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110 Chapter 4

• The story must be intelligible to the specifi c audience so they are “ hooked. ”
• The story should be inherently interesting.
• The story should spring the listener to a new level of understanding.
• The story should have a happy ending.
• The story should embody the change message.
• The change message should be implicit.
• The listeners should be encouraged to identify with the protagonist.
• The story should deal with a specifi c individual or organization.
• The protagonist should be prototypical of the organization ’ s main business.
• Other things being equal, true is better than invented.
• Test, test, and test again.
The use of fables such as those found in Aesop ( 1968 ) is often quite helpful in tacit
knowledge capture. A simple approach is to invite participants to a workshop where
they are given several classic fables to read, asked to recollect some they had heard,
and to identify the lesson to be learned in each. Fables are particularly useful with
multicultural groups since fables occur in all cultures but they defi nitely differ from
one culture to another. Next, participants are given a fable minus the “ punch line ”
and are asked to fi ll in the moral of the story. Asking for a punch line is a highly
effective way of acquainting participants with the objectives behind stories — the
purpose of organizational storytelling — that is, to have the reader learn from it. Sec-
ondly, participants also became aware of the fact that stories, like fables, need to be
concise. A fable can consolidate multiple viewpoints and recollections of different
individuals since it is not dependent on a single story to deliver its message ( Snowden
2001 ). Finally, the best way to end a fable — the punch line — is to have an ironic end
in which the reader realizes how a happy ending could have come about without the
narrative actually stating this in any form.
Two illustrations of the value of storytelling in the capture of tacit knowledge are
described in box 4.2 and box 4.3 .

Learning by Being Told In learning by being told, the interviewee expresses and
refi nes his or her knowledge, and the knowledge manager clarifi es and validates the
knowledge artifact that renders this knowledge in explicit form. This form of knowl-
edge acquisition typically involves domain and task analysis, process tracing, and
protocol analysis and simulations. Task analysis is an approach that looks at each of
the key tasks that an expert performs and characterizes them in terms of prerequisite