Scaling Up Your Story: An Experiment in Global Knowledge Sharing at the World Bank

Timely and effective knowledge transfer is increasingly important in today's technologically advanced global market. However, a myopic focus on efficiency has frequently rendered most organizational knowledge ineffective. By coupling technology with a formal system that captures informal stories in an engaging and entertaining way, actors within an organization may be more willing to listen to what geographically dispersed colleagues are doing, and may be more likely to ascribe value to that information. Focusing on the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, we conducted interviews with those sharing and using knowledge, and performed content analyses of 175 knowledge-sharing narratives. Our goal was to understand which aspects of narrative knowledge drive interest and value to users of that knowledge. We found that those seeking knowledge look to others in determining interest, but rely on the internal emotional content of the narrative in determining value. This finding suggests that the usefulness of knowledge is both socially and analytically constructed.