For many years now I've made a strong distinction between narrative and story tellin

In IBM days Rosetta Stone Language and afterwards I emphasised anecdotes over stories and frequently evidenced my dislike of the recipe type approaches typified in many a popular writer in this field. Often I have been critical (frequently highly critical) of the business (or organisational) story telling movement. However I have never gone so far as to call them zombies or to suggest that their products are little more than prosthetic devices. In a recent post my former colleague Shawn does precisely that and adds in artificial, forced and clumsy just to rub their noses in it. The link he makes with failure artificial intelligence is a good one and while I might be more circumspect in how I expressed it I am in broad agreement with the points Shawn makes, specifically: We can learn from script writers, novelists etc. but we can't replicate those skills in one or even five day storytelling courses. Anecdotes have more value in an organisational context (I remain flattered by the way that Shawn chose Anecdote as the name of his company, along with unorder as his twitter name). Too many story telling consultants focus on the performance of the story rather than the learning value of the content (I am paraphrasing here, Shawn does not say that explicitly)All good stuff. Its where we got to in the old IBM story group training programmes and having devised it with Cynthia, Sharon and others it would be churlish to reject it! That said I think the linear scale between Little "s" and Big "S" storytelling is too limiting and we need to move on a bit. I've taken Shawn's linear distinction between little and big "s" story telling and placed it as a part of my x-axis which creates a left-right scale of the degree of effort required to create a narrative. On the far left we have micro-narratives of day to day existence. These are the stories we tell as a part of day to day existence and can include photographs, voice etc. etc. They are fragmented in nature and they Language Learning Software just happen. We then have reflective narrative which butts up against Shawn's little "s" stories but is different. Reflective stories are the micro-narratives we recall when prompted by circumstance or question or those we create as mental rehearsal evaluate action (think of Gary Klein's work in Sources of Power here). They can also be other people's stories, or examples from literature than we endorse as exemplars. An interesting sub-class here are stories of failure, or near failure used by trainers and mentors. By telling a story of how you failed, you build confidence in the trainee and you impart learning.x-axis - effort and refinementTo complete the x-axis I've gone beyond anecdotes to the fragmented micro-narrative which is much of my work. I have also added metaphor on the far right. Metaphor type stories such as the Children's Party Story or Longitude take time to construct, lots of experimentation and refinement. They have a lot of detail that people often don't discover or appreciate the value of until after multiple tellings. There are also aspects of Big "S" Storytelling here. Common stories in companies and society as a whole are frequently referenced in day to day conversation, especially those that define key turning points in the organisation's history. Neither is it complete stories by the way, I still use classics like Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows for key phrases that carry complex meaning to people who have also read those books. These stories are the modern equivalent of Spanish Learning Software defining myths, we may not tell stories about Apollo and Athena but we do tell stories about great leaders, key episodes etc.