Steve Denning on how to create a culture of storytelling

Steve Denning

Steve Denning is one of my intellectual heroes. There is no one else who knows more about the business narrative as an art form, nor anyone who knows more about how to formulate a high-impact business narrative that will help to achieve strategic objectives, whatever they may be.

Here is an excerpt from a recent blog. To read the complete article, check out a wealth of other resources (including an audio recording of a recent Smithsonian symposium on effective communication, and/or sign up for a free subscription, please visit http://www.stevedenning.com/site/Default.aspx.

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I am sometimes asked: what’s involved in creating a culture of storytelling in an organization? How do you create an organization in which authentic storytelling is the natural and normal way of communicating? How do you do this in a way that is highly productive for the organization as well as deeply satisfying for the participants?

I believe that six steps are needed.

[Here are the first two.]

1. The first step is to recognize that establishing a storytelling culture must not only encourage good storytelling: it must meet other goals as well. Thus a storytelling culture in which people sat around all day telling stories to each other and got nothing done would not be sustainable. We must not only have good storytelling: it must also contribute to getting things done in the organization. Otherwise it will be seen as an encumbrance to the organization and will not survive.

We also need to recognize that storytelling is not an end in itself. This was recognized in the question that Paul Costello raised at the close of the Smithsonian session last month: He asked: What would be involved in creating an analytic framework to ensure that positive storytelling was encouraged and the de-humanizing storytelling was identified and discouraged?

Paul’s question implies that there is a good storytelling (life-enhancing) and bad storytelling (de-humanizing). In promoting a culture of storytelling, we are interested in promoting the former rather than the latter. This in turn recognizes that storytelling is not an end in itself. It is a tool that can be used for good (life-enhancing) purposes or for bad (de-humanizing) purposes.

When we say life-enhancing, we have in mind interactions that enrich human relationships, that lift up the human spirit, and that appeal to the highest qualities of mind, heart and soul, that may even foster truth, beauty and love.

When we say bad or de-humanizing, we may have mind interactions that crush the human spirit, that foster fear, hate, meanness, selfishness and back-stabbing, that create environments that are boring, stifling, dishonest, ugly and systematically dispiriting. Eventually such cultures lead to repression, discrimination and even wars.

Once we recognize that storytelling is not an end itself, we need to be clear on what is the end for which storytelling should be deployed. Why do we like storytelling? Why do we want a storytelling culture? A short answer is that goal for which storytelling should be deployed is to foster high-quality interactive human relationships.

2. The next step is to recognize that storytelling is not the only way to create high-quality, interactive human relationships. Storytelling is a big part of accomplishing this, but it’s not the only part: open-ended questions are often a more powerful and appropriate way of fostering high-quality human relationships: instead of telling people stories, one listens to what other people have to contribute. The goal is not to tell stories, but rather to have open-minded conversations, by stories, questions or whatever way of communicating that enables this.

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I urge you to check out Steve Denning’s books, notably The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, The Springboard, Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership & Storytelling, and The Secret Language of Leadership. His next book, The Leader’s Guide to RADICAL MANAGEMENT, will be published in November (2010). Here is a link to information about it:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx.