guidance of a faculty member, theywork together to analyze and synthesize conflictingdata and points of view, to define and prioritize goals,to persuade and inspire others who think differently,to make tough decisions with uncertain information,and to seize opportunity in the face of doubt."

This is only one of many examples of the value ofstories in the form of case studies.

User scenarios provide another form of storytelling.These are fictional stories with characters, events,products, and environments. They project productideas and themes into the context of a realistic future.A user scenario is a fictional narrative of a likelyconsumer (a consumer described in the user profiles)

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using the product. User scenarios can be derived fromdetailed task analysis data obtained from comprehen-sive studies of consumers and the activities and tasksthey want to accomplish using the product. Or they canbe more speculative, in the early stages of the designprocess to help developers envision the product func-tionality from the viewpoint ofthe target audience.

With user scenarios, you can prototype innovative —and informative —stories about how particular usersinteract with an interface, an e-commerce system, or asoftware program. These scenarios present stories abouthow members ofthe target audience might navigatethe existing site and how they might navigate a sitewith the proposed design features.

Scenarios are powerful tools in the design process.They force you to think the way users act —not ration-ally, but impulsively and emotionally. User scenariosare detailed descriptions ofthe actual sequence oftasks users would follow in accomplishing a goal usingthe service/product. User scenarios provide a concreterepresentation of the user, the setting, and the actionsequence, bringing out aspects ofthe design that areless visible when more abstract specification methodsare used.

ConclusionStories provide a valuable panoply of tools in an

organizational setting. Companies that overlook storiesdo so at their peril. For example, we are now observingthat Google is having trouble with its story, whichis centered on how two Stanford graduate studentshypothesized that a search engine that analyzed therelationships between Web sites would produce betterresults than existing techniques. Google's mission isto help people find information. News has come out,however, that Google is complying with the Chinesegovernment's pressure to restrict access to informa-tion for Chinese citizens, and this has contradictedGoogle's corporate story, lowered its stock price, andlowered its credibility.

Similarly, Nike has had problems with its story.Nike's story centers on providing people with shoesand related equipment so that they can perform

their best in athletics and everyday life, empoweringpeople. Stories came out that Nike's products weremanufactured with the help of child labor, however,which was a shocking form of disempowerment atodds with its story. Nike has struggled to overcomethis counter-story.

Renowned Silicon Valley pioneer Alan Kay once said,"Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in theworld? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) thananyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom,and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry fora wise person to tell us stories."

Stories provide both a wealth of wisdom and apowerful toolbox for communication, problem solving,innovation, and much more.

ReferencesL.B. Barnes, C.R. Christensen, and A.J. Hansen, Teaching and theCase Method, Harvard Business School Press, 1987.

S. Denning, The Springboard Story, Butterworth Heineman, 2001,p. xviii.

Harvard Business School Web site, http://www.hbs.edu/case/index.html.

T. Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation, Doubleday, 2005, pp. 11-12and pp. 254-256.

H. McLellan, "Experience Design," Paper presented at the annualconference ofthe American Educational Research Association,New Orleans, LA, April 24, 2004.

M. Steen, "Storytelling Sells," InfoWorld, Vol. 21 No. 22, May 31,t999, p. 87.

E. O. Welles, "Why Every Company Needs a Story," Inc., 1996.

LinksASK Magazinehttp://appel.nasa.gov/archive/ask/about/overview/index.html

Hilary McLellan of McLellan Wyatt Digital is a

media artist, storyteller, and educator. She has a

background in art history, design, instructional design,

and educational media. She can be contacted via

e-mail at hilarym@nycap.rr.com .

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