One of the hottest management tools around is something you might  not have thought about since primary school: storytelling.

Storytelling is more than just telling interesting or funny anecdotes. It is about using the power of stories to unlock new connections and reveal tacit knowledge. Because the human mind relates to stories in a different way from the way it relates to analysis, storytelling can succeed in releasing new ideas in areas where conventional analysis or presentations might leave a group merely looking dazed.

Storytelling can also be used as a motivation tool to excite people’s hearts, not just their minds. It is thus a useful tool for times of disruptive change, when you need to create buy-in for new ideas or foster a sense of collaboration.

MinLaw’s Strategic Planning Division (SPD) officers have undergone training in using storytelling as a tool for Knowledge Management, and have already conducted a strategic retreat for the Intellectual Property Policy Division (IPPD) using the storytelling method.

Using a tale featuring Jack and the beanstalk, giants, cows, golden eggs, and even golden carrots, SPD helped IPPD officers explore their unstated assumptions and push beyond their current thinking in order to come up with strategies relating to IP.

SPD will be pleased to support any MinLaw department that wishes to use this tool to develop and tell stories so as to unleash the flood of ideas.

How storytelling can be useful for management

Action: Analysis excites the mind, but storytelling excites the heart, and is thus effective for getting buy-in.

Collaboration: Telling a story encourages other people to share their own experiences, which unleashes the ideas inherent in a group.

Knowledge management: People can use telling stories to describe problems and how they were (or were not) solved. This way an organisation can bring out tacit knowledge from its people.

Scenario planning: A story can help evoke a concrete vision of the future, inspiring listeners to consider various images of the future and help them anticipate potential
changes.

Values: Stories can illustrate the values of an organisation, thereby bringing those values to life (although leaders’ actions have to also be consistent with the stories they tell).

Credits to: Power of Storytelling

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Magnesium helps build bones, make proteins, release energy stored in muscles and regulate body temperature. Now, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers report a possible new role for magnesium: helping maintain memory function in middle age and beyond.

The adult daily nutritional requirement for magnesium, a trace mineral found in foods such as dark-green, leafy vegetables, is around 400 milligrams. But studies show that as many as half of us do not consume enough.

Associate Professor Guosong Liu and postdoctoral associate Inna Slutsky at MIT’s Picower Centre for Learning and Memory found that magnesium helps regulate a key brain receptor important for learning and memory. Their work provides evidence that a magnesium deficit may lead to decreased memory and learning ability.

According to the study, maintaining proper magnesium levels in the cerebrospinal fluid is essential for maintaining the brain’s ability to learn and remember.

The researchers have identified and are now studying several families of drugs that may restore learning and memory in animals.

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New scientific research tells us that where humour is concerned, there’s definitely a gender divide.

If you’ve ever cracked what you consider a surefire joke, only to have a member of the opposite sex stare back at you blankly, eyes rolling and shoulders shrugging, take comfort: It might not be a reflection on the quality of your material. It turns out that humour is a funny thing.

When it comes to comedy, new scientific research tells us there is a significant gender divide - the brains of men and women react quite differently when confronted with a punch line. This discovery may help to shed light on important differences between the sexes and how their brains work. It may also go a long way towards explaining why, to this very day, it remains difficult to find a female human who even begins to understand why her otherwise mild-mannered husband is prone to abruptly commencing thunderous recitations of whole passages from Monty Python movies.

It is thanks to a very serious study about comedy, published in the very serious-sounding Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that we now know gender differences in what researchers call “humour processing” to be scientific fact.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers (who must have had a good laugh over the fact that while other researchers down at the lab toiled nightly over a spleen, they were studying comedy) affiliated with the department of psychiatry and brain sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers showed 70 black-and-white cartoons to ten women and ten men as each lay inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner - a machine that is not, one must say, traditionally associated with good times and laughter. The MRI monitored brain activity as the test subjects looked at the comics and pressed one of two buttons to indicate whether they found the material funny.
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