Digital storytelling, narratives collected in databases, was meant to be one of those Internet movements that changed the way we "do" culture. Storytelling is a natural way to learn, and big business has found new uses for narrative, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

Untroubled by the agonies of finding an agent or publisher, we could open our hearts, or memories, and load it all up, along with the snapshots of our lives.

The Goliaths of big business, however, have made much more of the digital story than the world of subsidised culture ever aspired to.

Digital storytelling is now embraced by business leaders, chief executives and chief information officers of some of the largest companies in the world. Digital storytelling is cutting-edge business technique. Its gurus include Larry Prusak, executive director of global computing giant IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management, and John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox, the US copier company.

They, and their fellow bards of commerce, are advocates of telling stories at work, stories that are simply the narratives of people who lift themselves out of bed each morning and head off on the commute to spend their day in the employ of an organisation.

In their different ways the story guru's message is that narrative, the stories we all tell naturally in the course of explaining our lives to each other, enables individuals to understand how an organisation, a community, or a complex system can change. In an era when change is everything to commerce, stories are a winning way.

There are many business gurus who now claim to have invented narrative as a mechanism for changing organisations, but one of those with the best claim is a modest Welshman who doesn't relish the spotlight.

Dave Snowden is a storyteller, who as a boy sang and recited at Eisteddfods (or local festivals) in and around north Wales. "Coming from Wales," he says, "you see stories as a natural way of communicating and learning. It is the oral tradition, as it is in the west of Ireland. Stories were everywhere. It's what we did with our weekends."

He became, for a few short years, one of the main advocates of storytelling at IBM, but for the past 18 months he has been ploughing his own furrow as head of the Cynefin Institute, which grew out of IBM's narrative research department.

A typical Cynefin assignment is to collect the stories of peasants and travellers in Singapore to discover how best to control a SARS outbreak. Or to collect the stories of farmers and the salesmen of an agri-business to discover why the salesmen are not selling and why the farmers are not buying.

One project on the simmer is to record the work stories of baby boomers in London, Boston and Melbourne, as a way of preserving the collective workplace wisdom of a generation about to slide into retirement. It will become a knowledge resource for future managers in the public sector.

"Stories", says Dave, a gently spoken man with little trace of a Welsh accent (the industrial areas of North Wales from where he hails are the least melodic in the land of song), "have three characteristics that make them the only medium for real learning. They carry a high resonance factor, they are used for displacement - by which I mean they offer us a way to confess without blame - and they are full of ambiguity."

It is the first and last of these that he and his colleagues have been exploring for the past 20 years and which they are now learning how to exploit.

In a world dominated by computers and computing logic, most organisations have convinced themselves that language and communications should be infallible, that in effect communication is relatively linear and straightforward. It may not be 0s and 1s, but the elimination of ambiguity is the hallmark of the software engineer's craft. It is also their limitation.

"We've not been making computers to emulate human thought processes," says Snowden, "though we think we have. People tell stories, and the language they use is inherently ambiguous, and that's not something that computers can emulate. To work effectively, computers and people have to do what they each do best."

Ambiguity, according to the Cynefin tradition of story analysis, is what allows change. Stories evolve, and on retelling they are likely to adapt to new circumstances. The classicist Eric Havelock once pointed out, in his book The Muse Learns to Write, that by setting down The Iliad in writing, Homer or the clerks who served him just about killed the social and political dynamics of the poem. On every telling and retelling of a story, a Homeric poet or singer would adapt the poem to flatter the people paying his fee or to appease and please the ascending social groups.

Stories, in other words, in the spoken tradition, are filters and ciphers of change. Documents, the records that have replaced poems, are generally judged on their consistency and accuracy, attributes of truth that are irrelevant to stories.

"We've learned far more about the human brain in the past five years than we knew from the past 500," says Snowden. "And we now know that people do not learn in structured ways. They learn through resonance, through appeals to their pattern-matching capabilities. Stories, because they are so prevalent in our lives, create patterns. Stories appeal to our pattern-matching instinct."

It is Snowden's ambition to collate stories that are anecdotal adaptations to everyday life. He is collecting some 50,000 on one project and says 10,000-30,000 would be about average.

In a recent assignment for a pharmaceutical company, he had 250 employees go out and interview the person they most felt represented the future values of the company, with the proviso that they must put five scenarios to their interviewee, thereby almost effortlessly creating 1,250 stories about the company. He then asks the interviewers to index the stories, which brings a kind of meta-story into being, as employees extract the most significant element of their interviews to group, interpret and exchange them. These processes are, he believes, the natural way of learning and adapting. He makes all its techniques available as part of the Open Source movement, that is, free of charge and adaptable by anybody who cares to take the techniques on.

The lesson of digital storytelling and the way it has evolved in the past decade is that even as organisations surround themselves with high-tech machines and as the computer forces us into ever more rigid structures of thought, successful companies are having to go in search of their employees' intimate thoughts, chit-chat and gossip.

There are ambiguities here, too. In a classic business book, The Social Life of Information, published in 2000, John Seeley Brown described how Xerox collected the stories of copier engineers, filed them in their computing system and used them as a resource that engineers on the road could call up. It was a way of replacing canteen talk and the free exchange of information that regularly took place when people met at work. It saved Xerox $30 million a year.

Great for Xerox but the story stands as a monument to the depersonalised nature of modern work rather than a solution to it. Stories and narrative are supposed to be about bringing human nature back into the workplace.

Snowden says: "We're interested in getting to the deeper meanings that people don't necessarily know exist. Stories are a way people encounter those meanings, and people are surprisingly willing to expose themselves to multiple meanings in their lives."

We'll end the story there for now. But for those who want to know more: The Cynefin Institute is at www.cynefin.net; The Digital Storytelling festival is at www.dstory.com; The Centre for Digital Storytelling: www.creatingthe21stcentury.org. The Muse Learns to Write is published by Yale University Press