Continuing yesterday’s wrapup of the Dec. 6 article about career and organizational storytelling in FORTUNE, for which writer Vickie Elmer’s editors had some final questions about the article…

Today: What’s the evidence that storytelling is effective in organizations? I knew that of the information offered in the responses I helped Vickie gather, FORTUNE would have space to include only a minimal amount in the article, so I’m summarizing the evidence here.

Lori Silverman in her article The Five Sides of Story, synopsizes research on storytelling’s effectiveness from her book, Wake Me When the Data’s Over. From the article:

In-depth interviews conducted with more than 170 business leaders in 80-plus organizations throughout the world suggest that stories have strategic impor- tance far beyond mere entertainment value. In the aggregate, the responses from these executives revealed five practices surrounding the use of stories that bring results: how to find stories, how to dig into them to uncover hidden patterns and themes, how to select those stories that need to be reinforced, how to craft memorable stories, and how to embody stories to positively affect attitudes, thoughts and behaviors.

Silverman notes in the article, “For the book Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over, 72 organizations provided examples of how they use stories, summarizing these results:

• 36 percent have experienced positive financial impact to the bottom line through increased growth, profitability, and/or increased funding.
• 18 percent have noted that story has moved them closer to furthering specific organizational goals.
• 17 percent have reported increased levels of engagement between people and the organization and/or higher levels of teamwork.
• 17 percent are able to show a positive impact on the amount and type of customer feedback, improved customer satisfaction and/or improved customer perceptions of the brand.
• 11 percent have experienced decreased workflow cycle time, improved speed of message delivery or time to market, and increased effi- ciencies.
• 10 percent reported an impact on training feedback and effectiveness, including transfer of skills and knowl- edge to the workplace.
• 8 percent noted positive cultural changes.

Casey Hibbard shared the information that surveys have been conducted about the effectiveness of using customer case studies/success stories in selling technology products, including a recent survey from Eccolo Media. “It’s about what marketing collateral is used in tech B2B purchases, and case studies are one of the areas they asked about,” Casey reported, citing one statistic in the study: Nearly 80 percent say case studies/success stories are influential in the buying process.

“Also,” Casey noted, “anecdotally I can tell you that the number of companies doing success stories on their customers has dramatically increased in the past 10 years that I’ve been doing this work, though I don’t have anything measurable. But companies from the largest in the world to small startups rely on stories to sell their products and services.”

The private LinkedIn group created for the recent Reinvention Summit on the future of storytelling has a lengthy discussion going on around this question: “Do you have an example of an organization or business that has effectively used storytelling to achieve results?” Since it’s a private group, I don’t feel right revealing everything that’s been said, but here’s an overview:

• Gabrielle Dolan of the Australian agency One Thousand and One pointed to a case study about her company.
• Peter Fruhmann described a positive experience with collecting stories from a big regional police corps of about 1,700 employees in the Netherlands.
• Shelly Alcorn noted from her perspective on the nonprofit trade and professional association world, that “stories are key to both mission and membership (or citizenship as I prefer to call it). I have seen the use of story coupled with appreciative inquiry transform nonprofit organizations.”
• Also using Appreciative Inquiry in its “Generative Journalism” is Axiom News, where Jennifer Neutel serves as Story Advocate, and reports, “We use the power of storytelling within organizations through providing strengths-based Stakeholder News programs. This means that organizations contract us to write stories and post their success stories on their website, every day.” Axiom’s Stories at Work section gives examples of the effectiveness of organizational storytelling. Axiom offers an e-book about the process and benefits of storytelling: How To Change Your World By Sharing Stakeholder Stories . I’m looking forward to learning more about Axiom’s work as Jennifer has agreed to participate in a Q&A.

Steve Denning discusses the effectiveness of storytelling on pages 20-24 of his book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. Here are the studies he cites:

• LaClair and Rao, Helping Employees Embrace Change, McKinsey Quarterly, 2002
• Osborn and Ehninger, The Metaphor in Public Address, Speech Monograph, 1962
• Kouzes and Posner, Credibility: How Leaders Gain It and Lose It, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, p. 198
• Borgida and Nisbett, “The Differential Impact of Abstract vs. Concrete Information on Decisions,” Journal of Applied Technology, 1977
• Zemke, Storytelling: Back to Bacics, Training, March 1990
• Wilkens, Organizational Stories as Symbols Which Control the Organization, in the book Organizational Symbolism, 1983
• Conger, Inspiring Others: The Language of Leadership, Executive. 1991
• Martin and Power, Organizational Stories: More Vivid and Persuasive Than Quantitative Data, In the book Psychological Foundations of Organizational Behavior, 1982
• Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performance, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, pp. 236-237

In the private LinkedIn group from the Reinvention Summit, Denning said:

Asking for examples of companies that have effectively used storytelling to get results is similar to asking for examples of companies that have effectively used analysis to get results. All companies use storytelling, just as all human beings use storytelling. Examine any successful company or any successful leader or any successful organizational initiative and you will find examples of effective storytelling as well as effective analysis. Examine any organization or any initiative or any leader that ran into problems, and you will find ineffective storytelling or ineffective analysis, usually both.

Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote, cited this study: Chestek, K.D. 2010, Judging by the Numbers: An Empirical Study of the Power of Story, Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, vol. 7, no. 1.