Jessica Simmons

"You simply learn more from a story."

Storytelling

Welcome to the Storytelling Section, a part of EduTech's Knowledge Sharing Service.

At EduTech, we specialize in a unique knowledge management service - storytelling. We understand how to find and develop your organization's collective and individual stories.

The purpose of capturing your stories could be to accomplish any of the following:

• Share knowledge for succession planning
• Promote team development to enhance productivity
• Exemplify values to build community
• Capture lessons learned to develope best practices
• Prompt action to change the organization
• Record the past to preserve corporate heritage

Why storytelling? Because as Tom Peters says in his groundbreaking book In Search for Excellence, "We reason by stories at least as often (Author's emphasis) as with good data. 'Does it feel right?' counts for more than 'Does it add up?' or 'Can I prove it?'"

We solve problems every day based on our intuition and judgment, nurtured over multiple experiences, including ups and down, successes and failures, trial and error. How do we convey this kind of knowledge to a peer or junior colleague? Reach for data or the latest theories and the words seem incompatible with the meaning of what happened. But start telling a story — let me tell you about what happened to me — and if the listener has been anywhere near that kind of experience before, he or she will recognize the terrain and identify with the meaning on a tacit level.

Storytelling is a tool in EduTech's Knowledge Sharing Initiative for NASA.

The EduTech storytelling team has written a number of articles on the subject of NASA's Knowledge Sharing Initiative, including The ASK Story, The Impact of Story telling at NASA and EduTech, and DAU Collaborates with NASA.

Please contact someone from our Storytelling team for more information.