Corporate narrative is not storytelling

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —January 13, 2005
Filed in Business storytelling

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.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

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