Waste not the lifeblood of workplace gossip
Those who stifle stories risk dismantling knowledge transfers
Some corporate leaders fear “data stories” that escape into the wild. “Stories change every time they’re told!,” goes the alarm — as if the ideal was confinement and the inevitable suffocation.
Of course stories change. They change with each new point of view, each storyteller, each audience. They morph at every conversation whether at a meeting, over social media, across pillows, and in every other hothouse of chat. Organizations are human beasts, and they thrive with stories to feed on.
Most important for the organization, stories are the primary form of knowledge transfer. Many of them carry knowledge and ideas, the very lifeblood of any organization. Ronald Coase, in his Nobel Prize-winning paper “The Nature of the Firm,” theorized the critical importance of efficient transfer of knowledge for organizations. It’s their edge over independent workers.
Fortunately, such fear of storytelling is far from universal among corporate leaders. Scott Davis, longtime technology industry innovator and entrepreneur in Denver, Colorado, believes there’s just one kind of workplace story that calls for caution: the factual story. That’s unlike the hypothetical and predictive stories. “Our hypothetical stories certainly will evolve as our knowledge evolves.” About the predictive type, Davis says, “[Forecasts] are always all wrong.”
Sometimes, story variants save the day, such as to reveal critical insights. I watched first hand one such instance. In 1993, within a nationwide public interest organization. A committee I chaired oversaw the organization’s precious old mountain lodge near Lake Tahoe. It was a legacy from the time when this organization was a fraction of its size that year, built largely by the smooth hands of UC Berkeley and Stanford faculty. As membership had spread from the old California base across the U.S, it fell from mainstay to side show.
In mid-1993, along came another budget crisis. Lower level staff began spreading the word that sacrifices might be ahead, and as usual the old lodge was mentioned. But the big guys in the board room had underestimated its enduring popularity. I wrote a letter, got a handful of big names to sign it, and persuaded my fellow chapter newsletter editors around California to print it in their next editions. Soon, the organization’s San Francisco headquarters had received about 740 letters and phone calls in protest. The lodge was saved, mostly thanks to the lodge committee’s variant story: Sell the lodge and make us dues-paying, perhaps also endowment-committed members really upset because you broke the implicit promise of decades ago.
No figures had been mentioned, but what if they had? Say the projected deficit had been half a million dollars. The only thing that comes after that is an imagined outcome.
So calm down, corporate leaders. There’s nothing to fear but the hypotheticals.