The Springboard

Stephen Denning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138131620
• eBook ISBN: 9781136013539
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations is the first book to teach storytelling as a powerful and formal discipline for organizational change and knowledge management. The book explains how organizations can use certain types of stories ("springboard" stories) to communicate new or envisioned strategies, structures, identities, goals, and values to employees, partners and even customers. Readers will learn techniques by which they can help their organizations become more unified, responsive, and intelligent. Storytelling is a management technique championed by gurus including Peter Senge, Tom Peters and Larry Prusak. Now Stephen Denning, an innovator in the new discipline of organizational storytelling, teaches how to use stories to address challenges fundamental to success in today's information economy.

PART I

Practice

ONE

Stumbling upon the
Springboard Story

But regarding this Treatise as simply a history, or, if you prefer it, as a fable, in which, among certain things which may be imitated, there are possibly others also which it would not be right to follow, I hope that it will be of use to some without being harmful to any, and that all will thank me for my frankness.

René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode¹

Around noon, the dry, odorless, conditioned air in the fifth floor of the office building where I work succumbs to a faint whiff of French fries and Chinese food that makes its way up the elevator shaft from the cafeteria on the ground floor, or from the communal microwave ovens in which penny-pinching assistants heat meals hand-carried from tiny apartments in the outlying suburbs of Washington, D.C., or from the sandwiches that some of us purchase and bring to our desks to munch in front of multicolored computer screens. Often we eat alone, oblivious to any kind of social nicety, or the weather outside, totally immersed in our work, as if eager not to lose a moment in our efforts to advance the cause of poverty alleviation in the poorest countries of the world, which is the daunting mission of the international organization where we work.

It is March 1996. Today, I am sharing a brown-bag lunch around the conference table in my office with a younger colleague. He is fair, fresh-faced, and engagingly idealistic. An economist in the health and education sectors, he has worked with me in various parts of the organization in the past. I am relieved to see that his sudden and recent ascension to be an adviser to one of the organization's top managers has endowed him with none of the hauteur and self-importance that sometimes come with these transitions. He has the same self-deprecating sense of humor that attracted me to him in the first place. He sees himself as an anomaly in the exalted echelons of top management, where he is treated gently as a sounding board for the men and women in the trenches. He is learning what it is to work in those sublime heights. Although he doesn't seem to regret my advice to take the position for a limited time, he is keen to get back to working directly with clients on the front lines. He has generally proved receptive to new ideas. When I ask him to come to share some sandwiches in my office, he accepts at once and is immediately eager to hear what I have to say.

A month prior to this lunch, I had been asked by the management to look into the issue of information in our organization. As a manager in operations in the organization for several decades, I had not been especially happy to get this request, since my professional life and enjoyment lay in face-to-face dealings with clients, traveling to remote countries around the globe, seeing for myself what was happening on the spot, and solving problems with everyone from heads of state to villagers and children. At the time, I had no desire to leave this kind of life. This was what I liked doing and what I thought I knew how to do. Why should I leave this exciting world and look into the unglamorous issue of information, a field of expertise in which I was no more than an enthusiastic amateur? The answer wasn't obvious to me or anyone else. At the time, information was considered a low-status and low-priority occupation in the organization. The shift from operations to information was universally regarded as a move to an organizational backwater. It caused everyone to wonder why I would consider it, let alone agree.

And yet I was not exactly angry. I was even a little intrigued with the idea of looking full-time into the issue of information. As an early advocate of personal computing who had felt the exhilaration and liberation that it offered, I had some inkling of the potential. Yet the institutional issues that it generated were immense. The costs were high and rising, and the benefits not yet evident. Many of the basics were not in place: every question on even the simplest issue, such as how many clients we had, or how much money we had spent on anything, had multiple answers. There was no strategic vision of the role of information, which existed in silos and was inaccessible across the organization. Periodic efforts at cleanup were fragmented and generally short-lived. Despite the high costs of maintaining information, there seemed to be little benefit from our information systems for external clients and partners in running the organization's business.

