The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations

by Stephen Denning

The How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations is the first book to teach storytelling as a powerful and formal discipline for organizational change and knowledge management. The book explains how organizations can use certain types of stories ("springboard" stories) to communicate new or envisioned strategies, structures, identities, goals, and values to employees, partners and even customers.



Readers will learn techniques by which they can help their organizations become more unified, responsive, and intelligent. Storytelling is a management technique championed by gurus including Peter Senge, Tom Peters and Larry Prusak. Now Stephen Denning, an innovator in the new discipline of organizational storytelling, teaches how to use stories to address challenges fundamental to success in today's information economy.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Writing, Communication, Leadership

246 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2000

Reviews

[Jack Vinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was the story of how Denning, of the World Bank, learned how storytelling could be used to inspire change in an organization. Denning focused on a particular type of story: positive stories that give just enough information for people to understand a situation AND get them to think about what the future might look like, based on the implications of the story.
 
The story of the book spans three or four years of a change program that Denning led. He discovered, serendipitously, that simple stories were an excellent mechanism for helping people "get into the mood" of the change that he wanted to discuss. In the end, he advocates for a significant change away from traditional just-the-facts presentations to a story-based presentation that is used to hook into the facts.
 
Denning discusses the factors involved in successful stories, both from the storyteller's perspective and from the perspective of the audience. He explores the thoughts of traditional organization change people, such as cognitive theorists. He also delves deeply into the "non-analytical" realms of literary criticism, storytelling and the softer arts to help explain why stories work so well when trying to help people understand the spirit behind organizational change.

[Olwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is aimed at helping change agents in organisations. Provides a useful guide to developing the stories that can help people get excited about change rather than resisting it.

[Azuree · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a total snooze. For a book that's espousing storytelling in order to keep your presentations interesting, this book couldn't have been any more the opposite if it had tried. One chapter went into Euclidean geometry and algebra totally going off subject. The only 2 chapters that were slightly helpful were 5 and the end of 8.

[Hossein Nasrabadi]

به گفته کتاب ایده عالی مستدام؛ این کتاب کمک می‌کنه که ببینید چگونه مشکل موجود می‌تواند تغییر کند. درباره حالت های ممکن صحبت می‌کنه