“It’s the undisclosed knowledge- the anecdotal knowledge.  It’s the stories that are missing. There’s an efficiency in story telling that you can not get from just the written text and then recorded videos.” – John Woodworth, 3M IT Manager

I am currently in the midst of coordinating  the 3M-DS106 Salon in coordination with the Fall 2013 “Headless” DS106 open on-line digital story telling course. One of my favorite technologies that we work with is audio, and I’ve been curious as to how or if podcasting might be an unexplored opportunity at 3M. So… last week I sat down with one of our 3M IT managers, John Woodworth, to discuss and record his thoughts on how vignettes and story telling can be used as an effective and often quite efficient mode of communication and knowledge transfer in the corporate environment.  John is an avid story teller who illustrated many of his points by telling a story.  As you can imagine, the time flew by and we talked for almost an hour.

This segment of my podcast experiment at 3M captures the second portion of our conversation specifically focused on story telling.  The first half on vignettes was much longer and needs to be edited to a more reasonable length or split into a couple of episodes.  If you find this interesting and would like to hear more, let me know and I’ll work up and post the remainder of our conversation.

Music Attribution: “Skirting Boards” by Bleak House (Creative Commons License)

NOTE: I want to apologize to John Woodworth and my listeners for the poor sound quality of the recording.  John sounds off in the distance with some annoying room echo.  I am still learning how to use my audio equipment (a Samson Meteor Mic plugged into an iPad using the Recordium App) and what room environments work best. (Definitely not John’s office with my set-up. I’m even wondering if I was actually recording through my iPad mic instead of the nice Samson.)  I did my best to try and fix it during post-production within GarageBand.  Most of the advice out there in Google Land was to trash it and start over again.  But one guy talked about how he adjusts the noise gate and EQ settings, and that it might take a second pass. I gave it a valiant effort, trying all sorts of different effects as well as what was recommended, and will do better next time around. What can I say in my defense… I’m a technical person by heart and enjoy getting out of my comfort zone to experiment with new technology. That’s one of the traits 3M hired me for!