SUMMARY

A truly brilliant book of enormous value to anyone concerned with management of change. It is written as an extended story about the power of stories and set in the context of embedding knowledge management as a central function of the modern organisation. The author demonstrates the power of stories, their place and role in the whole process of balancing change and stability, what makes a story effective and how to craft stories.

REVIEW

The Springboard belongs on any short list for best business book of its year. It is an essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone, executive or consultant, who is concerned with the management of change. The context of the book is the introduction of knowledge management into a very large organisation - The World Bank - but its relevance extends to any and every aspect of the change process.

This is a book that I will keep with the half dozen or so to which I constantly refer.

The form of the book is an extended story about storytelling and the impact of a particular type of story in engaging the attention and commitment of people to necessary change. It is written directly, simply and with a poet's precision of language, which makes it immensely readable. Many of the books that I review, I skim for points of value. This one I read from cover to cover, and enjoyed doing so.

The opening words convey the style:

      “Why storytelling?

      Nothing else worked.

      Charts left listeners bemused

      Prose remained unread.

      Dialogue was just too laborious and slow.

Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group … to get enthusiastic about a major change, I found that storytelling was the only thing that worked.

This book is thus the story of how I stumbled upon the power of storytelling.”

The thesis is a simple one and the extended framing story about the development of knowledge management within The World Bank, which makes up the book, proves the thesis. Change is driven both by the logic of the relationship of the organisation to its environment and by the interaction of human hopes, fears and preferred perspectives (mental models) with the 'objective' situation. When new departures are needed, an appropriate story can engage the imagination and creative powers of the audience, where analysis and logical argument may only engage the critical faculty. A story can provide the means of circumventing an unacknowledged fear of change and built-in defences by enticing the audience to participate in the creation of a world that overcomes problems which affect all of them. Denning's thesis is not that a story is all that is needed; it is that the initiating power of stories has been neglected in our culturally preferred analytical approach to problem definition and problem solving.

The story must be of a particular kind. What the author calls springboard stories are:

Told from the perspective of a single protagonist who was in a predicament that was prototypical of the organization's business. The predicament...was familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it was the very predicament that the change proposal was meant to solve. The story had a degree of strangeness or incongruity...yet...was plausible, even eerily familiar, almost like a premonition of what the future was going to be like... The stories were told as briefly and simply as possible [in order to] spark new stories in the minds of the listeners... [T]he stories all had 'happy endings': this seemed to make it easy for the listeners to make the imaginative leap from the explicit story...to the implicit story that I was trying to elicit in their minds.

The author explains how it was that in a real and important situation, storytelling worked where nothing else did, and leads us through his journey of discovery about what kinds of stories work, in what situations and why they seem to work. He also provides step by step guidance as to how to identify, select and present stories, the characteristics that give a story power and how stories designed to unlock the possibility of change differ from our ordinary conception of a story designed to entertain.

I happen to have been working with an organization that seeks to do on a smaller scale some of the things that The World Bank does on a very large scale, and is currently experiencing many of the issues that Denning describes in The Springboard. Both his diagnosis and his prescription ring absolutely true. In every chapter I found explanations, ideas and suggestions that are immediately useful and helpful, not only to that situation, but to any change management situation.

There are five invaluable appendices summarizing aspects of the development, presentation and performance of springboard stories, structures for building up a springboard story and examples of stories with explanatory marginal notes on the role of each part of the story. These provide an extremely useful ready reference for the practitioner.
 

The book is arranged in three parts, called Practice, Understanding and Catalysis, thus moving from description to analysis of the structure, content and place of the story in the process of change, without ever losing the central story line of this being a journey of discovery in a real and urgent situation.

The last chapter, entitled The Medusa's Stare, provides a synthesis of the issues of change and stability in any radical change process. The role of the story is to entice the community into initiating and supporting necessary change. As the change becomes established, more conventional, even bureaucratic, tools are needed to provide the structure and rigour to support the new way of doing things &endash; and these in turn need to be challenged and tested through new relevant stories as the external environment continues to change. Denning uses the legend of Perseus and the Medusa to telling effect as a metaphor to dramatize the 'dance' of movement and stability that is necessary to healthy development of an organisation.
 

Two references that are not included in the bibliography, but which would be useful are:

Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. Gardner conceptualises leadership as follows:

When one thinks of the leader as a storyteller, whose stories must wrestle with those that are already operative in the mind of an audience, one obtains a powerful way of conceptualizing the work of leading. It is important for leaders to know their stories, to get them straight, to communicate them effectively, and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell.

Gardner is using the word 'story' in a slightly different way from Denning, but the two perspectives strongly reinforce each other.

The Learning History website has a different but related purpose. 'Learning histories' are designed to help organizations learn from the experience of their own change initiatives. The site explains how they are used, why they are such a valuable tool in change management efforts and provides links to other valuable papers. Carefully constructed histories can be a valuable source of the kinds of springboard stories with which Denning is concerned.