Steve Denning interviewed Procter & Gamble’s (former? Denning uses past tense) senior manager, learning technologies, Linda Coffman, who is speaking on Friday, May 9, at the Smithsonian Associates Organizational Storytelling Weekend. Here are 5 things I learned from the interview about organizational storytelling at P&G:
- Global Learning and Development, the branch in which Coffman is involved, is investigating new Web 2.0 technologies to tell stories.
- Coffman started a virtual book club that includes a blog by a senior company leader who is also a subject-matter expert for the book.
- P&G has a corporate storyteller, Jim Bangle, who has collected or authored more than 100 stories. Bangle tells some of these stories as podcasts.
- Coffman has developed four pilot projects to assess ways of enhancing the use of storytelling for knowledge transfer, drawing from 100 stories that fit many business areas and situations.
- An example story that Coffman tells Denning is intended to illustrate to P&G workers that “what [they] do in P&G matters, that it changes people’s lives.” The story, about a woman in a low-income area in India buying P&G sanitary napkins for her daughter, “uses a combination of video, and still images, a voice of narration and background music to support the emotion.”