In 1995, Howard Gardner pointed to the importance of storytelling for leadership, and since then, a cascade of books and articles have described the power of storytelling in organizations:1/  But the Winter issue of the Booz Allen magazine, strategy+business, reminds us that the intellectual foundations for the current management interest in storytelling came much earlier. 

Since 1970, Nobel-Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has been documenting the predominance of intuitive thinking over rational thought processes. Contrary to the standard picture of man as a rational animal, Kahneman’s research showed that most of our thinking is fast, associative, governed by habit and emotionally charged: even people who have been trained for many years in statistics and risk analysis to think analytically make the same mistakes.  Storytelling is a way of connecting with these intuitive, associative mental processes. 

This is not to say that there are not good reasons why business communications are persistently analytic. Analysis is the key to good theory, precise thinking, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery. Analysis cuts through the fog of myth, gossip and speculation to get to the hard facts. Its strength is its objectivity, its impersonality, its very heartlessness: it goes wherever the observations and premises and conclusions take it. Analysis isn’t distorted by the feelings or the hopes or the fears of the analysts: analysis gets us relentlessly to the bottom line.

Yet the very strength of analysis – its heartlessness – can be a drawback when it comes to communicating with human beings. Analysis might excite the mind, but its heartlessness is hardly the route to the heart. Yet it is the heart that we need to reach to get people enthusiastically into action. Endless mind-numbing cascades of numbers can result in dazed audiences and PowerPoint burnout. At a time when corporate survival often entails disruptive change, leadership is about moving and inspiring people – often to do things that they are not by habit or by predisposition inclined to do: just giving people a reason simply does not work. 

Hence the current management interest in storytelling. Good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, but they are typically approved on the basis of stories. A story can translate dry, abstract numbers into compelling pictures of how the deep yearnings of decision influencers can come true. And Kahnemann's research shows why.

Go to the article in strategy+business
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For more examples of Storytelling in The News, go to the Archive

1/ See for example:
Davenport, Tom & Prusak, Larry, What’s The Big Idea? Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. 
Denning, Stephen. The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations. Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 2000. 
Gabriel, Yannis. Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford, 2001.
Simmons, Annette. The Story Factor. Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2000. 
Mark, Margaret, & Pearson, Carol S.: The Hero and the Outlaw : Harnessing the Power of Archetypes to Create a Winning Brand. McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Vincent, Laurence: Legendary Brands: Unleashing the Power of Storytelling to Create a Winning 
Marketing Strategy. Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2002. 
McKee, Robert: “Storytelling That Moves People” Harvard Business Review: June 2003. 
“ROI's Secret Ingredient”  CIO Magazine, June 15, 2003. 
Bennett, Julie: Storytelling and Diversity, by Julie Bennett, Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2003. 
Bennett, Julie. “Spin Straw Into Gold With Good Storytelling.” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2003.