Storytelling, which comes naturally to just about everyone, could be the missing element in the many knowledge management initiatives that have failed to make an impact in the past decade, some experts say.

A knowledge management system is intended to make the expertise of top-performing individuals available throughout an organization and shorten the learning curve for new or less experienced employees.

The problem, some experts say, is that organizations typically fail to capture the kind of information that makes a knowledge management application an indispensable resource for their employees. If people do not see the value in such an application, they will not use it or contribute to it. It will be left to languish.

But thoughtful storytelling could potentially reverse that trend, those experts say. The narrative form makes it easier for people to convey ideas and details that might otherwise be left unsaid. Stories also make it easier for listeners to stay engaged and absorb information.

That is because storytelling is part of human nature, an age-old way of sharing information and cultural values, said Carol Metzker, a consultant on organizational learning who is based in Westchester, Pa. “Stories are everywhere, whether we choose to look at them and focus on them or not,” Metzker said. “You don’t have to have someone say, ‘Let’s get together and tell stories.’ It happens.”

But to take advantage of this seemingly innate ability, organizations need to understand how stories work.

A door to tacit knowledge
Knowledge management proponents often talk about the tacit knowledge that guides experts in the work they do but often eludes the most well-intentioned documentary efforts. It’s not that experts mean to withhold information, said Gary Klein, chief scientist at Klein Associates. It’s just that the best employees are not always conscious of their real expertise. Klein Associates, a division of Applied Research Associates, is a consulting firm based in Fairborn, Ohio.

Their success comes from knowledge that people often cannot describe, Klein said, speaking last month at the Knowledge Management conference sponsored by FCW Media Group. Asked how they know what to do, experts tend to talk about experience, hunches and intuition, or they cite existing policies and procedures, even though they do not necessarily follow them.