President Obama repeated yesterday that the US intelligence community “failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from attacking America.”
I’m thinking that imbuing the various intelligence organizations with storytelling techniques could help them get better at connecting the dots.
That’s what storytelling’s all about after all — connecting dots, making meaning, sensemaking.
Obama talked about better analysis, but perhaps conventional analytical approaches aren’t best suited when there are dots to be connected.
My colleagues who are storytelling practitioners and consultants know better than I do exactly how the organizations could be trained in storytelling approaches.
NASA could also provide an excellent model for storytelling approaches as storytelling is well-ingrained in the NASA culture. This article (and many others) describes how storytelling works to teach lessons at NASA: “APPL [NASA’s Academy of Program and Project Leadership] uses stories as their chief knowledge transfer method — the mechanism these program leaders use to shape and define their culture and to pass along lessons to the younger generation. Quite frankly, the process of writing the stories is often how they discover lessons in the first place.”