I’m taking storytelling so seriously that I’m now spending part of my time at the new institute for media literacy at USC. I’m particularly interested in digital storytelling, in new ways to use multiple media to tell stories and in the ability of kids, who are now growing up in a digital world, to figure out new ways to tell stories. They have the ability to build interpretive movies very simply and to lay sound tracks around the content. They condition or “sculpture” the context around the content. The serious interplay between context and content is key to what film — and rich media in general — are about. I want to understand what film people know about storytelling. I want to know what makes them such good storytellers. What are the techniques (and grammars) of film that help them create an emotional scaffolding around a story so that it connects first to the gut and then to the head?

Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can’t talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic mental model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are doing. That is to say, you use a connotative component (what the thing means) rather than a denotative component (what it represents). First, you grab them in the gut and then you start to construct (or re-construct) a mental model. If you try to do this in an intellectual or abstract way, you find that it’s very hard, if not impossible, to talk somebody into changing their mental models. But if you can get to them emotionally, either through rhetoric or dramatic means (not overly dramatic!), then you can create some scaffolding that effectively allows them to construct a new model for themselves. You provide the scaffolding and they construct something new. It doesn’t seem to work if you just try to tell them what to think. They have to internalize it. They have to own it. So the question is: what are the techniques for creating scaffolding that facilitate the rich internalization and re-conceptualization and re-contextualization of their own thinking relative to the experience that you’re providing them? Put more simply: how do you get them to live the idea?

Blogs are powerful when there’s a set of blogs working independently that end up helping you triangulate on the same point. You have different points of view that end up linking to the same mega-idea. If you have three independent rumors that all say the same thing, then that rumor may turn out to have a certain kind of significance. What’s interesting is whether we should read blogs in the same way as we read a newspaper.

Notice, also, that blogs can suddenly reach a critical mass that then forces something out into the open, into public consciousness. You might think of it as an analogy to the subconscious vs. the conscious. The formal or conscious part is what today’s journalism is about, New York Times and so on. But the informal layer, comprising things like blogs, is like our unconscious mind. It’s not publicly visible. But all kinds of things are happening there. Things get linked together and suddenly there can be enough links (creating a dense mesh of intertextual links) that the underlying ‘idea’ breaks through to public consciousness. The recent Trent Lott situation is an excellent example. Initially, the mainstream press didn’t pick up on what he said. It wasn’t in the public consciousness. It was the blogs that identified the issue and got the debate going. It was connected at the subconscious level — speaking metaphorically in terms of the social mind. Enough energy was generated, and then it burst forth into the conscious mind and into the formal media.

Well, what is the structure of a narrative? What makes narratives fit so perfectly in the architecture of the human mind? What are the ways of creating the scaffolding for that narrative? How do you set the context for that narrative? How do you maintain consistency with your core ideas as you set the context? Now there are different media. You can do it orally. You can do it in terms of writing and you can do it in terms of film and video.

Let’s take a look at online games, such as Lineage, which are a much larger phenomenon than most people are aware. This particular game holds the record for having the most people online at once, probably hundreds of thousands. It is immensely popular in Korea. Or, in this country, consider Sims Online or EverQuest. If you take into account not only the game itself but also all of the peripheral activities (activities happening around the edge of the game such as the support sites, the chat rooms, and so on) you find a rich social ecology constantly unfolding. But just focus on the game itself which involves all the players building and evolving a complex world, and you see a new kind of nonlinear, multi-authored narrative being constructed.

Yesterday I heard an amazing comment from a 16 year old named Colin. Colin said: “I don’t want to study Rome in high school. Hell, I build Rome every day in my online game.” (Caesar III ). And in so doing he is continually building a new narrative space that goes on evolving. Of course, we could dismiss this narrative construction as not really being a meaningful learning experience but a bit later he and his dad were engaged in a discussion about the meaningfulness of class distinctions — lower, middle, etc — and his dad stopped and asks him what class actually means to him. Colin responds: “Well, it’s how close you are to the Senate.” Where did you learn that, Colin? He said, “The closer you are physically to the Senate building, to the plazas, gardens, Triumphal Arch raises desirability of the land, and makes you upper class and produces plebians. It’s based on simple rules of location to physical objects in the games (Caesar III)”. Then, he added, “I know that in the real world the answer is more likely how close you are to the senators, themselves — that defines class. But it’s kinda the same.”

In the past, I had tended to think of narratives as being basically linear and but they aren’t necessarily. As Steve Denning has pointed out part of the power of a narrative is its rhetorical structure that brings listeners into an active participation with the narrative, either explicitly or by getting them to pose certain questions to themselves.

