The Springboard

I learned about this book after hearing author Steve Denning describe how he used story telling to inspire the World Bank to make knowledge management and sharing with clients a central part of its business model. Captivated by his powerful story, I wanted to learn more. I started by reading The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, which every leader should read and apply. That's a great book. I noted at the back of the book that Mr. Denning offered to start conversations with his readers about storytelling. I quickly crafted a first attempt at a Springboard story and sent it to him by e-mail. I was delighted when Mr. Denning took the time to thoughtfully consider my story and raise questions to help me improve the story. From his questions, it was clear that I didn't really understand yet what a Springboard story is. One of his suggestions was that I consider writing a book like The Springboard, so naturally I had to read this book next. Before completing the book, I found myself with a much more thorough understanding of Springboard stories and how to use stories to launch and achieve organizational change. If I had read The Springboard before crafting the first draft of my Springboard story, I could have avoided many of the errors he so kindly and gently pointed out to me. While The Leader's Guide to Storytelling has all of the elements about Springboard stories in it (along with many other types of essential stories that leaders need to tell), you need more context to appreciate what a Springboard story is. The Springboard gives you that context. I highly recommend that you read The Springboard, and that you read it before you read The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. You'll make faster progress if you do. The book has many valuable sides. You learn why stories work well both in terms of how listeners respond to them and the ways in which stories better capture reality than linear, abstract data. You also learn to craft a Springboard story and replace that story as your organization's performance improves in the Springboard subject area. That was one of the important lessons I had missed. My subject for the Springboard story is encouraging people to create 2,000 percent solutions. Yet that activity has gone so far that I need to describe it differently than I did when I first began talking about the subject in the 1990s. I need to build on where it is today as a mainstream activity creating billions in value and improving millions of lives around the world, rather than as the hope for the future based on limited experience that I originally used to describe it. For most leaders, this book will teach you more about effective leadership than most MBA programs will. Don't miss it! Here's why. In most organizations, the leader finds it hard to get anyone to do anything differently. The best method is for people to decide that they like the change and want to spearhead it themselves as though they thought of it first. A Springb

Think about it. Who are among the greatest storytellers throughout history? My own list includes Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Aesop, Jesus, Dante, Boccaccio, the brothers Grimm, Confucius, Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Andersen, and most recently, E.B. White. Whatever the genre (epic, parable, fable, allegory, anecdote, etc.), each used exposition, description, and narration to illustrate what they considered to be fundamental truths about the human condition. In this volume, Denning focuses on "how storytelling ignites action in knowledge-led organizations" and does so with uncommon erudition, precision, and eloquence. His narrative covers a period of approximately three years during which he used what he calls "springboard" stories to "spark organizational change" at The World Bank. More specifically, to forge a consensus within that organization to support the design and then implementation of effective knowledge management, first for itself and then for its clients worldwide. How he accomplished that objective is in and of itself a fascinating "story" but the book's greater value lies in what he learned in process, lessons which are directly relevant to virtually all other organizations (regardless of size or nature) which struggle to "do more with less and do it faster" in the so-called Age of Information. Maximizing use of their collective intellectual capital is most often the single most effective way to do that. There are several reasons why this book impressed me so much. Here are three. First, Denning allows his reader to accompany him during the process by which he eventually overcame rigorous but subtle internal opposition to what was perceived to be a threat to the status quo at The World Bank. Second, he shares with his reader the profoundly important realization -- well along during the process -- that he needed to use a "springboard" story to win over his opposition. That is to say, practice what he had been preaching but without (until then) much success. Finally, he provides just about anything his reader needs to know inorder to use storytelling to achieve the same objectives within her or his own organization: forge a consensus of support, design and implement an internal information management program, and then extend participation and benefits to all other stakeholders, especially customers or clients as well as strategic partners. The comprehensive narrative (which really increases in pace and impact after Denning's "profoundly important realization") is supplemented by six appendices: Elements for Developing the Springboard Story, Some Elements for using Visual Aids in Storytelling, Elements for Performing the Springboard Story, Building Up the Springboard Story: Four Different Structures, Examples of Springboard Stories, and finally, a Knowledge Management Chart. The Bibliography which follows is brief but more than adequate. The footnotes are conveniently provided within each chapter to facilitate correlation with De

