Storytelling: The Song-Lines of Knowledge Management
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | In his famous book Songlines about the Aborigines in Australia – especially about the passing on of knowledge (about the past, about the frontiers and orientation of the land) – Bruce Chatwin makes a point that can be boiled down to the following story: One of the Aborigines, who was on his songline-‘walk’ and was taken to the next village or some destination by some-one in a Jeep, complained that ‘his songlines had not yet caught up with him’ (the Jeep was too fast!). The same holds true or can happen in Knowledge Management (KM), when we take ‘shortcuts’ to use documented knowledge literally to (re-) produce certain results but have not yet built up, what we like to call the constraints of corrective experience. We have to grow with our knowledge! Storytelling in KM (sometimes called ‘Harun al-Rashid principle’) intends to go beyond just being a technique to convey and conserve knowledge or to transform it into rules for action. To us, the essential point of Chatwin is his way of ‘challenging traditional forms of linear narrative’ (whose consequences we transfer KM). We claim that we need to understand that narratives provide a sense for understanding and guiding our actions. This idea again links up with Jeremy Rifkin’s recent book on The Third Industrial Revolution where he points out that president Obama lacks a narrative (or a ‘legend’, as Tatiana in ‘Smiley’s People’ by John le Carré) to support his actions. He (as well as in some cases the EU) provides us with a lot of pilot projects and isolated economic programmes, which are not connected enough to tell us a new story about an economic vision for the future. According to Rifkin, our story should start with, for example, the insight that new technologies of communication and energy systems need to be combined and will become the medium for the organisation and management of a new and much more complex civilisation living on new stories. |