Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Storytelling for Working, Learning, and Innovation

Having once again summoned the article by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that appeared in 1991 in Organization Science entitled, "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice" to beat someone over the head (this time JP Rangaswami in his effort to promote Facebook as a vehicle for knowledge management), I figured it was time for me to review for myself what I thought were some of the gems from this paper that keep it alive for me over fifteen years after it was published. Beyond the "big picture" in which the authors develop "a unified view of working, learning, and innovation," which I have already cited, the argument to which I continue to return is the case they make for the role of storytelling in this unified view. That case draws heavily on Julian Orr's anthropological study of Xerox repair technicians, with particular attention to their practice of sharing "war stories" at the end of a hard day's work. What emerges is an analysis of how the very telling of these stories is as important as the stories themselves in the ways in which those technicians behave as knowing subjects. Here is a passage from the Brown-Duguid paper that bears much of the argumentative weight for making this case:

Story telling allows them [the repair technicians] to keep track of the sequences of behavior and of their theories, and thereby to work towards a coherent account of the current state of the machine. The reps try to impose coherence on an apparently random sequence of events in order that they can decide what to do next. Unlike the documentation, which tells reps what to do but not why, the reps’ stories help them develop causal accounts of machines, which are essential when documentation breaks down. (As we have suggested, documentation, like machines, will always break down, however well it is designed.) What the reps do in their story telling is develop a causal map out of their experience to replace the impoverished directive route that they have been furnished by the corporation. In the absence of such support, the reps Orr studied cater to their own needs as well as they can. Their narratives yield a story of the machine fundamentally different from the prescriptive account provided by the documentation, a story that is built in response to the particulars of breakdown.

It is arguments like these that remind me why I get so upset when I ponder evidence of our growing inability to tell stories. On the one hand this make be taken as a sign of our work culture undermining our more general social culture; but, at least to those of us who buy into the Brown-Duguid argument, that inability is also undermining our work culture. What will we be left of our lives when the social contexts of both work and leisure have been so undermined? Perhaps yesterday's comparison that put us below the level of the great apes is not as hyperbolic as I originally intended it to be!

2 comments:

  1. @
    What will we be left of our lives when the social contexts of both work and leisure have been so undermined?


    By "work or leisure" do you connote public and private?

    In any event, Life reduces to paperwork: filling out forms. Forms about yourself or forms about other forms other people have filled out. The more creative among us can fill in nonsense. Just so long as it's either perfectly organized or completely disorganized. Anything in between is too unpredictable to be profitable.

    Bow down to the American Idol! Three cheers for efficiency, and its requisite scarcity of resources! Growth! Progress! Freedom!

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  2. I had assumed that our work life is a public one; but, having just seen Absolute Wilson, I am now willing to grant that there can be private elements in the work we do. There is probably more general consensus that leisure time can be public or private.

    On the other hand I simply cannot agree that "Life reduces to paperwork." For me, the act of living (not to be confused with how we choose to define "life" as a concept) consists the actions we take that both manifest and are guided by that tight coupling of knowledge, memory, being, and description that I discussed on
    Monday
    . Some of those actions involve "document creation," one instance of which is filling out forms; but a considerable amount of my life is engaged in other pursuits (such as writing this blog)!

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