Steve Denning's books, The Springboard, (2000) The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2005) and The Secret Language of Leadership (October 2007) cover many issues related to business narrative, including a continuing exploration of the role of springboard stories as a leadership tool.

      In The Springboard (2000), Steve Denning described his experience in using a particular kind of story to spark change in a large organization. He called this a "springboard story". A springboard story is a story that enables a leap in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an organization or community or complex system may change and inspires people to implement that change.

      A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information, but through catalyzing understanding. It can enable listeners to visualize from a story in one context what is involved in a large-scale transformation in an analogous context. It can enable them to grasp the idea as a whole not only very simply and quickly, but also in a non-threatening way.

       Not all stories had the springboard effect. A springboard story has to be crafted in a certain way, framed in a certain way and performed in a certain way. The Springboard explains why some springboard stories worked well with particular audiences – and why they didn’t with others – and the principles that can help us choose stories that will work with audiences to achieve a particular effect. 

      The stories that were successful all had certain characteristics. They were stories that were told from the perspective of a single protagonist who was in a predicament that was prototypical of the organization’s business   The predicament of the explicit story was familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it was the very predicament that the change proposal was meant to solve. 

      The stories had a degree of strangeness or incongruity for the listeners, so that it captured their attention and stimulated their imaginations. Yet at the same time, the stories were plausible, even eerily familiar, almost like a premonition of what the future was going to be like. Steps were taken to ensure that story embodied the change proposal to the fullest extent possible, using real examples from within the organization, and sometimes extrapolating into the future to complete the picture. 

      The stories were told as simply and as briefly as possible. Speed and conciseness of style were keys, because as an instigator of change, The idea was less about conveying the details of what exactly happened in the explicit story than in sparking new stories in the minds of the listeners which they would invent in the context of their own environments. For the same reason, the stories all had “happy endings”: this seemed to make it easy for the listeners to make the imaginative leap from the explicit story being told, to the implicit story to be elicited in their minds. 

     Chapters 8-10 of The Springboard discuss in detail the techniques involved in on crafting, building and performing springboard stories. The appendices provide more detailed advice.

     Steve's subsequent books deepen and expand the discussion. Chapters 1-3 of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2005) explore further facets of springboard storytelling.

     The Secret Language of Leadership (October 2007) shows how storytelling fits within the broader array of communication tools available to leaders.