Steve Denning

An organizational storyteller extraordinaire, Denning is the author or co-author of several acclaimed books which include The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge Era Organizations, Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling, Storytelling in Organizations: How Narrative and Storytelling Are Transforming Twenty-first Century Management which he co-authored with John Seely Brown, Katalina Groh, and Larry  Prusak, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, and most recently The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative.

Denning was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied law and psychology at Sydney University and worked as a lawyer in Sydney for several years. He did a postgraduate degree in law at Oxford University in the U.K. He then joined the World Bank where he worked for several decades in many capacities and held various management positions, including Director of the Southern Africa Department from 1990 to 1994 and Director of the Africa Region from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 2000, he was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank.   He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on knowledge management and organizational storytelling. His clients include scores of Fortune 500 companies.       

Q: What's the evolution of your thinking about the business narrative, especially within the context of your association with the World Bank?

Denning: For most of my life, I was the quintessential left-brain, analytic person. My education and my professional career both reinforced that tendency on a daily basis. It was in 1996 when I was trying to introduce what was then a strange new idea--knowledge management--to the World Bank at a time when no one was particularly interested in listening to what I had to say, that I found that the abstractions I'd been using as a manager for several decades didn't work. Nobody listened. So I became desperate and became willing to try anything--even something as implausible as a story. I landed on one that worked--the Zambia story--and found that when I didn't use it, everything was turmoil. So I kept on using it, and other stories, like it. But I was still in denial for more than a year after that. Story was working for me but I barely believed it. It was only when Harvard Business School Press invited me to write a book about storytelling that I started to think about it seriously. I mean, if Harvard thinks there's something in storytelling, maybe I'd better check it out. So I did and I wrote The Springboard, and suddenly found myself in a new career of organizational storytelling.

Q: Storytelling has been a popular activity for centuries. How do you explain the fact that, only in recent years have executives begun to understand and appreciate the potential value and, more importantly, the impact of the business narrative?

Denning: We are entering an era with a rapidly growing need for leadership. This is caused by the convergence of irresistible socioeconomic forces. Accelerating economic and social change in the global economy, the consequent imperative for ever faster innovation, the emergence of global networks of partners, the rapidly growing role of intangibles, which can't be controlled like physical goods, the increasing ownership of the means of production by knowledge workers, the escalating power of customers in the marketplace, and the burgeoning diversity in both the workplace and marketplace--all these forces imply a vastly more important role for transformational leadership in the future.

The ability to get results in the face of these challenges will depend at least as much on leadership as on management. It will depend on a capacity to inspire enduring enthusiasm in people over whom we have no hierarchical control.

These irresistible forces will drive organizations to develop genuine leadership capability as a necessary competence. Leadership--the ability to connect people to meaningful goals without hierarchical power to compel compliance--will become a requirement for organizational survival.

Management won't disappear. We'll continue to have much to thank management for. It has helped us achieve the wonders of the modern global economy--its stunning scientific accomplishments and the massive improvements in the physical standard of living of most people, at least in the developed countries--and it will go on doing so.

But the challenges now facing the human race won't be solved by better management alone. Management will still be needed, but it will be less pivotal. In fact, it will be mostly taken for granted. Our capacity to manage will give us the technical means to solve our most intractable problems. What is needed now is the will to solve them. So goals, ends, purposes--what we are trying to accomplish--move to center stage.

In the world of management, the goals are largely given. Management is about finding the quickest, cheapest, and best way to reach those goals. The language of management is naturally abstract. Human goals are naturally absent from its discourse.

Once the emphasis shifts toward goals, ends, and purposes, then it is natural for the language to shift from abstractions to narratives, which have goals built into them.

Q: To what extent (if any) are the elements of the business narrative relevant to the writing of white papers?

Denning: Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca noted in their classic The New Rhetoric, more than three decades ago that managers and scientists delude themselves in thinking people listen intently to abstract presentations and reports.

Abstract writing works fine if you are addressing people who basically agree with you. It breaks down when you're inviting people to change their behavior in some significant way and when they don't already agree with what you're proposing.

That's where leadership comes in, and it turns out that storytelling is one of the most important ways--though not the only way--to get people to change their ideas and their behavior, not grudgingly and slowly, but quickly, willingly and enthusiastically. My new book, The Secret Language of Leadership, describes how this happens--specifically what works and what doesn't.