Which business were we in? On this central issue, even among the top management, there was little consensus. Traditionally, our organization had been conceived as a financial organization, transferring money through loans for development projects in the poorest countries of the world—getting kids into school in Bolivia, sparking rural development in Uganda or health development in Kenya, igniting private sector growth in Thailand, remedying gender disparities in Zambia, or protecting the environment in Brazil. Over time, however, the organization had acquired additional functions, as a coordinator of transactions with the countries in which the organization operated, as a catalyst or promoter of additional financial sources and transactions in those countries, and as a knowledge broker, through the transfer of information and know-how to people and organizations on how to get results in those countries. It was this last function, that of knowledge broker, that had been steadily growing in practical importance over the years. Initially it had occurred as a natural by-product of financing development projects, but there were increasing opportunities to transfer this know-how independently of any financial transaction, and indeed the advent of the World Wide Web dramatically expanded those possibilities. Clients were becoming more demanding in terms of the quality of the advice that the organization provided. They were increasingly dissatisfied with merely receiving the expertise of the individuals who happened to have been assigned to handle their affairs. Instead, they were beginning to insist on getting the best expertise from around the globe that the entire organization could provide, and if we couldn't offer that, they would go elsewhere to find it. It was striking that the only aspect of our organization's business that was significantly supported by the huge investment in information systems was the financial transfer business. The coordinator, catalyst, and knowledge broker functions were essentially being conducted on a craftlike basis, with one-on-one transactions handled in person or on paper. Despite an immense wealth of professional expertise in the staff of the organization, there were, apart from a couple of isolated pilot efforts, no consistent and systematic actions to establish and maintain access to the organization's knowledge or to extend its potential reach. The potential partners of those various businesses—coordinator, catalyst, and knowledge broker—were so numerous that the craft mode of operation was increasingly incapable of coping. Unless a new mode of operation could be invented, these businesses were at risk of unraveling.

Even in the financial business, where systems already existed, there were immense information inefficiencies. The simplest issue, such as disbursing funds for overseas projects, entailed a large-scale paper chase. One might imagine that in an era of electronic technology and ATM machines, the question of disbursing the money under a loan from a large modern organization would occur in a matter of minutes. In our organization, the task was far more arduous and the normal lead time was in weeks or even months. Thus, even after loans were agreed, the borrower would deliver a complicated paper-based withdrawal application to the field office of our organization in the place where the disbursement had occurred. The field office would log in the application, which would enter a pile of disbursement applications. The collection of applications would in due course be placed in the pouch and flown to New York, where it would be sorted and flown to Washington, D.C. From here, it would find its way through the mail room to the disbursement department and enter a queue of paper applications awaiting attention from the staff. In due course, the disbursement application would be logged in again, enter a new queue, and eventually be processed, so that an instruction would be sent to the cashiers department to issue a check, and thus eventually—some two to four weeks after the borrower submitted the paper application, if there was not some other snafu—the payment would actually be made. Everyone was doing his or her job expeditiously and diligently. No single individual was causing the delay. It was the overall system that had to be dismantled, so that funds could be disbursed in minutes, not weeks or sometimes months.

The problems of our organization in managing information thus were obvious. But what made the prospect of reform so unpromising was that these problems had all been repeatedly documented. In 1988, the internal audit department had written a report pointing out the need for policies, procedures, and controls in the management of information. In 1989, the audit department had produced another report to the effect that enhanced information management was essential for the organization to maintain its competitive edge. In 1993, a comprehensive study concluded that the information systems in place were not responsive to the organization's business needs. In 1995, three separate reports had reached the same conclusion. All these reports had three features in common. One was that they had all correctly identified the huge unresolved problems that the organization was facing in managing its information systems. Secondly, they all refrained from recommending comprehensive solutions to those problems. Apparently, immense bureaucratic inertia and territorial defensiveness had set in whenever anyone had dared suggest remedying a setup that was untenable. Thirdly, the outcome in each case was identical. It simply led to yet another study.

Fixing the information systems would thus not only be immensely difficult. It was, as everyone was quick to tell me, utterly unrealistic.

