And what is it that is being explained by the story? As we all know by now, knowledge management is a complex idea. I don’t know whether it has ten dimensions, or twenty dimensions, but it’s certainly got lots of dimensions that need to be mastered if it is going to implemented successfully. Let’s say for the sake of argument that knowledge management has sixteen dimensions.

   Our reaction to abstract explanations

   Well, if I say to you, “Let me explain to you in detail and depth right now each and every one of the sixteen dimensions of knowledge management,” you’re already 

    If I say to you, “Let me show you a chart.” Now this is a chart that we actually used in the World Bank in 1997. And the senior management of our organization loved this chart. They thought that this chart was wonderful because you could see on the left hand side, there’s the the knowledge being created. And then you could see the knowledge passing through the yellow 

Our reaction to a story

   But if I say, “Let me tell you something that happened in Pakistan,” that is to say, a story, you’re immediate reaction is, “Yes, I’d like to hear about it.” You’re not sure what I’m going to pop out at you, but you’ve heard so many interesting stories, in your life, you have a positive attitude and expectation to the prospect of hearing a new story. And I may lose your interest by telling an boring story, or by telling an interesting story poorly, but my initial attitude and expectation towards the story is positive. Unlike the abstract explanation or the chart, I start out on a positive note.

The explanatory power of stories

   But you might ask, “How could this possibly work? How could a 29 word story like the Zambia story that I just told you, how could that 29 word story possibly convey to you a 16 dimensional concept like knowledge management? That’s one-and-a-half dimensions per word. Surely that’s not possible?”
    And if you take the standard view of communications, developed by Roman Jakobsen some forty years ago. The standard view of communications runs something like this. I am talking to you. So my head must be full of stuff. So you are sitting there silent, listening, so your heads must be empty. And the object of my communication is to download the stuff which is in my brain into your empty heads. In other words, some kind of computer dump. 
   There is only one thing wrong with this picture. And that is that it is total nonsense. I don’t happen to have all the answers to the questions to give to you. And even if I did, I couldn’t transmit them to you in the time that I have available. 
    In fact, something quite different is going on. Your heads are not empty. Your heads are full of all sorts of understanding about how the world works, where Pakistan is, what highways are, what the world wide web is. All of those things you have in your mind. And all I need is a tiny fuse of a story that can link up with all of this tacit understanding that you have in your minds, and if it succeeds in igniting that understanding, then suddenly a new pattern of understanding can flash into your mind, and you can suddenly see how the world fits together in quite a different way from what you had been thinking. A new pattern of understanding emerges in your mind.