Professor and Dean Executive PGDM and Head of Centre for Excellence in Communication Skills, Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai University, Mumbai, India. Email: uma.bhushan@ves.ac.in
Online published on 28 January, 2019.
Stories provide symbolic perspectives of organisations. Unlike statistics and lists, stories are more convincing and are repeated more often than technical information like percentages and figures. This approach fits in with strategic management in organisations due to the fact that it involves a translation from the intangible area (storytelling as an art) to a tangible one (a set of practices and tools). The variety of story typologies identified within and outside organisations all emphasise two main aspects: Firstly, stories are about interaction-they are shared through interaction and are based on communication and collaboration. At this level, stories are ‘socially constructed’. Stories do not reside in individuals’ mind; they are a consequence of people interaction and are based on a common language, shared meanings and values. Secondly, stories are about experiences-they include a description of a real or imaginary situation in which a hero succeeds in achieving his/her goal. It is a way of transmitting one's values, emotions and beliefs some theorists view stories as the single most powerful form of human communication. The written form of knowledge transmission is a fairly recent phenomenon if we consider that almost all ancient cultural and religious beliefs have been passed on for thousands of years through the spoken word as stories that take as many forms as human creativity could this conceive. This paper presents a 10-S model of storytelling derived from ancient Indian mythology-Strategy, Structure, Seller, Soul, Symbols, Sense or Sentiment, Setting, Synergy, Silence and Scalability-by illustrating it with stories from the Mahabharata, one of the most versatile of Hindu epics. This paper also discusses in detail, the last three uniquely Indian dimensions not captured in any known model of communication. This paper concludes with a convincing argument for the universal applicability of the 10-S model for encoding and decoding organisational storytelling.
10-S communication model, Communication model, Indian communication theory, Indian mythology, Organisational communication, Organisational storytelling, Storytelling model