In fact, stories have always been a kind of dialectic or conversation between the storyteller and the listeners. Thus the meaning of the literary classics — and the related narrative space — has steadily evolved over time. So the evolution of the narrative space per se isn’t new. But what is new in the online games is the scale and pace of the change. First, there are many more people actively involved in shaping the story — as many as tens of thousands at a time, rather than just a handful with the literary canon. Second, the technology enables the participation to be radically more active than before, not simply the odd comment that might or might not be listened to. Third, the participants are geographically scattered all over the globe, rather than concentrated in one place or country. Fourth, the changes are happening at an incredible pace, that is, in minutes and hours, not in decades or even centuries. The dimensions are so different that the evolution of the narrative space really becomes something new.

Here’s another thing that’s curious. Let’s look at the exercise that you had us do in the conference just now. You asked us to share a story with someone close at hand. You told us that we’d only have a short time to start the story and then we would have to continue it later in the conference. One thing that we know about the structures of stories is that it’s dangerous to stop a story before you’re finished. But, you gave us enough time in a social context to start a story; then you said, “Sit down.” Now, something interesting starts to happen. I didn’t have the time to finish my story. Normally, I won’t tell a story if I don’t think I can finish it. The way in which you orchestrated things here turned on what makes stories so powerful. What you did was to condition us. You said, “You have 20, 30, 40 seconds to tell a story.” So I might do one of a couple things. I might give a synopsis to my partner so I can reach the end of the story. Or, I might decide to just tell you enough of the story that you will come up to me at the break. These are the kinds of things that happen, all subconsciously. But you have to understand the structure of stories to know that.

Right. That plays out fairly simply for stories. But what is more curious is what happens when you see it played out in terms of practices. Science works on replicable knowledge that flows across the entire scientific world. Most of us have thought that scientific knowledge is explicit and can be completely reported on and replicated from those reports. But it’s not universally true. Basically what happens is that there are networks of scientific practice, which embody a practice within a certain area of science. The participants share enough of the same ‘roots’ that they can replicate the knowledge (or experiment). It is their shared roots that enable the knowledge to flow through their network.

The reason why knowledge flows so readily across a community of practice is that the members all share the same roots, not just some. That’s what enables a community to work. The reason why we keep trying to replicate an experiment is that we want to make sure that the stuff sitting above the ground is the right stuff and that we have found the minimal root structure required for it to be reliably replicated. Sometimes in an experiment, we engage in practices that are not known to other members of the community or even to ourselves. For example, in a novel and complex biochemical preparation experimenters may be doing things — that they’re unaware of in terms of the way they do the experiment — that actually make the experiment work. In science what we’re trying to do when we get other communities of practice (albeit, usually from the same network of practice) to replicate an experiment is to find the minimal roots of the new knowledge, so to speak. These are the shared practices that are used in replicating the experiment and supporting the claims by the community that this is (warranted) knowledge and not just an opinion or belief.

Let’s look at another very powerful example. Stories are one reason why novels have been so powerful through the ages. Why did we create the canon? A set of classic literary works is the canon for western civilization because these stories constantly get repositioned and re-contextualized but in that process help to extend the culture in a time relevant, situated way. The meaning of the story may morph according to the social practices of the culture at any moment in time even when the story line stays relatively invariant. That is how civilization advances and why these canons can be so powerful. A canon is a collection of stories. It can be folk tales. It can be biblical stories. It can be the classics. These stories have the capacity to move wonderfully through time. They have enough of a root structure that enables us to uproot them and replant them at a later time in another place.

By contrast, if I give you a fact, you don't have enough of a context to be able to understand what that fact means in a new context or even if it is still meaningful. Why was it uttered? To whom? What else was going on? Remember how I described how Cartesian philosophy underlies so much of today’s pedagogy. But what was going on with Descartes when he said something equivalent to, “I think therefore I am”? If you don't understand the religious environment that he was struggling against in that particular moment in time, you won't understand the force of what he was really trying to say, or why he was saying it. It made eminent sense at the time. It doesn’t necessarily make the same sense today yet our system of schooling and our notions of pedagogy are still based on it.

By contrast, stories are able to move on. When I tell you stories of the persecution and what was going on at that time, you begin to understand why Descartes had to play it safe., why he needed to placate the Church. You understand why he said certain things in certain ways.

Right! Now exactly how well it really works, we’re not really sure yet. We sense that it’s working. We see that the traditional approach to communication — bullet points in PowerPoint slides — doesn’t work at all in this area. But we haven’t yet been able to measure the impact of organizational storytelling in any formal sense. So our intuitions are not analytic. Steve Denning’s work isn’t analytic. My work isn’t exactly analytic. We have a strong sense that we gain more leverage through the storytelling mechanism than many others. Maybe one day we’ll figure out a way to measure it.

