Exploring the Use of Stories in Patterns of Collaboration

Abstract

Stories are an ancient way to communicate experiences (i.e. direct observations of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge). By looking closely on how experts communicate, we find that they tell stories to convey the challenges and solutions they encountered. Thereby, stories can play a major role in group decision-making, but so far the role of storytelling during group decision-making has not been extensively researched. Based on these grounds we investigate in this article the possible use of stories in group decision-making processes. For that purpose, we conducted a series of interviews with professional facilitators on how they have perceived the use of stories in decision-making processes. We present our analysis of the interviews along the patterns of collaboration and extract a set of propositions for future research.