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Storytelling

Description
Story-telling is simply the act of telling, writing or otherwise communicating a true or fictitious accounting of an incident, series of events, life of a person or persons, or the existence of ideas, concepts or things. While story-telling is used in many ways to create, transfer, translate and transform culture, its use in communities of practice is especially important for sharing tacit knowledge, or what we know that is generally hidden, unspoken and otherwise unexpressed through any explicit means. Community members should also be aware that stories can also be a barrier to creating new knowledge. The official "party line," for example, can get it the way of members ability or willingness to express contradictory views, because the party line is, in itself, a story of reality as perceived by those in power.

Example
One example of story-telling for the purpose of sharing tacit knowledge in a community of practice comes from a large-scale community development project in a medium-sized town in the Midwestern United States. In this example, a ten-member community made up of highly diverse community change practitioners used story-telling as a vehicle for ongoing sharing of knowledge gained through an array of civic engagement activities, ranging from home visits to large-scale events of 300 or more participants. The practitioners met monthly to share their experiences by answering the questions: what happened, why do we think it happened, what did we learn, what are the implications for our practices of civic engagement. By sharing these stories on a regular basis, in the company of colleagues with similar interests, passions and responsibilities, members were able to help each other make their tacit knowledge explicit. Thus, their knowledge and know-how became available to the community, and to others interested in learning from their experience.

Approaches
There may be as many ways of telling stories as there are story-tellers in the world, but for communities of practice, it may be useful to use a standard "narrative schema", as defined by John C. Thomas of IBM Research. This schema suggests that stories told for the purposes of "attending to, storing, and accessing material" can be organized according to the following format:

1) Introduction of setting and characters: How would you describe the context and the primary actors or stakeholders?

2) Explanation of state of affairs: What was happening in the context that called for your actions or interventions?

3) Initiating event: What set your actions or interventions in motion?

4) Emotional response or statement of a goal by the protagonist: What were you trying to accomplish? What did you hope for as a result of your actions?

5) Complicating actions: What surprises or synchronicities either helped or hindered you?

6) Outcome: What actually happened as a result of you actions? What happened that you didn’t expect?

7) Reactions to the outcome: What is your explanation of what happened and why? What did you and others learn from the experience? What would you do differently if you had it to do all over again?

Check
Ask the members of your community of practice if your story helped with any of the following aspects of your shared learning, offered by Dolly Haik-Adams Berthelot. According to Berthelot, story sharing can be a powerful human strategy for:
  • Stimulating critical and creative thinking
  • Increasing awareness and understanding
  • Teaching effectively
  • Influencing attitudes, behavior, cultural change
  • Creating a climate for unity within diversity
  • Integrating people who are new to particular groups
  • Reinforcing cultural values and ethics
  • Orienting newcomers to work roles or organizations

More
An excellent resource for learning more about the use of story can be found at http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/project_summary.html , the website of The Knowledge Socialization project being conducted at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. More great story-telling help is also at www.berthelotconsulting.pen.net/drdolly/story.htm, the website of Dolly Haik-Adams Berthelot.

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