What you are about to read is the forth chapter of an article I wrote a while ago for an engineering and management KM conference in Tel-Aviv.
Storytelling is the most profound long standing influence device that exists through human history and storytellers who can harness the power of the art are the central link in this process. Many names have been given to this skill –legendary marketers, thought leaders, communication architects, but it all cuts down to one expression – masterful storytellers.
Storytelling is perceived in various ways and as a combination of literature, theater, demagogy, folklore and plain lies. What storytellers actually do is “Mediate ideas articulated in words to or with other people. Storytellers work with thought and relationship. The same process happens in literature, poetry, and theater. It is the need to successfully mediate the verbal and kinesthetic narratives to other people orally, in time, while adapting to a specific telling, that demands the use of a third narrative. That is the vocal, the narrative of patterned movement.” (Shiponi, 2002)
Storytellers work in a narrative world, expanding and zooming in on the information constantly in order to reveal the most relevant and reliable information that will help create the decision about their next action. This information is met with other performance indicators and together a decision is made in an instance.
This process of scanning information, experience and predictions is what creates the solid plot line then compared to known plot patterns they carry in order to form the best plot suitable for a specific event. In the storyteller’s absence the managing device of the story event is only partial or totally missing.
The most outstanding skill of a storyteller has to do with patterned movement and the use of it in combination with all the other facets of a storytelling event to create a space for a crystallized living body of knowledge – a story. Storytellers are skillful in combining time patterns and content in a way that attracts people like diamonds – a purification of substance.
Storytellers organize information and knowledge, content and relationships in a non-linear dynamic way; they use structure and process interweaving polarities; they use metaphor as a tool to comprehend complex patterns surfacing an alternative mode of understanding which lives beyond the matrix; they visualize the narrative world of stories through sphere-based geometry and configurations of higher order. For storytellers, chaos is a play ground to observe, reframe and organize, so a single plot can be reframed and sculptured in time. Storytelling suggests the integration between the knowledge society and the awareness society – it is the reflection and organizing principle of a wisdom society.
Therefore it is no surprise that the top rated feature of masterful storytelling by storytellers is ’sense of story’ (Shiponi, 2007) which is an inclusion of various organizing terms among them ‘the formula’ and the ‘oral formulaic theory’ known from the works of Lord, Parry and Foley. The word ‘patterns’ indicates the element of re-using knowledge.
We all do that but masterful storytellers have larger parts of the process mastered to the extent they can collect data, process, take a focused relevant decision, aim towards a target audience at eye-level and elicit feedback at such high speeds that the outcome sounds like plain chant and seems effortless and therefore ‘must’ be a natural talent or something rather simple anybody can do. Taking one step back from this picture and looking at it from a KM perspective – the skill of storytelling is management of information in context to produce an actionable understanding that is extremely fast, almost always relevant, and never superficial.
There are two important realizations here though – there is no need to go through a thorough prolonged analysis in order to prove the power of masterful storytelling. That would be like sending oneself to get lost in the Mandelbrot set. And secondly, not everyone can be a masterful storyteller.
So? reading that chapter, whether you agree or not, whether you are curious to know more or just about to click away from here, I’ll be happy to read your thoughts. In any case, there is no way I could agree on calling storytelling “a tool”. That would be like looking at an entire person and calling here “long legs”.