Eureka! Discovering the power of stories

Troubleshooting computers has been a part of the job description in my past several positions. I know the magical power of the re-boot. I've sifted through spaghetti-like cable messes to find the source of a connection problem. I can hold on a vendor's tech support line with the best of them. BUT... there's a technology troubleshooting challenge that sends me running and that is the dreaded challenge of the photocopier. Thank goodness for the specialized technicians because to me the inner workings of the photocopier are an intimidating mess of hidden paper jams, messy ink, and odd error codes.

I recently read Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind, which is all about the importance of right-brain thinking skills. One of those important right-brain skills is the ability to tell a story. Pink sees this as an increasingly important business skill. "When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact. And that is the essence of the aptitude of Story - context enriched by emotion" (p 103).

One of the examples Pink cites is from the Xerox Corporation. "And Xerox - recognizing that its repair personnel learned to fix machines by trading stories rather than by reading manuals - has collected its stories into a database called Eureka that Fortune estimates is worth $100 million to the company" (p 108). I was intrigued by this example because I think it reflects what the MaintainIT project is all about -- collecting and disseminating stories and successes from the library world to help libraries support their public access computers. John Seely Brown (a thinker I admire) co-wrote an article for Fast Company about the Eureka database. Note that the article is from 1995, well before the term Web 2.0 started being bandied about. From the article... "the most valuable knowledge often resides where we are least able to see or control it: on the front lines, at the periphery, with the renegades". So remember that, all of you library technology fix-it wizards out there... you're not out there all alone like the lonely Maytag Repairman I remember from childhood TV commercials. Instead we're working together, learning from one another, better together than we would be on our own.