1. Storytelling and Narrative in the Workplace
Charles Lanigan, MA
E-mail: clanigan@sanepractices.com
Phone: 412-378-5013
About This Workshop
Storytelling humanizes work environments, providing enabling personnel to collaborate and communicate
across organizational and experiential boundaries. Stories provide context for comprehending abstract
information, facilitating closer connections and a deeper understanding among team members. This in
turn helps teams respond effectively to changing needs and opportunities. As John Seely Brown and
others have shown, conversations among project personnel and business partners include a mix of
technical and personal information. Organizations don’t always recognize the benefits of these
conversations. Not all team members are equally skilled or willing to articulate their ideas and share what
they know.
Whether storytelling occurs through formal channels or through informal offline conversations, it facilitates
knowledge-transfer and the creation of shared goals and identity among project teams. It enables
personnel to take an active rather than passive role in conducting and contributing in projects.
This workshop presents skills and techniques for use in recognizing the dynamics underlying storytelling
and employing it to increase the depth of understanding and connection among individuals and groups.
The skills are applicable face-to-face conversations and interaction through virtual (Web 2.0) technologies
Who Should Attend:.
The workshop is designed for managers and other personnel leading project teams.
Participants Will Learn
• How human beings use narrative to discover and share what they know
• How to use humor and drama to engage teams and redirect tension and conflict
• Storytelling techniques that are effective in engaging individuals and groups
• How to go beyond Powerpoint slides to use stories in connecting audiences with abstract
information
• How to ask open-ended questions and engage in conversations that uncover hidden (tacit)
knowledge
• How to translate user stories into actionable information to be documented in story cards and
formal requirements
• The dynamics of virtual vs. face-to-face communication and storytelling (body language, tone of
voice, netiquette, word choice, code-switching)
• Using stories to connect and share organizational knowledge across experiential, cultural and
departmental boundaries
• How stories contribute to shared organizational memory
• Finding the balance between documentation and dialogue in projects
Preliminary Outline
1. Audience, Purpose and Need
• Understanding your audience and what they care about
• Engaging people through backstory and prerequisite knowledge
• Individual and group personas

2. Lanigan, Storytelling and Narrative in the Workplace
2
2. Narrative Techniques and Considerations
• Stories that inform, motivate, persuade and instruct
• Metaphor and analogy
• Storytelling and organizational memory
• Myth and work: archetypes of successful projects
• The social life of information
3. Tools and Techniques
• Storytelling in print and electronic (virtual) environments
• Online and in-person presentation skills
• Communicating across cultures and subcultures
• Code-switching, jargon and the importance of language
4. The Storytelling Process
• Ways of knowing: acting on vs. acting with
• Discovering knowledge through conversation
• Storytelling in teams
• Uncovering hidden (tacit knowledge) in working with subject-matter-experts
5. Exercises and Discussion of Case-Studies
Storytelling in group and individual decision-making
From obfuscation to enlightenment: jargon, audience-appropriate language and code-
switching
Using stories to establish and reinforce team roles
Guiding users in narratives to identify and prioritize their business needs and
requirements
Asking good questions: applying active listening techniques
Uncovering hidden requirements: understanding what is said and not said
Developing clear language and presentations skills
Mind-mapping and story-board techniques
6. Summary and Conclusion
About the Speaker
Chuck Lanigan has spent fifteen years developing workflow and collaborative applications and
promoting knowledge management initiatives at organizations such as PNC. He has written for CIO
Magazine and taught previously at the Katz Center for Executive Education, Penn State University
Outreach and Carnegie-Mellon University. In 2009 he began a project exploring the relationship between
storytelling, labor and identity in association with Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a Master’s Degree
in Instructional Design & Technology from the University of Pittsburgh, with a focus on literacy, critical
thinking and computer-mediated work. He served on the IT Workforce Education board at Catalyst
Connection of Southwestern Pennsylvania and with the Pittsburgh Regional Knowledge-Management
Consortium (PRKMC). He is past president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Society for Technical
Communication and STC WorkQuest, a professional employment networking group.