Engaging Conversations, Revealing Stories, Expeditions of Discovery

The scene has been repeated in enterprises of all kinds, from Sydney to San Francisco to South Hampton. Individuals, teams, and communities of practice confront the future through conversation and a spirit of expeditionary discovery. Communities at the World Bank share stories to reveal old insights in order to understand fresh challenges. Cross-campus teams at Eastern Michigan University answer the question, “How will the university portal enable me to experience the University if I am a student, a faculty, an employee, a parent, an alumni, or legislator?” Member leaders and staff at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists tell stories about the ecology of interactivity at their annual meeting in order to understand how to extend and enhance the meeting through e-knowledge.

The first challenge for enterprise leadership is not for the management team to make the right decisions about e-knowledge. Rather the challenge is how to engage the enterprise community in revealing conversations and storytelling, focused on real issues, challenges, and opportunities, so that the right decisions can be illuminated and emerge. Engaging the enterprise on the subject of e-knowledge, through storytelling and conversation is an indispensable strategy.

In his forthcoming book, The Squirrel: The Seven Highest Value Forms of Organizational Storytelling, Stephen Denning describes the range of uses to which storytelling can be put in the course of organizational change. Denning’s perspectives can be deployed in any setting to provide the experiential, emotional, and factual foundations needed for people to engage and discover the future.