On the eve of this year’s storytelling weekend in Washington, DC, conference leader and business-narrative pioneer Steve Denning received a critical question from a blog reader: “Why have you abandoned storytelling?”
Denning quotes the full question in blog entry: “Why have you in the last eighteen or so months allowed yourself to be drawn into ‘management speak’ and that has diluted the impact of your original approach that was so special, attractive and accessible to the many people who do not read management books and who are not comfortable with that vocabulary?”
After all, Denning’s first three books specifically addressed organizational storytelling in their titles, while his two most recent volumes ostensibly drift further from the narrative emphasis. “Narrative” appears only in the subtitle of his 2007 The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative
and not at all in his forthcoming The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management.
Denning defends his approach in the blog entry, noting especially that storytelling still is not part of the management mainstream.
“I haven’t abandoned storytelling,” Denning insists. “It is a key element of everything I am talking about in the new book.”
He’s got a lively conversation going in the comments to his blog entry, notably a dialogue with Michael Margolis.
Especially with storytelling weekend marking its 10th anniversary, examining the state of organizational storytelling is an important enterprise.
Check out the conversation and weigh in.