Storytelling

{{Term|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

The story should have the following characteristics whether it is used for social or institutional change:

• It needs to be simple and powerful;
• It should be in response to a demand, and timed with specific opportunities;
• 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 minds. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag