I wrote many times about the importance of storytelling in organizational learning, leadership and knowledge care. Just to recap, few of them :
Storytelling through Visualizing Information
Storytelling / Narratives and Learning
Anecdote’s The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles
Shawn Callahan on Storytelling and Narratives
Storytelling in six parts
More Resources on storytelling
More on Storytelling
Online Storytelling – More Resources
Story telling: a thought aggregation
I believe storytelling is a great tool for knowledge transfer and learning. Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer this your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. There has to be an emotional component in what you are doing. First, you grab them in the gut and then you start to construct (or re-construct) a mental model. If you try to do this in an intellectual or abstract way, you find that it’s very hard, if not impossible, to talk somebody into changing their mental models. But if you can get to them emotionally, either through rhetoric or dramatic means, then you can create some scaffolding that effectively allows them to construct a new model for themselves. They have to internalize it. They have to own it.
Over at TED, Storyteller Carmen Agra Deedy spins a funny, wise and luminous tale of parents and kids, starring her Cuban mother. Settle in and enjoy the ride — Mama’s driving! A great storytelling style worth taking a look.
Deedy is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s Weekend All Things Considered and Latino USA. Her audio collection of twelve short stories originally heard on NPR, Growing up Cuban in Decatur, Georgia, [Peachtree Publishers (January 31, 2004)] was named Publishers Weekly 1995 Best Audiobook–Adult Storytelling and received the Parents’ Choice Gold Award 1996.