Could I get some plausibility with that please?

This time last year, I was working with Stephen Denning to design a workshop based on his book The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action through Narrative. The thing I took away from working with Stephen is that it's not about being a great storyteller. It's about telling a particular kind of story. Here's how Stephen explains it in an earlier book: The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations: 

The stories that were successful for me all had certain characteristics. They were stories that were told from the perspective of a single protagonist who was in a predicament that was prototypical of the organization's business. The predicament of the explicit story was familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it was the very predicament that the change proposal was meant to solve. The story had a degree of strangeness or incongruity for the listeners, so that it captured their attention and stimulated their imaginations. Yet at the same time, the story was plausible, even eerily familiar, almost like a premonition of what the future was going to be like. ... The stories were told as simply and as briefly as possible. Speed and conciseness of style were keys, because as an instigator of change, I was less interested in conveying the details of what exactly happened in the explicit story than I was in sparking new stories in the minds of the listeners.

Hold on there! Did he say "plausible?" Has he been talking to Karl Weick? Professor Weick, who studies how people make sense of things, says there are at least seven characteristics of sensemaking, and #7 is "Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy." In his book Sensemaking in Organizations, he offers one of my all-time favorite paragraphs:

If accuracy is nice but not necessary in sensemaking, then what is necessary? The answer is, something that preserves plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies past experience and expectations, something that resonates with other people, something that can be constructed retrospectively but also can be used prospectively, something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to fit current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story. 

So the storytelling guy is pointing to plausibility, and the plausibility guy is pointing to storytelling. Good enough for me. Let's tell some stories, heavy on the plausibility.