Knowledge Management in Action: Scenario planning through co-created storytelling

this is a translation of the original article in Danish which is available on VidenDanmark.dk

Organizations have widely started to embrace knowledge management in the beginning of the 1990s. This was – among other things – a result of the new economy which is more networked and subject to rapid change. Particularly due to the rapid change, organizations are sensing an absence of the data or information necessary to make an informed judgment concerning a new problem or opportunity. Such an absence creates uncertainty and new knowledge is required. Hence, to generate and share new knowledge effectively, organizations are increasingly developing tools and activities to enhance learning.

In the blog post I present a way how co-created storytelling can be used to generate new knowledge, to migrate the knowledge into an organization and to let it impact the organizational performance.

Why is co-created storytelling crucial for your organization?
First of all, storytelling is crucial for current knowledge management practices because all the changes in knowledge management have resulted in a focus on context and narrative, rather than only on content. In this respect, Polanyi already argued in the late 1950s that we only know what we know, when we need to know it. Hence, human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires a stimulus to recall. Snowden (2008) refers to this as “the small verbal or nonverbal clues [that can provide] those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled”.

Secondly, storytelling is crucial because we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down (Snowden, 2002). Thus, the process of speaking out loud your ideas and thoughts will already result in a loss of context, because not everybody have the same richness in their vocabulary and therefore these thoughts and ideas are being translated in limited ways. However, by writing down thoughts and ideas people are losing far more context, because you should also think about the structure of the language.

In order to increase the richness of the spoken words, it is being argued that stories should be co-created. This is because one single story cannot outline the complete truth. Everybody is experiencing new problems or opportunities through their own mental filters and past experiences. Therefore, a story should be constructed in collaboration with more than one person.

How can co-created storytelling be implemented in your organization?
The Future, Backwards technique is a way to implement storytelling in your organizations as an alternative tool to scenario planning. It is designed to increase the number of perspectives that a group can take both on an understanding of their past, and of the range of possible futures through storytelling. Future Backwards is set-up as a workshop format which takes around 90 to 120 minutes. Ron Donaldson (2009) outlined the steps that need to be taken to implement the Future Backward technique.

First, participants of a Future Backwards workshop are being divided in small groups. If there are, for example, 21 participants, these can be divided in three groups of seven participants. Thereafter, each of the groups are being asked to produce their own ‘story’ on a certain topic. They start defining how TODAY looks like by developing a time line backwards, made up of the most important events, decisions and turning points that have led the organization into the current situation. This timeline is made out of tags.

Second, each of the groups will be asked the question, if within three years everything could go wrong that could go wrong, how would HELL look and feel like, and what might be the fictitious events that lead to it. Again, this will also be tagged with keywords.

Third, each of the groups will be asked how HEAVEN would look like in three years, if everything could go right.

Finally, each group then nominates a storyteller who will tell the co-created story. By having three different stories with assigned tags, it is becoming relatively easy to signal future problems and opportunities. Therefore, co-created storytelling is a useful tool to look into a rapidly changing and complex future by using multiple knowledge bases.

Direct communication = informal learning

Based on three extensive case-studies, I have identified leadership behaviour that enhances organisational learning processes. I concluded that:

... leaders are enhancing organizational learning by promoting effective communication. Effective communication increases the participation of staff members in the process of sense and decision making regarding problems or opportunities faced by an organization. Where the tools applied by leaders to improve the effectiveness of communication are different, they have in common, except for one organization, they document tacit knowledge on a Wiki in order to enhance organizational learning. This raises the question whether it is recommended to invest time in adding content to a Wiki while fast-moving environments of organization are requiring speedy sense and decision making in order to compete

So, who was most successful in applying organisational learning processes and tools. That's hard to say as all of the cases were encountering a problem/opportunity in a complicated context. However, if the two cases that were focusing on documenting tacit knowledge were encountering a problem/opportunity in a complex context, they would have been lost and too slow to make sense and decide over the next big thing. Therefore, the case that kept tacit knowledge tacit was, in my eyes, the most successful. But what would this mean for the leader. How can a leader create such a business context that meets the requirements of a complex context? For this I refer to Chris Rodgers' latest blog post called "Drucker on communication in organizations" (10 February 2009):

... the centre of gravity of leadership communication needs to shift from formal, structured message passing to joint sense making and relationship building (see Leadership communication in organizational change). This point is echoed strongly by Drucker in the "four fundamentals of communication" that he sets out in his bookTechnology, Management and Society...

Rodgers' summarises the point to which Drucker referred: (1) Communication is perception, (2) communication is expectations, (3) communication is involvment, and (4) communication and information are different and largely opposite - yet interdependent.

Is hierarchy the stimulus for learning?

I just returned from Paris where I had a short break from London. I used the Eurostar because travelling by high-speed railway is much more convenient than leaving planes (travel time, security measures and so on). Unfortunately, there was a fire in the tunnel between Dover and Calais. As a result, Eurostar is following an amended schedule even after two months of the fire. This meant that when I wanted to check in to make my way from Paris to London, the guy behind the counter told me that my train was cancelled and that I needed to take a train one hour later (while I was one hour earlier, which results in waiting for two hours and arriving late in London). That was all he was able to do, or what he wanted to do! After I told it was not acceptable that they give us a different train without notifying us he was still like: ‘yes, it’s because of the fire in the tunnel’. After that, I became a bit annoyed and pissed and finally he called his colleague to see whether there were enough seats left in the train that was almost ready to depart. Not that it was leaving in seconds. It was planning to leave in 20 minutes! After a minute, his colleague came back and yes, I was able to take the train that was already at Gare du Nord. And was the train full? Not at all! I think 80 % of the seats were empty. Why are people doing their job, serving customers, only after you are becoming angry? Why is angriness a stimulus for people to do something out-of-the box. Thus, in order to encourage learning, some staff members are starting with learning only after grumpy customers. And I don’t want to become grumpy!

After this incident I was thinking of my recent research. My conclusion was that people learn effectively in flat management structures where learning occurs organically without someone, like a manager, telling you that you need to do A. However, only after opening my mouth and showing my dissatisfaction in a negative way, a customer member is starting to think and learn. So what kind of management structure is promoting learning among these people? That is the hierarchical structure where the customer is putting him/her, or in this story me, above the service member and then finally the service member is trying to make sense of the situation and make a correct decision in favor of the customer (a learning process).

Do I sound like a nagging customer? Perhaps! However, haven’t you encountered any situations where you needed to become angry before people would move forward?