After hearing Dave Snowden describe the importance and application of stories in organisations for the first time, I became extremely excited by the idea and raced off to write a story. I was in the middle of a project helping a client develop a competitive intelligence capability and the engagement was exilarating. So I wrote the story based on that experience to illustrate some of the characteristics which I thought helped form a successful team. A couple of days later I showed this story to Dave and he simply said: ‘You missed the point entirely. You’ve written your story. We are interested in collecting the stories which are currently told in the organisation and then we help the organisation make sense of them.’
Here is a copy of that story
I wrote. People have used it as a discussion starter in team building exercises.