I am always trying to find new ways to use familiar tools. For example, I’m exploring the use of compound real options theory. It’s a financial tool that is much more dynamic than using NPV (net present value) calculations.

It’s very complicated. It stretches the mathematical abilities of most CFOs. But it’s an extraordinarily powerful analytical tool. You can cast a lot of what we are talking about in terms of a compound real options. That is something that brings a different kind of credibility to this discussion. Many of my arguments for radical innovation are now cast in this framework. This buys credibility in the CFO community, which used to say to me things like, “Go put your sandals back on, John, and putter in that magic silicon sandbox called Silicon Valley.” (Laughter)

There are some ways that you capture attention and other ways that you get credibility. So a story cast in compound real options theory has a certain ecological validity and credibility in the financial community. It sticks with them sometimes a year or two after the fact. Both practices and stories provide the lenses to help us make sense of things.

Now let’s take a look at information. It has been defined as the difference that makes a difference. If you follow this, you can think of information as that which causes a ripple in the pond. But, the whole issue of, “What is the pond?” is a devastatingly complicated question. Philosophers haven’t been able to answer it. Here is a simple model with clear rules and yet nobody ever really seriously asked, but what’s the pond that the ripple is on? When Paul Duguid and I were doing this chapter of our book and we realized how fundament this question really was and that nobody had ever seriously answered it. Sure, we can formally measure it (i.e., using Shannon’s theory) but what really is it?

That is a whole new way into the subject. It’s having another look at the subterranean work that goes on in the work environment — the cultural fabrics, the social fabrics and the habits in both social and work practice. Here we have to use our ability to see something new. We have to see the world through a set of distinctions. These distinctions form the lenses that enable us to detect both the ripples on the pond. One person’s ripples are not necessarily another person’s.

So what one person sees as information is not necessarily what another person sees as information. In fact, people do have very different points of view, different interests and different assumptions.

Back and forth they go. Suddenly they come together and say, “Aha! Suppose we shift something over here that enables us now to use a new kind of material over here. Then maybe we can both achieve our goals. Won’t that solve the problem?” And so, something new comes about. Both of them bring their practices together for that moment in time and construct something brand new.

Yes and no. There’s a lot more going on than just a verbal conversation. If we were just doing that on the telephone, it probably wouldn’t work. But there are a lot of other factors at work here. For example, maybe the architect goes out to the construction site and tries to see the problem from the engineer’s point of view, and figure out what he was really attempting to accomplish by designing the wall that way. The design (or boundary object) is now situated in a broader context. In that shared context, each can adjust his own thinking and practice to encompass the other’s practice. And so on. It has to do with becoming more attuned to each other’s set of skills. When these skills come together around a situated boundary object, there can be a really creative compromise.

You’d be surprised. There are all kinds of examples of impossible things that just keep inching ahead. These can be million dollar issues. Many millions of dollars can come from solving some of these problems. That gets your attention.

Yeah, it is an exploration — each center is in the other’s periphery, but it is also a clashing. I call it, the creative collision of craft. That collision taking place in a fabric of trust can go — as we were saying with storytelling — huge distances.

Virtually every radical innovation from PARC has come about by creative collision of different crafts usually within a community of practice or sometimes across multiple communities of practice. If this is so, the question is: How do you build an ecology that facilitates these practices productively collide?

It’s almost always bringing crafts together and having members of each negotiate within and between their practices. That’s part of being in a productive and ever evolving community of practice. We don't usually talk about the diversity of crafts within a community of practice. I believe that we’re beginning to see the fine grain structure of what is going on here. What it produces can be amazing.

Nor does social capital! We all talk about social capital, but some of the worst labs that I’ve ever been in had extraordinarily high social capital within the lab. But social capital can create the feeling, “I’m better than anybody else,” and this creates dysfunctional work relationships. It creates the idea that “you’re a bad guy.” One of the best ways to build social capital is to have a common enemy. If that enemy is in the outside world, then guess what? You’ll have a very hard time transferring ideas from the inside to the outside. So, social capital can work against you. Communities of practice are not necessarily very open. They can become very rigid structures, just as rigid as hierarchies. Look at experience of the guilds in medieval times, like the stonecutters. They were very exclusionary. They were seats of absolute power. They were even able to challenge the church!

So we need to be careful when we’re using terms like “community” which are often spoken of as warm and mutually supportive and open. But a community is a highly ambiguous domain. A community is not necessarily a warm and mutually supportive domain. What we see in an innovative community is a lot of abrasion and tough clashes among their crafts and practices. These iterations can be tremendously exciting and we may end up creating something. But the clashes can be tremendously stressful for the participants when these forms of abrasion take place. Sparks fly, as Dorothy Leonard has said.