Anecdote has an interesting post from a few days ago about the power of storytelling in organizations. The particular example used in this post is the story of a particular manager:

One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn’t do that.

When presented along with about 150 other stories, leaders often selected this story as something they would like to get their managers to start doing. They believed that getting their managers to effect this change in their own behaviour would lead to an overall organizational change.

Part of the strength of this story is that we identify with the woman; we’ve had a manager who didn’t always listen to us all the time (or maybe we’ve been that manager). It resonates with us, and captures our attention.

Yet we also see the manager as different — we spot the pattern of unattentive managers and see that this one guy was different. We’re trained to see patterns, and we easily see that this guy didn’t fit the pattern.

More importantly, there’s a message to this anecdote about the anecdote that is not necessarily completely obvious. There’s an underlying message about how we see not only our place in the organization, but how we see the world.

Shared vocabularies often take the form of taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies — which, even though they’re built with the best intentions, often end up sitting on a virtual shelf somewhere. Why? Because to the average person they’re arcane and don’t have a real use in their day-to-day work.

But even more importantly, we tend to build our vocabularies verbally, rather than through writing. If you want to learn a new language, you’re better off immersing yourself in it, rather than studying it from a textbook, right?

Well, it’s the same with shared vocabularies. We build commonality in our everyday experiences — speaking, interacting and thinking. Getting things down on paper is an afterthought — and it’s tough to capture these ever-changing vocabularies.

Shared narrative may never supplant the need for the uglier tools of shared vocabularies: ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri. But they are a much more powerful way to not only capture shared language amongst people, but to actually participate in the process of creating that shared language.