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Storytelling - The Tribal Chief


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Posted by Kees de Vos on August 04, 1999 at 12:04:22:

In Reply to: Re: knowledge transferrence by writing - another! posted by boris on August 04, 1999 at 11:25:10:

Boris,

I hope not to irritate Martyn here (because he has a point, see posting "where are the hard (business) arguments") but what I am trying to point out is that for this story to transfer knowledge a common language/context is still needed.

To point this out I tried to indicate that if I didn't know what a "knife" was I couldn't relate to the story, thereby not learn anything from it. The sender, in this case you, might have the impression he shared knowledge, but only by INTERACTION (me telling you that I don't know what a "knife" is) this replication can be verified.

In your example (because you refer to a very common object in nearly all our individual contexts) this is trivial, but when concerned with specialistic storytelling this point might be more clear...

A great story on this point can be found in Arie de Geus's "The Living Company" where he discusses why companies are so bad at adjusting to changing environments. ONE (!!) of the theories is (O.K. Richard, here it comes...) We Can Only See What We Have Already Experienced:


"Consider, for example, the tribal chief who was brought to Singapore by a group of British explorers at the beginning of this century. The explorers had found him deep in the high mountains of the Malaysia peninsula, in an isolated valley. His tribe was literally still in the Stone Age. Its people had not even invented the wheel. Nonetheless, the chief was highly intelligent, and a delightful man to talk to (once they made themselves understood (!!!, KdV)). He seemed to have a deep, meaningful perception of his own world.
So as an experiment, they decided to convey him to Singapore. It was at the time already a sophisticated seaport, with multistory buildings and a harbor with big ships. Economically, it had a market economy with traders and professional specializations. Socially, it had many more layers than the society from which the tribal chief came. They marched the chief through this world for 24 hours, submitting him to thousands of signals of potential change for his own society. Then they brought him back to his mountain valley and started to debrief him.
Of all the wonders he had seen, only one seemed important to him: He had seen a man carrying more bananas than he had ever thought one man could carry. The tribal chief could not relate to multistory buildings or giant ships; but when he saw a market vendor pushing a cart laden with bananas, he could make sense of it. All the other signs of potential change were so far outside his previous life experiences that his mind could not graps what his eyes were telling him."

Mind you, it's just ONE theory, the story might not fot another persons truth, but I somehow think it is feasible to some contexts.

Quod erat demonstrantum for my personal referential framework.
Quod erat ... for all of you out there ;-)

Best regards,

Kees de Vos.


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