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 Storytelling Perspectives

Hilary McLellan

any organizations are turning to storytelling as a way to leverage their human capital more effectively. As Peter Giuliano of the Executive Communication Group explains, "Using a narrative approach is what helps make information tangible and memorable." (Steen, 1999) Stories provide many advantages, including the following: Stories show us patterns, and they help us to make connections. They are tools for empowerment. Stories originate in problematic situations; they show the way out of these situations. Great stories provide us with a road map or treasure map, which outlines all ofthe actions and tasks we have to accomplish in order to complete the journey successfully. Stories also provide a toolkit for solving all ofthe problems that have to be dealt with along the way.

We tell stories to eliminate suspects: who did what when, or what caused this technical flameout? Good stories make you feel you've been through a satisfying, complete experience. Stories are a form of "expert system" for remembering and integrating what we learn. Stories are thought machines, by which we test out our ideas and feelings about some thing and try to learn more about it. Stories help us to identify and understand the forces impacting upon us. Jungian and cognitive psychologists (notably Roger Schank) claim that stories are a fundamental part of human intelligence and imagination. We start with the mythic story patterns that appear in our dreams. Then, as we gain experience, we create stories to help us remember our

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experiences. Stories provide a convenient tool for remembering things. According to Rafe Martin, "Narrative is a complex, powerful, and mysterious tool, certainly one of the oldest technologies on the planet. Deep in the psyche, the world itself is a tale. Every story partakes of this mystery; every telling renews some recognition of this fundamental delight. At a practical level, stories provide us with given ways to organize, test, and simulate in the mind 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 applications can be used in organizations.
Story Gathering

Story gathering refers to activities such as getting the lay of the land and getting feedback from users and customers. Examples of this include user stories (now often documented on the World Wide Web) and workplace anthropologists gathering stories in their research documenting user behavior. There are other kinds of stories. For example, what are the stories customers tell about a product? We often hear testimonials featured in ads, but recently quite a number of companies have started to harvest stories from customers to use in advertising and promotion. As Kelley (2005) explains, "Companies from Dell to Starbucks have lots of corporate legends that support their brands and build camaraderie within their teams. Medtronic, celebrated for its product innovation and consistently high growth, reinforces its culture with straight-from-the-heart storytelling from patients' firsthand narratives of how the products changedor even saved their lives." Kelley reports that Medtronic employees often turn to customer stories as a way to re-inspire their work. One ofthe most exciting examples of story gathering comes from Coca-Cola. The company has established a special attraction in Las Vegas, centered upon stories. The World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas is a combination theater, museum, and store. It has a replica Coca-Cola bottle 100 feet tall where you can take an elevator ride. A storytelling theater shows a range of Coca-Cola ads as well as true stories about Coca-Cola from customers around the world. You are invited to tell your story, too a small studio is set up to record people telling their stories about their own Coca-Cola memories, providing potential additional stories for the theater.

Coca-Cola hired renowned storyteller Dana Atchley to advise on how to showcase stories in the World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas. As described at http://www.nextexit.com, Atchley recommended using digital media to capture stories about each visitor's special experiences with this famous soft drink. These memories are brought to life through several short two- to three-minute video vignettes that are shown in the storytelling theater. Twentyfour separate stories are rotated, so each visit will offer new tales to view. One ofthe most memorable visitor stories at the World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas, was told by a woman about her father, who served in the army in Burma in World War IL This soldier took six bottles of Coke to war, drank five, and saved the sixth as a good luck charm. He planned to drink it at the end ofthe war, but when D-day came, his Coca-Cola bottle had become such a beloved symbol of home that he took it back to Indiana, where it still rests, unopened, on his mantel, in a place of honor. Additionally, the World of Coca-Cola, Las Vegas, offers special events to help showcase stories. For example, in honor of Veteran's Day, wartime memorabilia is displayed including a soldier's sewing kit, a soldier's Coca-Cola ration card, playing cards, and 1940s Coca-Cola ad reprints and more. The display featured a reproduction of the special cablegram from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Robert Woodruff, Coca-Cola's chairman, requesting the distribution of more than 5 billion bottles of Coca-Cola to American servicepeople everywhere.
Story Sharing

Story sharing refers to knowledge transfer. Story sharing can be conceived as "bootstrapping" on other people's experiences, inspiring insight, and providing catalysts for communication. One example of this is technicians sharing war stories. At Xerox PARC, the leadership recognized that technicians were using their coffee breaks to share war stories and problem solutions, so they tried to encourage this behavior. Other organizations might have perceived only that the technicians were taking long coffee breaks and sought to tighten control, thereby losing this important communication channel. NASA has established ASK Magazine, which has won 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), librarian Teresa Bailey has established a weekly session where someone shares a story of his or her work with others within the organization, followed by discussion and information sharing.
Story Making

