(2004-04-21) Kahan Interview Brown

Seth Kahan [interviewed](http://www.sethkahan.com/Resources_0John Seely Brown.html) John Seely Brown. *Why Story Telling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can't talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic mental Model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are doing...

They have to own it. So the question is: what are the techniques for creating scaffolding that facilitate the rich internalization and re-conceptualization and re-contextualization of their own thinking relative to the experience that you're providing them?...

In fact one of the reasons I am at USC is to look at broader issues such as, "How do you re-think a culture of learning that might underlie new forms of Journalism? How do you create an environment that is conducive to more folks participating in a democracy?"...

What is the structure of a narrative? What makes narratives fit so perfectly in the architecture of the human mind?... In the past, I tended to think of narratives as being basically linear, but they aren't necessarily. As Steve Denning has pointed out, part of the power of a narrative is its rhetorical structure which brings listeners into active participation with the narrative, either explicitly or by getting them to pose certain questions to themselves. In fact, stories have always been a kind of dialectic or conversation between the storyteller and the listeners...

We sense that it's working. We see that the traditional approach to communication - bullet points in MsPowerpoint slides - doesn't work at all in this area. But we haven't yet been able to measure the impact of organizational storytelling in any formal sense...

Virtually every radical innovation from PARC has come about by creative collision of different crafts usually within a Community Of Practice or sometimes across multiple communities of practice. If this is so, the question is: How do you build an ecology that makes it easy for practices to collide productively? Innovation almost always comes from bringing crafts together and having members of each negotiate within and between their practices. That's part of being in a productive and ever evolving community of practice. We don't usually talk about the diversity of crafts within a community of practice. I believe that we're beginning to see the fine grain structure of what is going on here. What it produces can be amazing...

We need to be careful when we use the term, Community. It is often spoken of as warm, mutually supportive and open. But a community is a highly ambiguous domain. A community is not necessarily a warm and mutually supportive domain. What we see in an innovative community is a lot of abrasion and tough clashes among crafts and practices. These iterations can be tremendously exciting and we may end up creating something. But the clashes can be tremendously stressful for the participants when these forms of abrasion take place.*