Re: Storytelling LO1035

Art Kleiner (art@well.com)
Wed, 3 May 1995 01:56:41 -0700 (PDT)

Replying to LO1010 --

In the next Systems Thinker newsletter, George Roth and I have an article
about a form of storytelling we've deveveloped (along with a group of
managers and writers, based at MIT-COL). The name we use for it is
"Learning Histories" and it's a way of getting an organization to tell
stories to itself.

We base the form partly on what ethnographers call the "jointly-told
tale" in which the perspective is manifold and the story is told from
several sides at once. One model is Jean Stein's book Edie, about Edie
Sedgwick.

-- Art Kleiner, art@well.sf.ca.us

On Tue, 2 May 1995, John O'Neill wrote:

> Replying to LO1003 --
>
> ----- Begin Included Message -----
> I've started to notice -- perhaps belatedly -- considerable attention
> being paid to the concept of storytelling as a way of transmitting
> learning. My own notion of storytelling is of a way of not only making
> sense of the past, but of constructing future strategies; at the same
> time, it must involve all constituent parts of an organization -- external
> and internal.
>
> Any comments/references/suggestions/questions would be most appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ron Mallis
> Ron2785@eworld.com
>
>
>
> ----- End Included Message -----
>
> Roger Schank in the AI community has spent the last 20 years performing
> research into using stories as the basis of human understanding.
>
> In the 70's his work centred on scripts, or prototypical situations, and
> how these could be used for reasoning. His "most famous" script involved
> what you do in a restaurant.
>
> His latest book "Tell me a Story" looks at his work on story telling and
> details the different types of stories that he has found.
>
> I'd recommend this book for those interested.
>
> As an aside: I find it quite interesting that members of this list are
> finding stories as the basis for communication. The object-oriented
> community has discovered "use-cases" which are basically user requirements
> stories for how a computer system is expected to behave. Unfortunately
> they only use "use-cases" for requirements elicitation, there is no
> explicit representation of a use-case in the implemented system -> maybe
> we need to rethink our usage of computer systems.
>
> Just a couple of thoughts from unrelated disciplines :->
>
> John O'Neill
> DSTO C3 Research Centre, Australia
> email: jao@itd.dsto.gov.au
> -----
> Host's Note: "Object Oriented Community" = object oriented programming
> community?? ...or is there more?
> -----
>
>