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Torytelling Or Anecdote Management - An Ancient Art Revived

Stories are powerful because they show us rather than tell us, dramatically enacting a truth that can move us and influence the way we see things.

- S. Denning, The World Bank45

Technological tools, though effective in facilitating communication, do not convey the rich con­text of knowledge. This rich context can be conveyed only through human social interaction, which has led KM practitioners to create tools that adapt social activities to the business envi­ronment. Storytelling and discussing and reflecting on past actions have become KM tools.

David Snowden, Director of Europe IBM Institute of Knowledge Management,46 shows that in a case study of how pilots use their tacit knowledge to solve problems and make decisions, the pilots usually make decisions based on their gut feeling, and then rationalize them after the facts. The rational explanation is hardly as valuable as the "real" one, which is the source of wisdom and thus effective decision making. Snowden explains that the rational explanation for the deci­sion is usually not the real reason for or the basis of the decision and thus does not effectively transfer the pilot's tacit knowledge or make it explicit. Rationalization of the decision afterwards to fit the norm or the organizational protocol (which is part of the explicit knowledge) has a restrictive effect. Snowden therefore concludes in his presentation that transfer of tacit knowl­edge can occur only through direct human interaction in a community of trust, hence communi­ties of practice, using social tools like storytelling.

The storytelling approach to KM was originally introduced by Thomas Davenport and Lau­rence Prusak and popularized by Stephen Denning, formerly of the World Bank. This approach asserts that the use of stories to communicate knowledge is very powerful in conveying the rich context of knowledge. Stories do not convey just content but the meaning of experience from one person to another in a way that the recipient can easily recall. Stories are narratives about past experience that show how a certain department, group, or even organization solved a certain problem. Their contextual richness makes them very effective in communicating layers of mean­ing that the mind can later access.

Take, for example, KM's assertion that knowledge is not contained in a particular practice but in the why of it. No story communicates this better than the lamb roast recipe. A 5-year-old girl asked her mother why she cuts the end part of the lamb loaf before she roasts it. Her mother replied that she had watched her mother do it this way, and since the grandmother cooked the best roast, the mother used the same method. So the little girl went to her grandmother and asked about it, the grandmother replied that she had watched her own mother, who used to make the best roasts, do it this way. Eventually, the girl got to visit her great-grandmother, who was on her deathbed. Luckily, the great-grandmother had an explanation for cutting the end part of the lamb loaf before roasting it - the pot she had was not big enough!

As an approach, storytelling comes in many forms (e.g., Lessons Learned and After Action Reviews [AARs]). Lessons Learned are similar to success stories but are more about delivering a certain message about what works and what does not as knowledge gleaned from experience. AARs, originally developed by the U.S. Army in the 1970s, involve meetings to review past oper­ations and explore ways in which these operations could have been performed differently for bet­ter results. The recommendations from an AAR session are then tested in future operations, and hence learning is facilitated through doing. At the U.S. Army, AAR sessions are conducted so that soldiers meet with their superiors, who sit in the back rows of a round setting to encourage soldiers' contributions and overcome the constraints of military ranks. The first replication of AAR in the corporate setting is BP's "learn after doing" program, which aims to answer "What can we learn from the difference between what happened and what should have happened?"47

CONCLUSION

The goal of KM is to advance the organization in its journey to becoming a learning organization, where knowledge sharing, creation, and application is a way of doing business. The optimal beneift of KM is to prevent organizational memory loss and brain drain - in short, dissipation of knowledge resources - and hence enhance the efficiency of knowledge work and the innovative capability of the whole organization. To get there KM should be systematically implemented at the strategic and operational levels. However, an organization first needs to transform the way it sees itself and adopt the identity of a knowledge organization. This involves formulating a strong vision that drives the long process of becoming a learning organization. This chapter outlined the main KM concepts and practices, including undertaking an audit of the knowledge resources, adopting the appropriate knowledge strategies, effecting necessary structural and cultural changes, and adjusting the IT infrastructure to support KM processes. Though the organizational context is important in the design of any program, Chapter 11 will guide the reader further step by step to implement the KM stage of the Comprehensive Intellectual Capital Management (CICM) model. To highlight and demonstrate some of the complex issues of KM, however, the next chapter outlines the Navy's KM system.

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