Narrative management - the unique voice of your company

"Knowledge cannot be managed because it is between people's ears, and only there," the American economist Peter Drucker once said. And with that, he may even be speaking from the heart of one or two managers of Lady Gaga and Co. In fact, knowledge cannot be managed, just as people cannot be managed, but knowledge can be applied, leveraged, shared, and so on. Knowledge management as a discipline has been dealing with this challenge for decades. One might therefore assume that knowledge management is the best helper when it comes to helping a company achieve a successful performance.

Unfortunately, however, knowledge management in the past proved to be more of a mediocre roadie with a rather narrow field of vision. Because until today, most knowledge management approaches concentrate on explicit knowledge, i.e. on that area of knowledge which is already documented or which can be easily retrieved when needed. Databases, wikis, etc. are used in an attempt to get to grips with the large amount of data, facts and figures in a company. It is documented, indexed and filed until the archives are bursting at the seams.

This area of knowledge management has its justification. For example, it can make sense in a company to list the competencies and profiles of individual employees in so-called yellow pages and make them available internally to all colleagues. It is equally helpful in a production company to store operating instructions for machines on the intranet, to formulate corresponding processes and strategies, and much more.

knowledge which cannot easily be put into words

However, saving such knowledge stocks that have already been made explicit in some form falls short. It is like an iceberg: only the smaller part of it is visible at first glance. The much larger part, however, is waiting to be discovered under the surface of the water.

In other words: Knowledge is not always well visible in front of us. On the contrary! For the most part, it is well hidden - in the experience, routines, relationships and experiences of our employees. In this context, we also speak of tacit knowledge. This is characterized by the fact that it cannot easily be put into words. It eludes our language because it is inextricably linked to concrete situations and our experience (situated cognition).

→ Let's take cycling as an example: Most of us have mastered it since childhood, but as soon as it comes to expressing our knowledge about it, we suddenly lack the words for it.

In other words, tacit knowledge means being able to do something without being able to say exactly how. Even the experienced surgeon who decides against the textbook and in favour of his intuition in an operation will not be able to easily verbalise his decision in most cases. For it is, among other things, his long experience and his ability to survey situations more quickly and to make decisions which he has acquired over many years and innumerable similar situations and according to which he acts.

What makes this tacit knowledge so valuable for your company is the fact that your employees always know more than they can immediately put into words. And it is precisely in this more of project and organizational knowledge, know-how and intuition that the uniqueness of your company lies. In order to give this well-hidden knowledge a voice, special approaches are therefore needed in classic knowledge work - and storytelling is one of them.

Storytelling as a Vocal Coach

Stories are one of the oldest ways to communicate with others. In stories we pack values and attitudes, but also information and knowledge. In stories we get to know ourselves and our environment. Stories accommodate the way we think, they generate emotions and thus remain in our memory in the long term. What the cinema industry and novelists discovered for themselves a long time ago, more and more companies are also realizing: Stories move.

If you listen to your employees and their stories, you learn important things about yourself as an organization. It is therefore not surprising that storytelling has established itself as one of the most prominent approaches in classic knowledge work to use the valuable but well-hidden knowledge of employees.

→For example, do you want to know something about the cultural reality in your company? You will not usually find this in the elaborately formulated mission statements and visions, but through the unofficial stories of your employees: How do they talk about the company? With whom and about what?

The range of narrative methods - i.e. methods that draw on forms of narration - is just as wide as their possible applications. It ranges from interviews to working with metaphors and event curves to transfer workshops, the use of comics and much more. What all methods have in common is that they create an open narrative situation in which the employee can narratively relive the rules of action that he or she has applied automatically, spontaneously or intuitively in a specific situation. This situational and individual knowledge thus becomes audible and interpretable for a brief moment.

So stories are a kind of detour that allows us to put what we experience into a language and share it with others.

And this is how you do it right

Regardless of whether you want to use storytelling to leverage important project knowledge, secure the know-how of departing experts, initiate change processes, or learn from a failed situation, there are a few tips you should keep in mind. Because narrative management requires a certain attitude.

• Appreciative: Narrative approaches put people in the foreground. It is not just the bare facts and figures that make up the success of your company, but your employees. This puts you on the level of personal conversation. Therefore, promote a culture of active listening. Because it is only through listening that new views and perspectives open up for you.
• Contextual: Accompanied by a constructivist value attitude, narrative management recognizes the importance and uniqueness of individual experience. There is no such thing as one truth. Experiences are always bound to a context and within this context they are always true for the person who experiences them. Allow that reality has many facets without always wanting to evaluate them conclusively.
• CommunicativeUnlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge needs mutual social exchange. Especially for storytelling it is true that it only makes sense for us if we cause something in our counterpart. This can be interest, understanding or curiosity and in the best case we even get a story back (because listening and telling are inseparably linked). Therefore, seek dialogue with your employees and don't be afraid to tell your own story.

The unique voice of your company

As a company, you are faced with the permanent challenge of constantly reinventing yourself, adapting to the ever-changing market conditions and yet always being unique and standing out. You cannot do this alone. Of course you need good employees on your way to success. But that alone is not enough to rock the business world in the long run. Because the best employees can do little if their valuable experience and know-how remain unused. Narrative management is a way that can help you make this silent knowledge heard and strengthen your company's unique market position.