Squirreling Around

As I read Denning's book, I couldn't help but think of Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. What is it about furry animals that makes people have these great relevations? Ironically, the answer to my simple question is within this very story. Specifically, narratives work because people are able to see themselves in similar situations. They create a connection with the audience while not directly throwing information at them.

As seen with Diana, people (squirrels) in the workplace often fear trying new ways to communicate for fear of being rejected. Rejection in the professional world can cause people get blackballed or cost them their jobs. Hence, many people are scared to step outside of the box, or as Johnson puts it, find new cheese.

Lastly, in one part in Denning's book, the bartender tells Diana that many squirrels use narratives to communicate. Like many stressed and confused business-squirrel professionals, Diana could not see the big picture: make the information relevant to the audience and in a way the members will understand. She even complains about how her superiors only wanted "facts, facts, facts", but they eventually praised her presentation. Thinking about Diana's experience, I thought about how I learned addition in elementary school.

Before ever taking a math class, I could not have automatically made sense of the following problem because it had never been explained to me:

1-1= 0

As a matter of fact, it is probably safe to say that none of my classmates could. Eventually after we learned and/or memorized the concept, our teacher began to reinforce the theory by making it practical to us [Enter the third circle of grade school hell]: word problems.

During that time, I hated word problems because they obscured the "raw data" and caused me to miss what I was to understand. Yet, now that I am an English major, I realize that maybe I was too busy analyzing the words instead of focusing on being in math class. At any rate, these word problems were forms of narratives for us. For a student who couldn't grasp the idea of 1-1=0, a story about how his two pieces of bubble gum turned to zero could make the information relevant.