Has anyone ever heard of this? The Operational Research Society is offering a one day course in "Introduction to Story Telling" which includes:

• Narrative engineering
• changing organisations through storytelling
• promoting ideas by means of stories
• motivating story deposition
• interpreting stories

I couldn't find anything on their website but a google search did throw this up: An introduction to Storytelling. It looks pretty interesting and may have something of use for us.

It does strike me odd that the idea of "coding up" information into stories is offered at the same time as decoding stories. If stories are that difficult to understand, or prone to misinterpretation, why use them in the first place?

Why use stories? Because when you get a person's imagination involved in a process, they become much more engaged in it. Even adding a small amount of one's own creativity in terms of, say, visualization, gives one a small measure of "ownership" of the object of that creativity. Once they "own" it, it sticks with them.

Also, to the extent that a story seems "real" (because it's well told, or even a true story), the person feels empathy or sympathy for the characters, and this can modify one's committment level as well. I think that RPGs are as grabby a form of entertainment as they are precisely because of the relatively high ownership and empathy factors, as compares listening to a story.

Oh, and note, too, when there's a message, they'll alwasy suggest following up with the decoded message ("The moral of the story is..."), just to insure that everyone got it. So you use the cluttered but grabby channel to get people onboard, and the clear but boring channel to ensure that everyone is onboard for the same thing. Note how often religious texts, and self-help stuff follows this methodology.

Mike