Stories can be used for all sorts of things in an organization or a community or a society. They can be used:: 

· entertainment;
· conveying information; 
· building communities;
· promote innovation;
· preserving organizations; but also 
· changing organizations.

Stories that change organizations

   How do stories that change organizations work? Well, when I say, “Let me tell you something that happened to our task team in Pakistan, and they got advice from someone working on Jordan, and there was the guy writing the book in Argentina, and then there was the head of the highways authority in South Africa, and then the people providing guidelines from New Zealand, and all this came back to Pakistan, and what we learnt from the experience went into the knowledge base in Washington,” when I say all that, we are sitting here in a room in Orlando Florida, but if you have been following the story, in fact you have been whizzing around the world and back in about fifteen seconds.
Avoiding the laws of time and space
    What we are looking at here is the phenomenon that Carl Jung pointed out, namely, that there are some parts of the human self that are not subject to the laws of time and space. And storytelling, the telling of, and the listening to, a simple is one of those things.

Getting inside an idea

 And what happens is that listeners get inside the idea. They live the idea. They feel the idea as much as if they were the task team there in Pakistan, not knowing what to do about some urgent but obscure question and then almost miraculously getting the answer so rapidly. They experience the story as if had lived it themselves. In the process, the story, and the idea that resides inside it, can become theirs. They don’t experience the story as an external observer, standing back, like a scientist in a white coat and appraising the experience, like some kind of voyeur or as a critic, but rather as a participant, someone who is actually living and experiencing and feeling the story.