Welcome
When you work with stories, you can ask people to tell stories about their experiences related to some subject of importance to you (and usually to them), and you can also ask them to answer some questions about those stories. When you do these things, you can find out things and make things happen that wouldn't be possible otherwise. You can:
- find things out,
- catch emerging trends,
- make decisions,
- get new ideas,
- resolve conflicts,
- connect people,
- help people learn, and
- enlighten people.
This online book is an informational resource for people who want to get started working with stories on a small scale in their communities and organizations.
Status
This is the third draft after addition of three case studies in Spring 2009.
Improve the book!
Each section of this book is linked to a reader-contribution page on the Google group that accompanies the book. See the link under "For further reading" in each section. To add your own insights and advice to the book, or to ask questions of other readers, please join the Google group.
PDF version for off-line reading
Here is a PDF version of the whole book for review. To shrink the text for easier printing, the PDF version doesn't have picture captions, and it doesn't have the Summary of method recommendations page (doesn't fit well).
About the author
My name is Cynthia Kurtz. I've been working as an independent researcher and consultant at/with/for a series of places (IBM Research, IBM's Global Services consultancy practice, IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management, IBM's Cynefin Centre, and Cognitive Edge) in the area variously called "organizational narrative", "business narrative", and "narrative knowledge management" (among other names), since 1999. Before that I was an evolutionary biologist and wrote environmental educational software.
Looking for something bigger?
If you want to do a larger project, or have someone else do a project for you, or get started consulting in this area, I suggest you look at the Cognitive Edge web site for a more in-depth approach. They have many open source method documents on their web site, and they also give an excellent training course for people wanting to learn more about the approach (and more besides) which I strongly recommend for anyone wanting to get deeper into the subject. The Anecdote group is also a great source of information and training on these ideas and methods.