Storytelling

STORYTELLING

Communication tool used in organizations, allowing individual to share their knowledge and personal understanding with others through inspired narratives. Telling a story is a deceptively simple and familiar process, a way to evoke strong emotions and insights. The language used is authentic (experience, not fact oriented); it is the narrative form that most people find interesting and attractive. Storytelling has existed for thousands of years as a means of exchanging information and generating understanding. Using it as a deliberate tool for sharing knowledge within organizations is quite recent, but growing rapidly. Working with stories in organizational settings is more complicated but they provide powerful mechanisms to aid reflection, build communities, transfer practical learning or capitalize experiences. Storytelling has numerous advantages over more traditional organization communication techniques. It enables articulation of both emotional and factual content, allowing expression of tacit knowledge that might otherwise be difficult to share. Additionally, storytelling can increase the potential for meaningful knowledge sharing; by grounding facts in a narrative structure, learning is more likely to take place, and being passed on.

Potential applications of storytelling are:

Breaking down barriers between multidisciplinary or multi-cultural teams;
Team or community-building exercises;
Workshop warm-ups;
Debriefings;
Project reviews;
Monitoring systems

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Organizing a StoryTelling

Step by Step

Introduce the workshop and the theme for storytelling. It's important to provide the participants a contest on which they can riflect and that pemrits them to select the story they are going to tell.
Make participant reflect on change process and think about details fo before, during and after.
Ask participants to form pair and to share the storied they have prepared.
Ask the participant that is listening in each moment to interview the partner and fill the story template as a guide, so that as much details as possible will be collected.
Form bigger gorups of two couples, where now each participant will tell the story that was previously told my the partner.
Make participants reflect on common points and contraddition of each one of the stories.
Ask every group to present to the whole group their findings and conclusions.

When to use

Potential applications are:

Team or community-building exercise
Breacking down barriers between multidsciplinary or multi-cultural teams
Warm-ups in Workshops
Trip debriefs
Personal Projects review
Entairtainment and fun
Monitoring systems

Practical Tips

Choice of the story

Type of story:
- Folktale, meaning a story from oral tradition
- Literary Tale, by a single author, made for publishing
- Real Life Story, form history and personal experiences

Characteristics of the story
- It should be simple, with a single, clearly defined theme, and powerful
- It should be in respons to a demand, and timed with specific opportunities.
- It should have a nice style, with vivid word picture, pleasing sounds and rhythm,
- It should provide a solution to both immediate and broader problems;
- It should be targeted at people with the power to make decisions and change things;
- It should play to what is already in people’s mind.

Preparation

Read the story several times
Analyze the word, thinking about the pictures you want the lstener to see and the mood you want to create.
Research back ground and cultural meaning of the story
Learn the story as a whole and not in fragments, whithouth memorizing it.
Map out the story line:
- Beginning: Whenere caracters are introduced,
- Body, in which the plot gets to the climax
- Resolution, where the conflicts are solved

Characteristics of the narration:
- Emphasis
- Repetition
- Transition
- Pause
- Proportion

Tricks to keep the attention:
- Involvement or Participation of listeners
- Distinct changes in pace, voice or mood
- Unusual or unexpected twist in narrations ^[2]

Job Aids

References

↑ www.personneltoday.com (17 July 2008), www.ijea.org(17 July 2008); www.daretoshare.ch/en (19 July 2008), www.odi.org.uk (19 July 2008)
↑ www.eldrbarry.net (1 September 2008), www.daretoshare.ch (1 September 2008)

[1] www.personneltoday.com (17 July 2008), www.ijea.org(17 July 2008); www.daretoshare.ch/en (19 July 2008), www.odi.org.uk (19 July 2008)

[2] www.eldrbarry.net (1 September 2008), www.daretoshare.ch (1 September 2008)

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