Steve Denning published a blog entry last month on an important but often overlooked topic in organizational storytelling — how to create a culture of storytelling within the organization. He offers six steps for doing so.
Though grounded in Denning’s earlier work in storytelling, the steps seem very much tied to his more recent work for his upcoming book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management
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If I ever have the opportunity to teach again, I would consider implementing these steps to create a storytelling culture in the classroom that students could take into their future workplaces. I always found it a bit difficult to get buy-in from business students on the value of storytelling.
Denning’s six steps follow, but his elaboration on each step is the real meat of his prescription, so I hope you’ll check it out:
- The goal that is being pursued in establishing a storytelling culture is to foster high-quality interactive human relationships.
- Stories should be recognized as one of the ways of fostering high-quality human relationships, but not the only one.
- The organization must have as its goal to satisfy, please and even delight other people.
- The work should be conducted in self-organizing teams.
- The work should be done in relatively short cycles,
- Communications should be more open than in a command-and-control bureaucracy.
[Photo: Story circle at McKenna Museum of African American Art discussing juvenile detention reform in New Orleans in 2008.]