People-focused knowledge management

We Rely on Stories to Tackle New Problems
When faced with new challenges, relevant stories often help us
create mental models that let us tackle the task effectively. Consider
Alice, an insurance underwriter, who is asked to produce an insur-
ance policy quote for a retail business in a socioeconomic area with
which she has no prior experience. She knows risk analysis tech-
niques and methods, and general business risks, and she has good
general knowledge of the retail business, though not of this particu-
lar kind. Alice knows all the principles and theory. However, she does
not know how her knowledge objects, other mental models, and con-
siderations should be applied to the specific retail business in the par-
ticular geographic location.
Her coworker Jean has worked with a similar case before and tells
stories of how she approached that situation. In relating the stories
— and there are several — Jean points out that she also made 
misjudgments and tells the reasons for those and how she corrected
for them. As a result, Alice is able to weave together a cohesive model
of the approach she will use to handle the situation — to interpret
the business and situational information, build the problem-specific
methodology for analysis, problem-solve the insurance quote, and
create the proposal details — all within the company’s guidelines and
intent and to the satisfaction of her own professional judgment.
Stories Help Us Learn Better
Stories often assist us in learning and are used in effective educa-
tional settings by complementing the teaching of theory, principles,
and other topic-related knowledge objects. Students are helped by
following and understanding stories, engaging in conceptual blend-
ing to tie mental objects together, and creating new ones. In this way,
they make new mental spaces as coherent wholes in their minds by
understanding new concepts, how individual objects fit with one
another, and how build expectations for evolving scripts and the like.
Good stories let us integrate and create coherent and harmonious
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Mental and Structural Reference Models
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mental models so that we can understand relationships and make
sense of the whole.
Instead of describing the synthesized characteristics of complex
matters, people find it easy to use stories to describe concrete situa-
tions and events. For example, stories are useful when the point they
are making and which they want others to understand is abstract,
such as when emphasizing the general nature of the potentially unde-
sirable consequences of unethical acts. People find it much more dif-
ficult to make explicit the general and abstract principles and lessons
that underlie the story’s moral or teachings. Difficult as it is, that step
is at times necessary to help recipients identify and focus on the
general idea and build the intended understanding — the intended
knowledge. It appears that the most effective approach to transfer
deep concepts is storytelling followed by discussion and dialogue
about what the story tells.
As an example of an effective use of a story from enterprise edu-
cation, let us visit a class in papermaking for operator trainees. The
small class had learned about all the parts of the paper manufactur-
ing process from chipper, digester, bleaching plant, refiners, the paper
machine with its head box to presses, felts, dryers, calenders, spools,
and all other objects. The teacher covered designs, construction, indi-
vidual functions, and principles of operation, but the trainees still
had problems understanding how everything fit functionally and
operationally together in detail, although they understood the general
flow of materials through the process. The teacher then told a 
“story” by following one piece of wood from the point where it
entered the chipper, was transformed into pulp and fine cellulose
fibers, before entering the paper machine and in the end emerging as
high-quality paper after calendering. As he told the story, he indi-
cated how the piece of material that started as a wood chip was grad-
ually transformed to paper and how it was beneficially or adversely
affected by proper and improper operation of the equipment. As a
result, after the story had been told, each student was able to build
coherent mental models of the whole process and develop a mental
framework for how to operate the different areas of the papermak-
ing process.