If you are impatient, narrow-minded, and opinionated (or overly enamored of your own opinion), don't buy this book. I bought it and eventually read it because someone I respect very much recommended it. I would not have bought it at my own initiative, and part of the my purpose in writing this review is to persuade you to take a chance on this book, whose title, while accurate, may be off-putting to those that think they are serious, action-oriented, "just the facts" get on with it types.The author has done something special here, and it is especially relevant to those of us on the bleeding edge of change in the information and intelligence industries, each trying to communicate extraordinarily complex and visionary ideas to the owners with money or the bureaucrats with power--neither of these groups being especially patient or visionary.The book accomplished three things with me, and I am a very hard person to please: 1) it compellingly demonstrated the inadequacy of the industry standard briefing, consisting of complex slides with complex ideas outlined in excrutiating detail; 2) it demonstrated how a story-telling approach can accomplish two miracles: a) explain complex ideas in a visual short-hand that causes even the most jaded skeptic to "get it," and b) do this in such a way that the audience rather than the speaker "fills in the blanks" and in so doing becomes a stakeholder in the vision for change; and 3) finally, provides several useful appendices that will help anyone craft a "story" with an action-inducing effect.The footnotes and bibliography are sufficient to make the point that this is not just a story, but a well-researched and well-documented real-world experience of great value to any gold-collar revolutionary struggling to overcome obstacles to reform.

The Springboard belongs on any short list for best business book of its year. It is an essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone, executive or consultant, who is concerned with the management of change.This is a book that I will keep with the half dozen or so to which I constantly refer. The context of the book is the introduction of knowledge management into a very large organization - The World Bank - but its relevance extends to any and every aspect of the change process.The form of the book is an extended story about storytelling and the impact of a particular type of story in engaging the attention and commitment of people to necessary change. It is written directly, simply and with a poet's precision of language, which makes it immensely readable. Many of the books that I review, I skim for points of value. This one I read from cover to cover, and enjoyed doing so.The thesis is a simple one and the extended framing story about the development of knowledge management within The World Bank, which makes up the book, proves the thesis. Change is driven both by the logic of the relationship of the organization to its environment and by the interaction of human hopes, fears and preferred perspectives (mental models) with the 'objective' situation. When new departures are needed, an appropriate story can engage the imagination and creative powers of the audience, where analysis and logical argument may only engage the critical faculty. A story can provide the means of circumventing an unacknowledged fear of change and built-in defences by enticing the audience to participate in the creation of a world that overcomes problems which affect all of them. Denning's thesis is not that a story is all that is needed; it is that the initiating power of stories has been neglected in our culturally preferred analytical approach to problem definition and problem solving.I happen to have been working with an organization that seeks to do on a smaller scale some of the things that The World Bank does on a very large scale, and is currently experiencing many of the issues that Denning describes in The Springboard. Both his diagnosis and his prescription ring absolutely true. In every chapter I found explanations, ideas and suggestions that are immediately useful and helpful, not only to that situation, but to any change management situation.There are five invaluable appendices summarizing aspects of the development, presentation and performance of springboard stories, structures for building up a springboard story and examples of stories with explanatory marginal notes on the role of each part of the story. These provide an extremely useful ready reference for the practitioner.

The reason that The Springboard is such an important book is that the story it tells of business transformation at the World Bank deals with the missing link in the knowledge communication chain between knowledge transmitters (teachers) and knowledge receivers (learners). The link has been missing since computers made hyper-access to information possible without making it hyper-easy to assimilate. (Many would say that computer accessed information is actually more difficult to assimilate, than traditional books and journals.)One of the many virtues of The Springboard is that it practices what it preaches. Nearly everything is communicated as a story. It is the story of Stephen Denning's personal odyssey as he recounts in slightly bemused wonderment how his discovery of storytelling forged a vital link in the knowledge communication chain at the World Bank, fostering many new enduring, cross-functional communities of practice. It is written, as all stories should be, in a way that makes the reader want to know what happened next.Stories permit listeners to suspend belief - enter the realm of the make believe - for a period of time, enabling them to assimilate and resonate with new stories, instead of having first to judge the truth of what they are being told, according to personal principles and beliefs about what is true or false, or right or wrong.The power of storytelling begins with the invitation to imagine. This invitation is so much more alluring than the prospect of being told what to believe. A well-told story is never an effort to understand. Rather, it is a pleasure to follow and to discover its meaning.In Stephen Denning's words, "When a springboard story does its job, the listeners' minds race ahead, to imagine the further implications of elaborating the same idea in different contexts, more intimately known to the listeners. In this way, through extrapolation from the narrative, the re-creation of the change idea can be successfully brought to birth, with the concept of it planted in listeners' minds, not as a vague, abstract inert thing, but an idea that is pulsing, kicking, breathing, exciting - and alive".Stephen Denning is to be roundly applauded for re-opening the book on storytelling as being at the rightful centre of human communication, knowledge transfer and consequent decision making. His Springboard story is a very specific story-form, honed to be effective in the context of 21st century organisational change.