Yet something else—less obvious—was also bothering me. Even if the existing information systems did get fixed, and the reforms were a glorious success, the organization would not be very different. It would move more quickly. After some initial investment, it would cost somewhat less to run. Clients might find it somewhat easier to deal with. But it would still be in the same business. It would still be at risk of competition from a new breed of financial organization in the private sector that was increasingly providing finance to the less-developed countries. It would not be adding much more value to its clients, who would remain the somewhat limited circle of beneficiaries of its financial transactions. The potentially broader audience for the treasure house of expertise that our professionals possessed would not be helped even by a fully successful reform of the existing information systems.

Thus, my intuition told me I had been given the wrong riddle. Information was yesterday's issue. Our real opportunity was in knowledge.

Knowledge offered a lot. If we could rapidly share good practice and make know-how widely accessible, then a more agile and more broadly useful organization might emerge. The idea of sharing knowledge was not new, and in fact was spreading across many forward-looking organizations under the paradoxical labels of “knowledge management,” “intellectual asset management,” or “the learning organization.”

So I found myself setting aside the mandate that management had proposed—to look into the issue of information—and instead, putting together a coalition of colleagues who understood how valuable the whole approach of sharing know-how and expertise could be and who could help transform the organization's strategy.

It was an exciting but difficult time for me. I spent my days prowling the organizations corridors and cafeteria, buttonholing anyone I could find, and dragging them to my office if they would come—or talking to them on the spot if they wouldn't—to tell them about the idea of knowledge sharing that had taken hold of me. My spirits were not a little depressed, as I was finding it difficult to get anyone to listen. Most of the people couldn't or wouldn't seem to understand an idea that seemed to me so obvious and logical and self-evident. To them, the notion was strange and incomprehensible and outlandish, almost contrary to common sense, as if coming from another planet. I was heavy with pessimism that the message would ever get across. In my desperation, I was improvising, trying things out, sensing the reactions of single individuals, getting their suggestions, struggling to understand their puzzlement, jettisoning anything that didn't fully connect, and accentuating any ideas that seemed to strike a chord and resonate.

On this day in March 1996, as I sit with my colleague eating ham sandwiches and talking and swapping stories of our respective experiences, and discussing the idea of knowledge sharing, he tells me about something that has happened to him recently. He has been traveling in Africa—in Zambia, a country about the size of France but with only a fifth of the population and very low incomes—where he is working on a investment project aimed at improving health services to families, particularly mothers and children, and he had come across a health worker in Kamana, a small town some 600 kilometers from the capital of the county, Lusaka. The health worker was trying to find the solution to a problem in treating malaria.

I have never been to Kamana, but I have been to Zambia several times, and know that it is one of the least developed countries in the world. At independence in 1964, it was a prosperous copper-producing economy, but mismanagement of economic policy over several decades has left the country with a huge debt, run-down infrastructure, and collapsing health facilities and schools. Government services are short of resources to an extent that is practically unimaginable in developed countries. All services have difficulties in getting enough funds to make anything happen. Our organization is involved in helping the Zambians redress the legacy of economic mismanagement in various sectors, including health. I know how desperate it is to be a health worker in an out-of-the-way place like Kamana with such limited resources. In the heat and the dust and the flies, there is often no running water, no reliable electricity, few telephones, unpaved roads, no drugs, no bandages, no equipment, and no reliable transport. In such places, the living and working conditions are so distressingly difficult that it is almost a miracle if any health services get delivered at all. Access to real expertise is more than an expensive luxury, almost an impossible dream.

My colleague tells me about a health worker in Kamana, who in June 1995 logged on to the Center for Disease Control Web site and got the answer to a question on how to treat malaria. He thinks that it's a neat illustration of how the idea of knowledge sharing across organizations is already working. At least one person in one of the least developed countries of the world has found something useful on the Web. This is, remember, early 1996, and the Web has not attained the widespread recognition as a potential purveyor of useful information that it will enjoy only a year or so later. The example shows that medical expertise existing on a Web site in Atlanta can lead to low-cost sharing of know-how with a health worker in a rural area on the other side of the globe—even in an out-of-the-way place like Kamana, with such limited resources, with so few educated people, with so little in the way of communications facilities. I am beginning to think: if it can work there, then why can't it work on a very large scale—not just in health, but in all fields of expert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Storytelling for Organizational Change
• Practice
• Understanding
• Catalysis
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Appendix 6
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author