Stories give "permission" to explore controversial or 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 people in the world, relied upon storytelling as part of his intellectual toolkit. As Keith Johnstone recounts, "We were all warned that algebra was going to be really difficult, whereas Einstein was told that it was a hunt for a creature known as 'X' and that when you caught it, it had to tell you it's name."
Storytelling

Story making refers to envisioning, sense-making, and creating narratives to test a vision or a proposed solution. An example of this is user scenarios. Stephen Denning (2001) refers to springboard stories, "By a springboard story, I mean a story that enables a leap in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an organization or community or complex system may change." At the World Bank, under the leadership of James D. Wolfensohn, World Bank president. Denning developed a program designed to use open-ended (springboard) stories to help professionals envision and test how to implement programs across the globe. Stories provide a powerful tool for stating and sharing your company's vision and purpose. Stories provide a shorthand perspective, as Welles (1996) explains, "At the heart of every good business story there lies a truth that is simple enough for the management to communicate, and so recognizable that others can quickly connect with it. SatCon Technology, based in Cambridge, MA, makes electromechanical products for markets from aerospace to autos. SatCon's work is complex and often theoretical, best expressed as a tangle of equations on a blackboard. But chairman David Eisenhaure can reduce SatCon's mission down to a single accessible idea: 'We bring a higher level of intelligence to machines.' As a result, Eisenhaure says, that SatCon can attract its share of gifted employees." Tom Kelley (2005), general manager of IDEO, an acclaimed design and development company with roots in Silicon Valley, articulates the value of story making as a design tool, as follows: Storytelling builds credibility. Storytelling unleashes powerful emotions and helps teams bond.

Storytelling refers to framing information so that it's understandable, meaningful, and memorable. Examples include presenting case studies, real-life examples, and simulations. The Harvard Business School developed its famous case study method in the years following World War II (Barnes, Christensen, and Hansen, 1987). Parallel to this approach, the Harvard Business Review presents case studies that can be used in HBS classes and to inform other readers ofthe publication. As the HBS Web site explains, "The case method forces students to grapple with exactly the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers confront every day. In doing so, it redefines the traditional educational dynamic in which the professor dispenses knowledge and students passively receive it. The case method creates a classroom in which students succeed not by simply absorbing facts and theories, but also by exercising the skills of leadership and teamwork in the face of real problems. Under the skillful guidance of a faculty member, they work together to analyze and synthesize conflicting data 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 of stories 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 product ideas and themes into the context of a realistic future. A user scenario is a fictional narrative of a likely consumer (a consumer described in the user profiles)

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using the product. User scenarios can be derived from detailed task analysis data obtained from comprehensive studies of consumers and the activities and tasks they want to accomplish using the product. Or they can be more speculative, in the early stages of the design process to help developers envision the product functionality from the viewpoint ofthe target audience. With user scenarios, you can prototype innovative and informative stories about how particular users interact with an interface, an e-commerce system, or a software program. These scenarios present stories about how members ofthe target audience might navigate the existing site and how they might navigate a site with the proposed design features. Scenarios are powerful tools in the design process. They force you to think the way users act not rationally, but impulsively and emotionally. User scenarios are detailed descriptions ofthe actual sequence of tasks users would follow in accomplishing a goal using the service/product. User scenarios provide a concrete representation of the user, the setting, and the action sequence, bringing out aspects ofthe design that are less visible when more abstract specification methods are used.
Conclusion

their best in athletics and everyday life, empowering people. Stories came out that Nike's products were manufactured with the help of child labor, however, which was a shocking form of disempowerment at odds with its story. Nike has struggled to overcome this counter-story. Renowned Silicon Valley pioneer Alan Kay once said, "Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom, and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories." Stories provide both a wealth of wisdom and a powerful toolbox for communication, problem solving, innovation, and much more.
References
L.B. Barnes, C.R. Christensen, and A.J. Hansen, Teaching and the Case 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 ofInnovation, Doubleday, 2005, pp. 11-12 and pp. 254-256. H. McLellan, "Experience Design," Paper presented at the annual conference 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.

Stories provide a valuable panoply of tools in an organizational setting. Companies that overlook stories do so at their peril. For example, we are now observing that Google is having trouble with its story, which is centered on how two Stanford graduate students hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between Web sites would produce better results than existing techniques. Google's mission is to help people find information. News has come out, however, that Google is complying with the Chinese government's pressure to restrict access to information for Chinese citizens, and this has contradicted Google's corporate story, lowered its stock price, and lowered its credibility. Similarly, Nike has had problems with its story. Nike's story centers on providing people with shoes and related equipment so that they can perform

Links ASK Magazine http://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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