Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Project managers need to effectively mobilize their knowledge to meet time-driven demands in temporary organizations created to successfully deliver projects. Our research shows that using stories and/or storytellers significantly reduces the time required to share relevant knowledge. The storyteller’s role is to share context-specific information to “…extend the organization’s capability to make informed, rational decisions” (Dalkir, 2005, p. 60). This paper reviews current publications on storytelling to mobilize knowledge. Mobilized knowledge is “… often transferred between people by stories, gossip, and by watching one another work” (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999, p. 90). Laufer and Hoffman (2000) suggest that “…the study of success stories told by [project] practitioners is unique in its capabilities to generate and disseminate knowledge”(2000, p. xvi). Storytelling can also be characterised as “narrative inquiry” where “…stories are driven forward by a detailed explanation of the cause-and-effect relationship between an action and its consequence” (Denning, 2006, p. 45). We suggest that “narrative inquiry” may be an effective way to generate and disseminate knowledge when managing temporary organizations e.g. projects. The findings of our literature review suggest that social exchange, or narrative, can successfully mobilize knowledge between people with the intention of eliciting an outcome. We found that the literature also identified that informal relationships that develop within formal systems are the predominant form of explicit knowledge mobilization in project management. These informal knowledge mobilization systems underpin how project managers mobilize knowledge in a social context to make informed decisions, highlighting the value of relationships in an organization.