Jim McGee offers some interesting and useful thoughts on how to talk to management about IT issues in a two part series on Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part One and Part Two. He says that making complex issues simple is not just a matter of “dumming it down for the suits.” You need to make it come alive through stories and other “day-in-the life” examples as senior managers tend to operate within an immediacy and concreteness that is similar to pre-literate cultures. I certainly agree with Jim on the power of stories and the need to use them to talk to management. In my past life, we always put stories into our sales presentations. When we tried to make CBT (computer-based-training for those to young to remember the acronym) more engaging in its early days in the 80s, we started with a story that illustrated the importance of the topic and motivated the users to take the course.
I also think there is still a part of this pre-literate oral tradition in all of us. The most effective senior managers are those that can follow this same thinking to communicate to their audience through stories, whether it is their employees or the marketplace. Stories are part of the human spirit; they touch our emotional core and provide a natural means for organizing our key values (see Dan McAdam’s “The Stories We Live by: Personal Myths and the Making of Self”). Research into great leaders has suggested that a leader who truly enables change is one who creates a story; a vision that significantly affects the thoughts, behaviors and feelings of a large number of people who then become followers (see Gardner & Laskin – “Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership”). For example, Gandhi successfully conveyed a vision that in non-violent struggle both sides could emerge strengthened.
As Jim writes, before text was invented, stories were the main form of knowledge recording and sharing, and the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. Stories provided the organizing framework for both the recorders and the receivers of knowledge. But stories did not lose their power to move people when the printing press made literature scalable. For example, many historians have argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was more instrumental in convincing the people of the northern United States of the evils of slavery than the more abstract appeals to morality by contemporary politicians. Stowe was referred to as the old lady who started the Civil War. She knew how to the talk to the “suits” and to the oral tradition within all of us.
Within business however, although stories have remained important in informal knowledge transfer, they have not been formally recognized for their value and have not been managed to achieve maximum benefit. As Jim writes, stories are about effectively sharing knowledge across cultures, about going from the analytical to the tangible and situational. They are not simply about entertainment. It is their ability to share culture, values, vision and ideas that make them so critical.
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