Julian Elve points to a Line56 article about a forthcoming book by Steven Denning on Organizational Storytelling ( sample first chapter, in PDF ). Here is a sample of his argument:
What if narrative and story were not trivial but actually very important? What if narrative is still the instrument by which we all as adults come to make sense of what is happening both in our private lives and in the serious world of organizations and business and government? What if the idea that we have somehow put the natural language of narrative aside or behind us when we grow up, because narrative is the province of children and primitive peoples, is pervasive but mistaken? What if we learn what is going on in the world through the infinite variety of narratives, finding out who did what to whom, or surmising what happened in the past, or what could be or should be done in future? What if story is the very bloodstream of our culture? What if story is the tool by which virtually everything that is of interest to us is communicated?
If all this were true, then storytelling would be a primary mode of business communication, and storytelling tools would be as strategic a technology as transaction-processing monitors and web-services protocol stacks.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/04/19.html#a200