The power and value of stories in an era of information overload

Introduction

Human knowledge has been long conveyed in the form of stories via word-of-mouth and scriptures and books. Tales that evoke visions of grandeur, achievement , greatness abound in scriptures; moral stories that paint pictures of wrong-doings and the undesirable consequences they bring lay strong foundations for moral and ethical behavior. Good stories, awful stories - all kinds of stories. As children we loved to be told stories, we avidly read stories ; as parents we concoct stories for our children, some pure fun, some fantastic while others are loaded with messages in context.

Instinctively and many times, unknowingly, we adopt the very humane approach of story-telling to convey the deep, essential, useful knowledge to our fellow beings

If story-telling is so effective in a social context, then why don't we tell enough stories at work? In this article, I have tried to research the characteristics of good stories, identified some innovative high-tech areas where story- telling has been applied with success and advocate strongly a more pervasive use of story telling as a medium to convey information and knowledge more effectively in our modern information-centric world.

Examples of professional story-telling

In my professional experience of developing complex software applications, I have frequently drawn inspiration from successful projects and learnt important lessons from project failures - all told as stories with a context, the players, the events and the final consequences and lessons to be learned.

Finding a solution while explaining a vexing problem

Computer programming is a tough job, especially when a computer does exactly what you tell it to do, not what you wantit to do. Like Winnie the Pooh, with a limited brain, I have spent quite a few hours trying to figure out why a particular program did not work the way I envisioned it to work. Two ways of solving the problem have been very effective for me - either sleep on it or explain the problem to someone. In both scenarios, I try to build a story- line, explain the forces (players), what the program is supposed to do (plot) and why it is behaving the way it is (climax). Once I started doing this, the cracks in the story became obvious leading to discovery of the problem, or finding a workaround - the pieces of the puzzle fell in place.

High-tech story telling

Recently, story telling is taking firm root in the newer ways of developing complex software. I first encountered the concept of story telling in a Distinguished Lecturer Series lecture by Linda Rising where she talked about minstrels that would convey stories from one part of the organization to others.

Story telling in eXtreme Programming

More recently, I experienced the power of stories and metaphor in eXtreme Programming (XP) a light- weight "way" of developing high-quality software in record time. XP uses stories to build a consistent set of requirements - a story-line that makes sense ; each individual story has a purpose, a set of rules (plot) and an ending that ends in the successful execution of a test-suite (see TestingStories). Each story, thus adds value to the customer, slowly building up a consistent, holistic system that makes sense. The emergence of this holistic system allows us, humans, to use our senses to detect inconsistencies, inefficiencies, flaws that in XP are called smells.

This consistent way to build story upon story allows us to employ one of the most powerful mechanisms available to us - pattern matching to detect, develop and use a meta-language called the pattern language using patterns to communicate powerful concepts resulting in tremendous speed in delivery of systems.

Story telling in Scrum

The spectacular stories of XP successes boosted the adoption of Agile Methods in general, spawning several other popular methods - one of which is Scrum. Scrum uses story-telling as a core concept. A leading practitioner of Scrum, Mike Cohn has taken story telling to a new level.

Story telling in the business world

A majority of management wisdom is passed along in the form of stories. For example, Harvard Business Review, a popular management journal publishes articles that paint a vivid scenario and apply analytical thinking to argue the applications of different scenarios. The spectacular successes of products like the Lexus automobile and Google the search engine have spawned books with scores of stories about their trials and tribulations. Several ground-breaking management theories owe their success to their packaging as stories- for example Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt introduced his Theory of Constraints as a business novel in the book The Goal.

Research on the power of stories

Having detected this pattern, I was convinced that some research must have been done about the _science _of story telling. In my research, I discovered two very good works that try to explain why stories are so powerful and why it is important that we understand the characteristics of a good story.

Tell me a Story

Roger Schank, Director of the Institute of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, in his book entitled Tell me a storyargues that artificial intelligence must be based on real human intelligence, which consists largely of applying old situations and our narratives of them to new situations. According to him :

"We need to tell someone a story that describes our experiences because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering."

The Power of Stories

In his gem of a book The sources of Power, Gary Klein identifies Stories as one of the powers utilized by people in making decisions. In his excellent treatment,

Gary Klein claims that we, humans, organize our cognitive world of ideas, concepts, relationships, events etc. in a linked interrelationship of stories

. He identifies a story as a blend of several ingredients:

Agents - the people who figure in the story.
Predicament - the problem the agents are trying to solve
Intentions - what the agents plan to do
Actions - what the agents do to achieve their intentions
Objects - the tools the agents will use
Causality - the effects of actions
Context - the many details surrounding the agents and actions
Surprises - the unexpected things that happen in a story

A story ties all these ingredients together. A story may contain useful lessons, often a form of a second-hand experience for people who did not witness the incident.

A good story has an element of surprise - the dramatic part; is a package of different causal relationships - what factors resulted in what effects; it draws together several components and shows connections ; has an ending; is plausible ; is consistent ; is economical ; is unique.

Using stories to elicit expert knowledge

For eliciting knowledge, Klein has found using stories to be the most powerful method.

This reinforces my own experience in software development and definitely explains the spectacular success of using stories to elicit deep domain knowledge from customers and thus drive requirements.

By having customers tell stories of their domain, their tasks and their problems, we are able to better understand what they need and want and why

.

Conclusions

Stories are powerful, concise and long-lasting ways of absorbing and transmitting nuggets of wisdom. Research and experience shows that this common-sense way of knowledge-transmission is very effective, especially in this new era of competitiveness and information overload.

References

Lecture notes, OTUG, 2001, http://www.otug.org/meeting/200109/arunnotes.html, Rising, Linda.

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