The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling

Volume 19, Number 2 Article by Shiva Kumar Srinivasan June, 2007

The Leader’s Guide to StorytellingThe Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative :By Stephen Denning, Josey-Bass, 20 :

Stephen Denning has a tendency to begin all his books on storytelling by expressing a sense of astonishment that storytelling should have a place at all in the analytically driven world of business management where (as the ‘official-story’ has it) managers are ‘rational’ individuals who believe only in ‘analysis’ rather than ‘anecdotes.’ In reality, most managers are pragmatists pre-occupied with the ‘cash-value’ of an idea, and don’t necessarily set much store by analysis, synthesis, storytelling, or any other cognitive and/or communication tool unless it can yield the kind of results that will impact on their bosses and shareholders. There is nevertheless a great deal of comfort that management instructors derive from perpetuating the official-story that the managerial game has to do with the analytic form of rationality. Denning (despite being a charismatic exponent of storytelling and one of its chief evangelists worldwide) is himself a bit vulnerable in the face of this official-story, which he seeks to debunk slowly and steadily (in volume after volume) rather than all at once, lest he be accused of not being ‘rational’ enough. Denning thereby concedes ground to the opposition which itself has no hope of demonstrating its rationality as an enacted reality (apart from merely espousing rationality in the form of ‘assertions’ rather than theoretically sound ‘arguments’).

The confusion in most management curricula emerges from the fact that these programmes set out to generate managers, but wind up producing consultants in large numbers. A successful economy needs its fair share of both, managers and consultants. The preoccupation with managers (to the exclusion of consultants) can be historically situated without any difficulty. There comes a point when a business school needs to understand its own genealogy vis-à-vis the industrial revolution and the factory model of knowledge production that entered society in its wake in the nineteenth-century. Most students nowadays want to be masters of business analysis rather than masters of business administration. It is not necessarily a virtue to produce managers (as opposed to business analysts and/or consultants): everything depends on the socio-economic context and the aspirations of the students. There are many forms of intelligence as educational psychologists working in the wake of Howard Gardner’s path-breaking work on ‘multiple frames of intelligence’ at Harvard will testify; and whether we develop analytic, synthetic, or some other form of intelligence in students of management depends again on the ‘felt needs of the time.’ It is therefore absolutely important that Denning and the other exponents of storytelling sell their position with as much buoyancy as they can command rather than with a mild sense of apology (especially with the facts of the ‘persuasion economy’ on their side).

I am however in full agreement with them about the underlying resistance to a genuine incorporation of any form of persuasive communication in business schools (of which resistance to storytelling is probably the most visible manifestation). Though Denning’s analysis of this resistance is focused on the analytic bias in professional cultures, it is worth mentioning here that this resistance is related fundamentally to the problem of ‘speech’ insofar as psychoanalysts are fond of demonstrating that speech is linked to the discursive structure of the unconscious and that desire is embodied, most fundamentally, in the form of speech. The real resistance to storytelling then stems from the fear of ‘letting go’ in language lest the ‘speaking subject’ reveal the underlying turbulence in his or her unconscious. But banning speech is tantamount to taking away opportunities for managers and other employees to work-through affective situations and structural forms of ambivalence. It also becomes difficult to bounce ideas, and/or seek innovative solutions through the creative uses of language. In the absence of speech, employees are much more likely to ‘act-out’ their unconscious conflicts in the form of ‘self-fulfilling prophecies.’

But, and here is the catch, the free market demands speech since selling and buying are necessarily implicated in the modalities of desire and objects by themselves don’t mean anything unless they are libidinised by speech (commercial or otherwise). What else is a ‘brand’ after all but teaching the customer to speak about (and desire) an object or a product in a particular way? Denning, following the work of the American economist Deirdre McCloskey, argues that ‘persuasion constitutes more than a quarter of the US GNP.’ And ‘if storytelling is – conservatively – at least half of persuasion, then storytelling amounts to 14 percent of GNP, or more than a trillion dollars.’ It is also worth noting that economies like the US which are staunch advocates of the free market also find it necessary to have a strong culture of First Amendment jurisprudence. This is an angle that Denning doesn’t invoke in this book, but which is worth examining. And, interestingly enough, Justices of the US Supreme Court who believe most strongly in the free market tend to be the strongest advocates of First Amendment privileges and protections as well and most of them tend to be wary of the ‘slippery slope’ of exemptions even in extreme situations like ‘hate speech,’ ‘representations with explicit content,’ etc. This is no doubt because the success of a liberal democracy requires a free market place of ideas (and not merely products). In other words, free markets will lead to free speech. Can we not then argue that storytelling is a privileged form of speech, spanning the extremes from the cultural to the commercial? Its exclusion from the business school curriculum is symptomatic of the ambivalence that management instructors suffer vis-à-vis the culture of business and the business of culture. While this is one particular direction in which we can push the argument, Denning, interestingly enough, tries to push storytelling as the ‘sixth discipline’ in addition to the ‘five disciplines’ that have been formalised in the work of Peter Senge (a well-known exponent of ‘systems theory’ and ‘organisational learning’ at MIT).

It is also important to remember that Denning is pushing storytelling as a communication tool for leaders rather than managers since leadership ‘deals with ends more than means’ whereas management ‘concerns means rather than ends.’ In other words, there is a greater role for persuasion, in principle, in leadership than in management since the latter is supposed to be driven by systems. Nevertheless management too like the other disciplines is finally coming to terms with the narrative construction of knowledge. While Denning uses the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ synonymously, it must be remembered that there is a whole typology of stories and one of the essential points in Denning’s argument is that the success of storytelling as a tool depends on the leader’s ability to identify the right type of story and discursive technique for any given occasion. Doing this no doubt requires practice and Denning is aware of the need to not only set out the role of storytelling, but to follow it up with ‘eight narrative patterns’ before concluding with an account of the transformative changes that he hopes to see in both leaders and organisations. This book is not really a work of theory (though it looks like one), but an elaborate manual with just about enough theory built in for leaders to persist in the task of storytelling or to be persuaded to try it out for the first time. The theory that has been built into the manual is meant to anticipate the ‘inhibitions, symptoms, and anxieties’ that might cause them to hesitate to take up storytelling or might prompt them to give up in a hurry if the results are not up to their expectations. It is also to help business leaders to situate both the success and failure that they might experience in their attempts at storytelling, to persist with success and bounce back from failure.

The eight narrative patterns are, respectively, supposed to help leaders to: motivate their followers, inspire trust, build a brand, transmit organisational values, get employees to collaborate, share knowledge and understanding, tame the unofficial grapevine, and create a sense of shared vision. All this of course demands that the leader take up the challenge of an interactive position. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the leader has to talk to everyone on the way to or back from work; it is rather about a willingness to understand that language can have effects of ‘being’ and ‘meaning’ in an organisation and that the ‘symbolic’ function of speech as embodied in a story can serve to bond people together in a common project that has not merely a commercial, but an existential dimension as well. While these are what are possible in principle (in terms of the ROI of storytelling), it must be remembered that storytelling techniques in themselves are neutral – that is, they function like an amplifier, and ‘whatever passes through the device – whether it is a signal or noise – comes out louder. If care is taken to ensure the quality of the signal, the effect can be extraordinary.’ The challenge therefore for leaders is to choose the right story and then tell the story right.

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