Steve Denning

Author

As a former Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank, Steve Denning learned a few things about organizational knowledge sharing. Today, he is an international expert in the role storytelling plays in organizations. “Getting from there to here is a story in itself,” says Denning.

Storytelling, Denning reasons, can serve as a powerful tool for organizational change and knowledge management. “People think in stories, communicate in stories, even dream in stories. If you want to get anything done in an organization, you need to know how to use the story to move people.”

With three successful books on the art of narrative under his belt Denning has defied the naysayers who he says since the age of Plato have been trying to “hammer the square pegs of analytical thought into the round holes in our brains.”

Catalyzing Understanding Through Artful Narrative

Most good leaders do a masterful job at efficiently delivering reams of analysis —the lifeblood of organizations everywhere. "Analysis is what drives business thinking," says Denning. “The standard management manual relies almost entirely on analytic thinking – fix the systems, re-engineer the process, enhance quality, streamline procedures, flatten the organizational structure.”

Yet there's a weakness that can prove lethal if you're trying to rally the troops and drive transformational change through your organization, explains Denning. "Analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart. And that's where you must go to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm."

Storytelling will get you there. A good leader, says Denning, “uses narrative to explore the future and persuade others to believe in it. It’s courage, passion, and imagination combined with smarts and analysis.”

Storytelling and the Innovation Paradox

Denning’s latest work involves using storytelling to solve the ‘innovation paradox’. “The biggest challenge in innovation,” he says, “is not in generating more ideas, it’s about how you take the really good ideas and make them actually happen.”

A company’s sustainability, Denning argues requires a commitment to transformation via disruptive growth – a place where most companies do not excel. The paradox, Denning finds, lies within the heart of the organization itself. “Innovation is less about understanding the problem than getting people to act differently, often contrary to well-established assumptions and practices,” he says.

Denning argues that to solve this paradox, a different kind of leadership is needed – one that goes beyond the familiar ‘command and control’. By crafting a logical narrative and testing a potential new business model against it, leaders learn to adapt the innovation to the evolving realities of the marketplace.

Denning harkens to what the science fiction writer William Gibson pointed out – ‘that the future is already here, it is just very unevenly distributed.’

“We often imagine that practical reality is hard and intractable and difficult to change,” says Denning. “What we don’t always realize is that ideas are more powerful than this apparently hard intractable reality. If we can get the ideas going in the right way, the future becomes the reality.”